There's a certain bluesy tune to the rainfall outside my balcony today. It's been an incessant flow, making me feel like I'm living next to a mountain river. Like the Beas that flowed below the hotel I was staying at in Manali. I remember the view from the room: looking out into the upper valley, a forest of dark green pine trees and grey cloud capped mountains.
..................................................

It's been speeding and slowing at will, the rain. Like a whimsical child playing with her imaginary friends, talking to herself. And I wish it poured and poured and poured more. Like it would flood and everything would get washed away. Washed clean of the tiniest speck of dust and purged of every memory of the past. And the next day would bring only the freshest, most thoroughly well scrubbed world of new possibilities.

Listening to Sain Zahoor sing Aik Alif on loop for the past hour I think. Reminds me of last year and the feelings associated with these songs. Almost like being washed up on shore by tidal wave, in a mixture of helplessness and awe that's just right.

An extract from Rumi's Masnavi.

Mathnawi VI: 2955-2962

The spirit is like an ant, and the body like a grain of wheat
which the ant carries to and fro continually.
The ant knows that the grains of which it has taken charge
will change and become assimilated.
One ant picks up a grain of barley on the road;
another ant picks up a grain of wheat and runs away.
The barley doesn't hurry to the wheat,
but the ant comes to the ant, yes it does.
The going of the barley to the wheat is merely consequential:
it's the ant that returns to its own kind.
Don't say, "Why did the wheat go to the barley?"
Fix your eye on the holder, not on that which is held.
As when a black ant moves along on a black felt cloth:
the ant is hidden from view; only the grain is visible on its way.
But Reason says: "Look well to your eye:
when does a grain ever move along without a carrier?"

"Rumi: Jewels of Remembrance"
Camille and Kabir Helminski
Threshold Books, 1996

"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping things across the plains - flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, cutting them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress under a sea of sand."

- H. Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

Sometimes I get the feeling maybe I'm reading too much into this guy. Maybe he's good but not as good as I think he is. Maybe he's warped my brain in someway, stolen it without me knowing and kept it in some gelatinous blue liquid in an underground lab he has in his basement. Experimenting with it, transferring whatever he wants me to think into it. And thus impairing completely my ability to judge anything fairly, enslaving me to every word he puts on paper. If the book I pick up starts like this, I don't mind being held hostage thus. I don't know if I should stop with him already.

I'm left behind as a residue, of a time that's long forgotten. No one here knows me anymore, all who knew me are long gone. A relic hoping to find a place in the sun that will rise in a few hours. I can do with the shade, reflected light is enough for my depleting appetite. In an attempt to catch attention I know I'll make a fool of myself. Like the court jester sentenced to the gallows for his below average attempts at humour, I know that'll be my destiny. Unlike any other, my road is unmapped and mine only.

A fruitless attempt...

I have been reading Bukowski for the past hour and half. Drinking the wine left over from last winter and smoking the last couple of cigarettes of the night. And I don't know where this will lead me. I started out with a note to you, which I didn't have the courage to finish. I didn't have the courage to tell you why I chose the ways I did. And yet I know I'll regret this the next morning like the many things regretted on a drunken nights excuse. I'm hoping to find songs and sounds that fit seamlesslely into the night. Of confused emotions in conflict with the rational world I will wake up in. Finding passions that I had thought were shipwrecked in the middle of the great ocean, in complete isolation, in absolute lonliness, feelings from a body that's been dead for years; Is magical. Like the card trickster guessing the cards the audience were thinking of. And the surprise that spread across the hall of admirers. It's more than just that actually, everyone knows it's a trick at the end of the day. Unlike a child whose genuine amazement has beset me too. I sit partly inebriated, stunned and wonder by myself; how this dead body of mine was awakened by your coming.