Blended

Kathmandu, Nov 2025.

You snap suddenly awake, just before dawn

and spot the sunrise, in a sky tinged pink

as dark and light shade into each other,

cross hatched and blended like a pen and ink

image, vaguely familiar, drawn upon,

drawn behind what passes for another

day - happiness and grief stop being distinct. 

Did you guess it will come to be a series

of golds and coppers and lilacs blending,

fading in, fading out at the horizons?

Day containing night in a never ending

loop. The shapes of flowers, leaves, entire trees

coalescing into a sharp remembrance.

The screen, the house, emptied yet upright, standing. 

From Nagarkot.

I've been travelling - first to Mumbai to visit the senior-most family members remaining and then to Kathmandu to visit the Himalayas. November is an introspection month, as the year draws to a close, I am prone to stocktaking - a habit leftover from my working days Every year comes with its own mix of challenges and triumphs, it's got increasingly harder to classify each one into neat compartments of great and not so great. The older I get, the more the contentment bleeds into grief and vice versa - the not so great is surrounded and subsumed by the great. 

We all come to an understanding of these blurred boundaries  in our own individual ways - the Himalayas seem to be my definitive route. They've taught me over the years that the sums are difficult to tally, to not even try. That I am myself just a mish mash of discrete memories stacking up year after year, but they cannot be toted up to give a firm quantity, positive or negative, this much or that. Some equations are best left unresolved.

Bhaktapur

In Nepal, I saw exquisite wooden carvings on buildings ancient and contemporary - windows and door shutters, struts and columns. And I immediately thought of my father, who was an architect and insanely fond of teakwood and sculptural art of all kinds. I saw a stone idol of a deity and my mother came to mind, her voice chanting her japa mantra. I saw a wildflower blooming on a slope and remembered a lost friend.  None of it felt sorrowful or heavy, on the contrary it made, no makes, me strangely happy that all those who've gone before me remain so much a part of myself that they pop up at random moments at places to which they've had absolutely no connection whatsoever. I think I've come to like this blurring of all lines between the sorrowful and contentment and thankfulness, this slow seepage and blending of happiness into grief. Or is it the other way round? Who knows? Ennyways.

I hope your month is going well and some top-class blending is happening at your end too.