Ruchira's Ramblings

Car smells make me sick. I don’t know if it’s the upholstery or the closed space or the stale air- something about cars with windows pulled shut remind me of the discomfort of movement, the uncertainty of the road, the sense of displacement from home. That’s a little bit ironic, because I love cars and cabs (who doesn’t?) and sometimes on a car trip I’ve wished for the road to continue so the solitude of vacant thought would linger, and the comfort of moving scenery provide distraction from the spaceless, static finality of destination. My favourite kind of road is the one that runs through lines of dense, leafy trees to infinity on a cloudy spring day with a light wind carrying just the hint of a drizzle. There seems to be less and less of those nowadays. I think car smells are the strongest on Monday mornings. Or maybe the body is just extra sensitive after the weekend. I read somewhere that general depression levels in a population increases on Monday mornings. Makes...

Some people live in the past. Some people live in the future. I fall into the second category. For as long as I can remember, I have survived the present by weaving stories about the future in my head, without knowing anything concrete about the path to those stories. And the futures became present and the stories never materialized and I moved on to newer stories, newer futures. But this future that engrossed me was always of the airy variety- not the practical future of- if I practice X sums a day for Y number of days I will finish a chapter in my math book, or if I write points a, b, c in this order I will have a coherent paragraph. When I was in school, my mother would complain about my habit of always crossing out the first sentences of any essay I wrote. “Why can’t you plan first and then begin writing?” But I could not begin to think till I was in the middle of the business, neck-deep into a sea of scratched out words and by then, the thoughts had begun to take a life of...