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greenbus.jpg

"Rum, please" in Gushaini


evening was coming
and surprisingly was too
the benevolence of 
an extremely eloquent,
made-for-the-city-but-all-
the-way-up-in-the-mountains-
electric super deluxe bus,
probably, the first of its kind
to be whistling away and along
the narrow absurdities of the
twisted hairpins of Tirthan,
out-swallowing us right where the
tuk-tuks said that that was Banjaar
eagerly wanting to take us to Gushaini,
but not before we had ourselves
some solid feeding of the appetite
upon the warmest, most nutritious
citadels of hill delicacy:

 

 

supposedly,
good quarters
were not to be
found in Banjaar
for the halt of the night,
which didn't seem so when
we did the traversing back
and felt in it the adolescence
of an industrious little hamlet
that had the rattles of the day
going on in its belly street;

and along the ring road that shot
off beat to bridge into Gushaini,
we felt the cold dusk air steadily
seeping in and above, blanketing
the serene landscape and its people
with a dire need to find warmth
lest they were made from branches,
which they did seem to be like
considering their penchant for
gazes and gaits bearing real fibre
as opposed to faked glitter
that was given ground by
ancient and forgotten qualities
and were devoid of forced emotion:


 

the search for a backrest 
came with a price when three
days' of movement fatigue
proved its point that
desperation did peak when
destination mockingly peeped
and made itself increasingly
difficult to pin-point at
through the numbness casted by
the hollow flight of the chilled bone
in stimuli to the harshness quotient
from being very very high up,
before we were taken in by
a cozy prose of wood wizardry,
by perhaps a long-time-ago-lived
hayman of his time
who believed in the
phantomic notions like
bare necessities and
building one's own shed:

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