Elysian

elysian

(adj.) beautiful or creative; peaceful and perfect

She stares at the white stone floor dotted with uneven specks of brown, black and so many shades of grey she loses count.

She hates it.

It makes her skin crawl, makes her want to scratch her spine, from the inside.

The narrow window doesn't let in much light, but she can see that the sky is a taupe grey.

It is going to rain. It is going to rain since a week but it hasn't.

These days, the sky is forever a shade of grey, sometimes a dark pewter, sometimes a lighter steel.

The weather is not unbearably hot, the kind of hot which causes your back to erupt into prickly heat and makes you want to invent cuss words just so you can curse the weather.

Neither is it the kind of cool and breezy and wet-earth smelling which makes you want to bring out your best smile and smile up at the sky and search for the gram flour in the kitchen cupboard because you want to make pakoras.

It is just a something shade of grey sky and no rustling of leaves with a heavy something lingering in the air which you wish you knew but don't.

She hates it.

The weather is stuck, somewhere in between.

She does not like the idea of somewhere in between.

A pigeon is sitting on the window ledge, staring at her with its calculating beady eyes, head tilted, puffed up feathers in shades of blue and a grey darker than the sky.

"What are you doing, sat beside the window, with a pen in your hand?" it seems to mock. "Fly, see the world, the filthy garbage-thrown-here and a sodden plaster-peeling-off-the-building-there world, take it in, take it all in. And when in doubt, just take a dump somewhere, anywhere."

She hates it.

She is not fond of birds.

She can see the strains of some hard rock music travelling up from her brother's room opposite hers and making their space in her head.

I've been looking at the sky

'Cause it's gettin' me high

Forget the hearse 'cause I never die

I got nine lives.

She hates it.

It makes her want to bang her head or the door of his room or his precious electric guitar on the floor. It makes her want to cover her head among the not-so-soft pillows scattered on her single bed with no head rest. The words are permeating across her brain cells, making her want to pick them out like she picks out the soft gooey onions from her mom's casserole which make her want to puke.

She was more of a jazz person anyway.

Her mother is preparing ghee. She can see its stench floating from the tiny stuffy kitchen to the tiny hall through the it's-not-really-a-lobby finally to her tiny room.

She hates it.

The smell has wrapped itself around every corner of the small house, settled comfortably on the tacky hardback taking centre space on the coffee table and hidden itself among the thin paper backs wedged between Elementary Physics and the Britannica on the floor-to-ceiling book shelf in her room. There is no running away from it, no escape.