When I was a little kid, my mom would always talk about a birthday card she saved from many years ago. Tinted a honey-gold, was the picture of a half-bloomed rose bud on a plant, among many other plants. Curly, fancy writing in a faded white said (something to the effect of):

As the years go by, people grow older
As time goes by, you only grow sweeter.

The love she felt for those words, were, I'm sure, associated with someone, and not the words themselves. And through association, I began loving the words too. The faded, honey-gold over light pink petals - so simple, so dreamy.
Today, I give you that birthday card, love.

Ponni and his family were not really the fashionable type. When I met them for the first time, I was a child, on her evening walk with her mother. It was a deep dusk, finding its way into every cloud and bird in the evening sky, all vehicles on the street and every tree in the world.
"There's Ponni!" said my mother, as she yanked me across the crowded street, walking towards them.

I remember all four of the Ponnis. Mr Ponni, a nondescript man in this early thirties, wearing a well-trimmed beard, very large, expressionless eyes and a mild manner . Mrs Ponni, an almost-anorexic woman in her late twenties, painfully gaunt, with over-sized buck teeth. She didn't seem to bother about her teeth at all, smiling in wide, white, toothy smiles at me. The little Ponni girls were inconsequential, playing about their parents, sometimes stopping to stare at me like I had sprung out of the tar. And then forgetting the world as they played their little game around their mother.
We spoke for a while, I'm sure, but I fail to remember about what. Like with all children, I must have spent my time watching the other children and the adults with them. Ponni seemed so mild and unimportant. He had a thick cloth bag with the name of a bank I had never heard of. And from the bag, stuck out a bunch of curry leaves, the slender end of a snake gourd and some other vegetable I had never seen. They were obviously on their way back from a weekday-vegetable-shopping spree at the local market. Mrs Ponni must have chattered on in her soft, high-pitched voice to vendors sitting beside lanters in the dying day.

After that, we met the Ponnis a few times more. And once we visited their home - a very normal, Indian house done up with the normal Indian stuff. A coir mat at the entrance, little brass plates as wall-hangings, a Kathakali dancer's painted face on the cushions, a red and black carpet that was too small for the room, glasses with flowers on them and mango juice in them, a wide-smiling Mrs Ponni, her incosequential, playful little girls. And Mr Ponni with his big eyes in the background.

Now I realize that we had always met the Ponnis at dusk. The sun was almost setting on us each time we met. And the Ponnis and their children would always be returning from a quick vegetable-shopping session. Mr Ponni with his big eyes that said nothing, Mrs Ponni with her big smile and the Ponni girls playing games that made no sense.

And then one evening, we met three of the Ponnis - Mrs Ponni and the two girls. But there was no similing or playing.
Mr Ponni had died. An unexpected health condition had taken him away.
On that last day I saw them, Mrs Ponni was at the bakery, buying her children some 'mixture', probably for school the next day.

Suddenly, everything about them seemed so significant.

Not the typical 'you-are-so-good-you-can-change-the-world' post

Crouch down to a deep grey, overpowering sky filled with rumbling, rolling clouds. Cover your head with your icy-cold hands and close your eyes as the thundering storm whirls around in mad swirls.
Breathe in shallow, shorter breaths. Move in narrow, controlled spaces.
Grit, grunt, whimper...crouch and bear.
When the whistling winds start to die down, open your eyes and look up in the hope of seeing a clearing in the sky above.
When the hail stones stop pounding, listen for the relief from a roar that is dying down.

Heros in cartoons fly through storms and pick up a couple of mountains while they're at it. But us realistic readers weather storms by crouching down to them.
Do not stand up when you need to crouch, for the hero in you might just slip and suffer a giant bruise to the ego.

The tires crunched over gravel, like little mills grinding stone into powder that rose in tiny whirlwinds in the woods. They cycled through patterns that the wind in the leaves painted on that sunny morning. Her light colored clothes quivered in the breeze; printed flowers shaking and waving among the trees. His shoes shared the tan of the pebbles they slipped and slid over, riding through spring-laden woods.
They stopped by the little lake nestled amongst tress that were still waking up from a deep, peaceful slumber. They watched blades of grass lean over the edge to see the sun in the pond…And slowly, the ripples began painting a picture. A picture of leaves and trees and a sunny morning. A picture of playful shadows on smooth pebbles. A picture of the sun sparkling in a forest pond…
…and she work up, looking into his eyes – and there swam a picture of them walking through those patterns.

Hush now, don't you cry
Wipe away the teardrop from your eye
You're lying safe in bed
It was all a bad dream
Spinning in your head

Your mind tricked you to feel the pain
Of someone close to you leaving the game of life
So here it is, another chance
Wide awake you face the day

Your dream is over... or has it just begun?

I- will be watching over you
I- am gonna help you see it through
I- will protect you in the night
I- am smiling next to you, in Silent Lucidity

- Queensryche – “Silent Lucidity”

Small doughnut.
Really small doughnut.
Tiny, wee doughnut.
Teeny tiny, tweeny, twiny doughnut.
Doughnu-teeny!

Itsy-bitsy
Teeny-weeny
Brown and dotted
Doughteeny!!
Laa la la!

Miniscule doughnut.
Inconsequential, insignificant doughnut.
Microscopic, amoeba-food.
$6!!

Suddenly-not-so-small-doughnut.

My head on your lap, we listened to music from years gone past. Songs we had forgotten about, and wouldn't have remembered if it weren't for a chance find.
You fell asleep while my fingers slipped and slid over yours, making little new patterns with the lines in your hand.
I tried not to shift my head on your lap - so you wouldn't wake up, so I could feel your warm breath on my forehead - while the rain and snow continued to fall silently in the late evening. Even the incessant New England winter wind died down and the impatient possums in our backyard stepped lighter on fresh snow.
You slept on while dreams drifted about, some of them falling loose and floating down to me.

Once again, through this blog where we found so much, dear husband - Happy Valentine's day.

Happiness to all my (two-and-a-half) readers too.

The worst kind of ghost is one that's real. An ugly spectre that refuses to stop haunting the mind and makes unpleasant visits when one is least expecting it to. It lives in history - in painful words recorded to last forever. It leafs through pages recording love, pain, ecstasy, great passion and abandonment and throws little pieces to the innocent passer-by. Then it paints great sketches of times and people then - words, minds, lives, memories, fingers, bodies, smells, tastes - and isolates the reader into a dark corner with its grand and self-absorbed presentation. It mocks the reader, telling him of a complete and joyous world that existed before he was found worthy of being recorded in time. He finds his own history interwoven with the ghost's tale, a thread running on a parallel line, tangled in a messy web of words, but inconsequential in that old and beautiful time. And he is reminded that history had been created and experienced before him.

The present will never detach itself from its past which is what makes history and ghosts so real and torturous.