arbit miscellany

There is a certain fear that is attached to your name. It gets tossed around by all the people who use it. Sometimes they like the sound of it and they just toss it around in their mouths...like a delicacy. It’s frightening. There is a sense of distortion that is intricately linked with the way it is perceived by people. It is mispronounced and bounced and taken to be something else in this infinite nexus of names and the person it carries within its image. Not its physical image so to say, but the person who gets formed according to the sound and style of the name. One tends to do that kind of judgemental exercise ever so often without realising it. it travels all through the BPO room when your call is transferred from one executive to another or when you lodge a complaint for the 13th time and your name forms this image of you which is not pleasant. You don’t want them to think on hearing your name that you are an unpleasant person but you still fear the obvious indifferent compartmentalisation. With your name you float around the room being tossed, sneered at and evaded. Is this all too surreal???? Or does it actually have something to do with the way you are present at this end of the phone as well as on the other?????
What exactly is one made up of????? All the things one tends to remember of all the days gone by in a daze???? Going everyday to conquer the world and end up fatigued in the fourth hour, dogged down by the perseverance of the bus conductor to reduce you to a piece of ticket. You aren’t even a name here but a mere 10 rupee note. I wonder if that’s what he sees me as. I always wondered how he ever could remember from all the people who had purchased their tickets and who hadn’t. If the memory is so exact what is he doing working as a mere conductor????? But that’s a question of sociology that I am not equipped to answer or even ponder at. Maybe he marks all those who’ve purchased the ticket with a 10 rupee note and all those who’ve not purchased it look just like themselves to him. So then there are those whose faces are the currency or the face of bapuji and then there are those who look just like their own selves.
I remember very queerly and distinctly the crackle of leaves under my feet. But that I always do hear, the sound is a bit disturbing because I am aware of the very last rites I am performing for these leaves which are already dead so no fault of mine there. The sound has a quality I cannot resist. Especially in the lonely walks it is a very tempting partner. For its company I think I wouldn’t mind walking for miles at ends. But I don’t do that, I only think I can. Then there is the camouflage of all the smells which haunt me, my eyes it seems are the only unconscious sense which works automatically without registering anything. The smell of samosas along the road to the metro station tells me somewhere in the cluster of trees is a small cardboard supported kerosene stove cooking samosas in the oil which as a result of its life of a couple of days has lost its golden shine and taken on rather the colour of coal....floating, simmering with waves dancing around the ladle. I meet this smell every day. So much so that it ceased to exist for me. There are so many other things which have gone out of existence for me simply because they been there for me to notice everyday without fail and my mind cannot cope with everything, things new as well as old. So it marvels everyday at the new and greets the old with a simple nod of the head which gesture too gradually stops and i forget it.