Anniversary

I am in the Big Bad City again. My mid-year break.

We drove along the national highway very early in the morning.  I had a kind of grim satisfaction from proving to myself that what the legendary Chandragupta Maurya could do in his early twenties, I can still do in reality at fifty: I am still a man.

I do not need great luxury and out of the way activity to enjoy a holiday. Just a break from routine (remember, I've been working non-stop since January 03), and lazing and sleeping and the glory of knowing there will be no classes to take, no homework to mark, no visitors to talk to and no phone calls in the line of business is ‘paradise enow’ for me. Especially when you have this kind of rainy, squally weather all day. There is a depression over the Bay, the dark rolling clouds have been hanging low, the wind is actually whistling and howling through the little gaps we have left in the windows, and we were chilled enough to turn off the fan and pull on the coverlets this afternoon, in end May!

And even more especially when you are located where I am.  My block of flats is minutes off the great Eastern Metropolitan Bypass which is choc a bloc with traffic at almost all hours, and lined with some of the snazziest and busiest new high-rises in the city, and yet my immediate neighbourhood still retains a certain rustic charm, with a vast water body on one side and an endless line of greenery on the other, when I look Bangladesh-way from the rooftop (which would be ten minutes flying time from here, I think). So I can think poetry from here, and dream of entropy, and wish my Natalie were here with me. While my wife and daughter are happily pottering away in the new home that they have lately decked up for dad to see.

Nice way to spend one's seventeenth anniversary. Things might have been better, and some readers will know how, but I am not complaining. God says 'This I am giving to you. Enjoy if you can. If you cannot, you lose.'

                                  (Three pix of the vistas from my roof)