A warm shower rinses remaining sleep from my body. Clean, I sit on the terrace singing to the now rising sun. Two eggs--hard-boiled--and toast make a tasty breakfast, and the first extended conversation with home satisfies an appetite of a different sort. It seems 1/4 kilo of coffee is too much for ten days, so I decide to make the cup truly robusto. Twenty minutes later as I speak with dad, the cup is ready and now my focus slightly too perked for much use beyond describing the day so far.
I'll leave early tomorrow at 3:45 in the morning for Pune Station. I've arranged a former, dependently regular autowala to pick me up in front of Indu Nivas. A 4:30 A.M. departure for Mysore promises to begin a new experience with a new experience: I've never boarded a train in the middle of the night.
Having returned to Pune this week, I realized how much I miss it here. Now leaving again, it is only the assuring promises of new friends and helpers, as well as cravings for something new and yet different that incite me to go again. I've wondered in the past week when, if ever again, time might afford me the pleasure of calling this magical place, the house of the moon on morning road, my home.
It seems, now, I will never again be a person with just one, if ever any of us are indeed such persons. Our hearts always residing in multiple places, octalocating our spirit sometimes in obscure, other time in more obvious places.
Lately, again, I feel myself resting in the beauty of a language--that of the gods. It offers a pleasure I enjoy every day as the light and sounds--birds' song, syllables, and the shifting tide of time pulling in, too, more horns--strung together along various colored threads of scent and sound are sewn together by eyes, two hands and feet, pulled by overriding intention to please the goddess of language who does, indeed, support everything. How do we experience, know or create anything but through language?
A large palm tree and a pine frame my view today. Buildings grown dirty, too, as they are allowed--simply allowed--to sink back into the environment from which architects and craftsmen conjured them, enchanting earth with spells. It's one of my favorite aspects of the immediately perceptible Indian aesthetic: Time, decay, mossy-moist life on earth transformed--concrete--become ornaments, not eyesores. Something about this is warming. It lacks presumption that time will not have its way; indeed, just helping time--that most successful of beasts--perform its duty and function, even though time, among all things of the world, needs the least help. Then, too, in offering help to time, perhaps we may get time on our side. Not a bad story of success to have sponsoring one's actions, I suppose.
Orders of business for the day include (hopefully) internet, tiffin, lock and lockbox, vegetables, and packing. In acquiring internet I've so far not met with success: the one thing not as prepared as I would have hoped, it is, among all things to be prepared, of the least order of importance and will keep life just that much more interesting.
It's been too short a time here in the holy city, punyapattanam; but, alas, all good things must, in time, come to an end.
