Yet Untitled Lite 022 - (a short) holiday dispatch

with no subtitle necessary.

Dearest Yet Untitler,

I’m on holiday and there’s this particular rhythm I’m in that’s completely different from my “normal” life. We’re travelling with kids and there are a lot of plans. There’s a lot of eating, drinking and a lot of walking. By the time we lie down in the evening I’m totally whacked! This is a city holiday - full of things to see and culture to absorb. It’s no beach holiday that’s replete with reflection-time spent by the seaside headlong in viscous time oozing along slowly. This is a brisk walk along pavements and through parks, in and out of underground trains, wired on coffee hastily drunk at museum cafes spilling and staining the exhibition guide and negating the drowsiness of the wine drunk earlier.

I’m wired in to this holiday with full commitment, not thinking actively about the rest of my life. Circumstances don’t let me, crammed as I am in a small apartment-hotel with all of us living on top of each other - cooking breakfast and setting off smoke alarms with burnt toast. But I detect an active subscript running under the thick experience of present-ness that I sometimes catch and sometimes don’t - shadow thoughts that tempt me with colourful glimmers on the walls of my mind before receding down tunnels to places where I have no inclination of pursuing them. I’ll go hunting in a few weeks and perhaps you and I will sup on that game together, hungry as we are, on these pages.

I’m meeting this time and embracing it like the many good people I’m meeting on this trip; some of them after very long. I can’t help feeling that it’s a gift to see them, even though we live in times when we can access the world like I access Noble Chemist’s back in Lokhandwala, Andheri West. Andheri West was scorching when I flew away from it to cooler climes. The memory of the heat - pulsing through that subscript running just below my active mind keeps having me face this thought, that perhaps we’ve swung the all-easy-access thing too far by putting too many planes in the sky, too many vapour trails, too much carbon. So being here - it feels precarious, fragile - and something to be made the very most of. No hug given here can be just a hug. It has to be a hug of utmost reassurance.

I’m keeping it short and sending you a hug, Dearest Yet Untitler. Thanks for being here and always listening. Your being here feels solid, safe; something to be made the most of.

Let’s keep going. I’ll keep writing, you keep reading. Let’s make our way through time together - be it vicious or rare like the crisp cool air that I wish your way for you to rest in.

Lots of love

V