Cigarettes on Rooftops

no faces to remember, no last words too cambrous, no eulogised farewells, only a deserted sidewalk of a deserted hometown sticking out its wanton disagreement with the sly north wind:

...

i remember the day i had made a deal with mother to breast feed me a little while longer than usual, in exchange for any lame overrated sweets after school, i was perhaps four; and she would make fun of me in front of relatives, at least till i was old enough to notice girls:

( and yes, i did start schooling at age three, i've always been the bright sorts, fuck you well wishers! )

why i remember this, i can't really tell. perhaps memories have a laconic way of being weird, perhaps they split themselves up into a moiety, ones that are imprints of footsteps on snow that have been long since eroded away, which show no life of their own anymore. and other ones that are embryos inside eggshells, that still have that tendency of life, personable over inanimate, taciturn yet indelible:

...

i remember the day

i had broken my hand, i had broken my leg too but i can't remember that feat anymore, perhaps the bump wasn't hard enough, or because there were two versions of the former's tale:

one way could have been that in an attempt to become junior-g, i had wrapped that old dirty gamusa

around my neck as a cape, did the jim-jam-jammy-boom, and tried to jump from one bed to another, which was really from one room to another. my poor arm couldn't write for another month or two:

the other way is mother's way, which puts the blame on Mr. Putul Sharma's wife, who was our neighbor back then, who, at that exact same moment, had uttered a dubious encomium about my St. Peterian styled handwriting. mother says she had a bad tongue. perhaps mother was being too harsh, perhaps mother was being the bull that she is - innocent yet irrational, only protecting her territory, because nobody fucks with the bull's territories!

...

the sly north wind had grown weary ever since, and no more limbs were decapitated, and no more vagaries of breast feeding interrupted mother's favorite show at that time- "Aparajita". perhaps its slyness had morphed into a milder form, which we hadn't paid much attention to over the years. but the sly north wind does blow, sometimes abashed, but other times with a grimace, it does blow every winter when government employees take LTC's to take their families to distant-land pleasures, when the ones who do stay back, have barren playgrounds to go to, solitary chinese food lunches and dinners to go order for parcel, isolated old monks to come to, and congruent floyd music to fall asleep to:

...