Afternoons at Little Buddha
Warm tea on an hot afternoon by the river. the heat like that of sweaty sex in stuffy small rooms in which ceiling fans don't seem to work. The sheets stain your skin and you can feel the texture of the rough knit fabric on your back for hours after.
The tea is cooler now: though still warmer than the streams of sunlight hitting my legs and making the hair glow golden. It was just slightly difficult to breathe as if the rivers and the mountains and the bhajans from the other bank were all melting in the air making it just that much denser.
I light a cigarette hoping it might make it easier to breathe. The lighter gives a scent of gas before it explodes in my hands. I am able to light the cigarette anyway.
My exhalations settle softly not rising in the hot air.
I see the water glitter in the sun and its like its filled with stars and I look at the river for a long time and I am now stubbing the cigarette - things are good.
The river is flowing determinedly forming a small "S" below me as it makes its way down to Haridwar and countless river towns after that. Its soporific passage so at odds with the fury of its birth. All raging mountain streams and brown gushing glacier mouths desparate to swallow the whole world - its birthing is strong and virulent and young. It moves as it does now getting wider and fatter and filthier till it acquires others - like it but lesser - as it moves to its flooded bloated scattered delta: which is all marsh and disease and there it dies.
When it rains it remembers itself as it once was, and its tremendous potential when it saw light and wanted to swallow mountains, bursting its banks and the delta becomes a sea.
There is a moral in there somewhere, some secret of this life, this universe and everything. But it escapes me now.
The tea is cooler now: though still warmer than the streams of sunlight hitting my legs and making the hair glow golden. It was just slightly difficult to breathe as if the rivers and the mountains and the bhajans from the other bank were all melting in the air making it just that much denser.
I light a cigarette hoping it might make it easier to breathe. The lighter gives a scent of gas before it explodes in my hands. I am able to light the cigarette anyway.
My exhalations settle softly not rising in the hot air.
I see the water glitter in the sun and its like its filled with stars and I look at the river for a long time and I am now stubbing the cigarette - things are good.
The river is flowing determinedly forming a small "S" below me as it makes its way down to Haridwar and countless river towns after that. Its soporific passage so at odds with the fury of its birth. All raging mountain streams and brown gushing glacier mouths desparate to swallow the whole world - its birthing is strong and virulent and young. It moves as it does now getting wider and fatter and filthier till it acquires others - like it but lesser - as it moves to its flooded bloated scattered delta: which is all marsh and disease and there it dies.
When it rains it remembers itself as it once was, and its tremendous potential when it saw light and wanted to swallow mountains, bursting its banks and the delta becomes a sea.
There is a moral in there somewhere, some secret of this life, this universe and everything. But it escapes me now.