Floating on the floor

It is 1:30 in the afternoon, the radio is on, placed on the table – the only table in the house. Paati(grandmother) has just settled down on the kattil (bed) with a double pillow. I am sitting down, on a mat, opened my geography book. Listening to the violin’s pull and swings (Carnatic music), I was bored. I hated it, but also liked it for some reason. It made me feel sad. The music itself, and the fact that I am alone at home with Paati, not with my “friends” who might be doing more interesting things like playing cricket or climbing trees – things I suck at. The reverberating music caused paati to doze off almost, yet I cannot sleep. I look at the ticking wall clock – it is stuck at 2:20 for a long time. I like watching the second-hand tick tock its way around. The clock has a funny face. It laughs at me. I am offended. I go back to my book. The stomach cries out a few burps. I slightly relax my posture. From sitting straight on the floor, I now lean back to my left using my elbow as the balancing fulcrum of my body – which all of a sudden says fuck it, and goes full horizontal.

The song diminishes, the literals are repeated – the vocalist says “sa”, and then “re” and very soon switches to “sa” but he doesn’t say “re” – he sticks to “saaaa” and so it goes. The violin stays strong, the percussion instruments – a mridangam and a ganjira – sounded so tiny and diminished that the vocalist must have shushed them to the background. I cannot see them – a TV in the house was still a few years away. But on that Tuesday, on a warm and sultry afternoon, floating on the floor under a twirling ceiling fan that made a hiss at every turn, my mind slipped on the words from the book which was about South American Inca civilisation, its mountains, how arid the conditions for agriculture were, and reading big words like “metamorphosis” and what not.

The violin was wailing now, and the vocalist had receded to the background. The mridangam and ganjira were talking to each other through their beats. How can they repeat each other so correctly? I dwindled, diminished and descended on a slope that slowed me down, until the music and my mind came to a complete stop.

Oh I better wake up. I have to finish this lesson before I can ask Paati to let me go play outside. The clock still laughed when it moved its second and minute hands so slowly at me. It keeps at 2:20 still. Is it playing with me? Oh, no it is 3:20 now. But it is still laughing. Paati snoring and I am looking at the hissing ceiling fan and it slowed down suddenly, circling slower and slower until it stopped.

Power cut.