Last Exit to Santhome

Wake up at 4:30 PM. Use your or preferably somebody else's cycle to get to the gate. There is no tomorrow. Thats a given. So walk.

Watch the sun dissolve into the river/sewer. Watch the canoes sail into the sun.

Walk past the painted ducks and snails. Walk to image audi. Sms Sheldon for fundaes. Get lost among the high rises. Get your hopes up about the clearing that lays ahead. Get lost again.

Ask for the wrong directions. Get the right ones. Know you're right when you see some Aquaculture building. Let ghosts crowd your fragile eggshell mind.

Live in Madras for 20 years. Visit Santhome for the first time. Be grateful for the fact that you've never been taken there before.

Nightfall.

The lights from the sea. The squalor on your left. Toilets masquerading as ships. Watch kids treat the entire road as one big zebra crossing. The sex that is bought. The sex that is sold. The sex that is perhaps not.

Watch the transsexuals collect their tax. Watch shopkeepers shut down for the night.

Let the lighthouse guide you. kill grammar. walk past a big catch. a five foot fish. Or eel. Or whatever.

Allow the lights of Marina to welcome you. kill grammar again. try burying it this time.

Let the waves crash onto your legs. Gently step on sea shells. Avoid the crabs.

Stare into the endless expanse. Let a malnourished horse momentarily obstruct your view.
Watch a brilliant flash of light signal a storm brewing in the cold distance. A rain that will wet no one.

Put kadalai. Of the good for you, protein kind. Chuck it. Do so because your body can do without the extra silicon. Get an ice cream. something called cocho stic. laugh. But not aloud. Decide to display your insanity in some other situation. It might help you get away with murder someday, if you use the plea. Read grammars' eulogy. Yes he was a great man.

Receive a message that asks you if you are on a date. Silently realize that there are people in this world for which the word date has alternate meanings. And that you're not one of them.

Walk to the bus stop. Be in two minds exactly. One two. Take the beaten path.Board the wrong bus. Depend on the kindness of strangers. Board the right one.

More dessert.

The above instructions, if followed religiously, might finally put you, in the same category of crazy as me.