One of those days

Sometimes, nothing matters in life. You wake up, stumble towards the balcony, pick up the bunch of newspapers, remove the rubber band which binds them together, read the headlines, look at the edit page, stare at Calvin and Hobbes, and throw the sheets away.

You don’t care about a smooth shave. It is a nippy end-October morning, and you wonder whether you should have a cold shower or switch on the geyser. Ultimately, you make do with a few mugfuls of cold water.

Books, which you collected for more than one decade, look like bricks. Sunflowers evoke no emotion. The crests and troughs of Abida Parveen’s voice irritate you. It is the same song on which you cried last night.

The statue of the unknown soldier, kept on your table, looks like an intruder. You don’t care whether your handkerchief is neat or not. You don’t bother to tie your shoelaces like butterfly wings, something your father taught you, twenty-five years back. You just do things.

In the evening you come back. You enter your room, closing the door behind you. You stare at the wall. It stares back at you. You pick up the mobile, searching for names you would like to talk to. There is no one. You switch it off.

A DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries is gathering dust. You close your eyes. You are not sleeping. You are not awake either. Someone calls your name outside. You don’t call back. You don’t get up.

Sometimes, nothing matters in life.