Gates open on Sunday

Sunday means thicker newspapers – the joy of reading a ‘Moby Dickish’ piece hidden somewhere between articles on Olympics and obese kids. It means drinking mugfuls of tea and cooing at the plants in the balcony. It means washing your sneakers and cleaning the bookrack with Colin. It means scrubbing your body at leisure while bathing and working diligently on the shaving lather. It means combining your breakfast and lunch – is that what they call brunch? – and then witness Pran Nath Razdan turn into Jonathan Bridgeman in a Hari Kunzru novel. It means keeping your gaze fixed at your toes till you fall asleep. It means holding discussions, while savoring roasted peanuts, with an uncle– on marriages in Jammu and Manmohan Singh’s Independence day speech. It means catching portions of Bergman’s ‘Summer with Monica’ or ‘Satte pe Satta’ on television.

Louis de Bernieres: They say that, for a madman, every day is a holiday, but they also say that insanity has seventy gates.

Let us say that, on Sunday, all those gates open up for me.