Two eggs, well-brisked into frothy glory. Roughly chopped tender mushrooms. She did not feel like onions today, nor cheese. Perhaps some herbs would do instead. As she brushed a fine layer of olive oil into the pan, Radhika lost herself in deep thoughts, too distant from the omelette she proposed to tuck between the toast. She looked out of the window as she waited for the oil to heat up. Would that be right? Giving up, again. Pushing back a flock of hair she tossed the mushrooms and played with them till a common glaze united them. Satisfied, she then laid out the beaten egg to a circle of exactitude that her life never had. It was always a graph chart. She layered it out evenly then and covered the pan. With thoughts like train tracks on a busy junction, she set up the water to boil and measured out a spoonful of coffee. She smelled it. Davidoff had a distinct bitter smell of subtle maturity. She preferred the Moccona but settled for this today. Almost as if functioning on the remote control push of a distant hand, she removed the lid and began grating cheese on to the egg-spread. When a cube was almost over, she suddenly realized she had initially not wanted it. She lowered the flame and put the lid back and returned to the coffee, which took a single action to be ready. The cheese had melted over the mushrooms like a candle did when she poked a matchstick into it during her study hours in childhood. She quickly tossed the thought and omelette over and sat down to eat.
After two days of no food and complete close down, she suddenly got up from her bed and decided to take charge of her life. In her lounge wear too, Radhika looked attractive. She took a bite, and approving the taste, went on to reason why Rishi did unto her what he did. With the second bite and first sip of the coffee, she indulged in deeper questions of how life always offered her a buffet when all she desired was a pre-ordered a la carte. And finally, characteristic of her, she concluded, in a sudden hurry, that she was privileged to be harbouring such frivolous thoughts when all around her, people could afford neither food, nor the attention to pain.
This had happened earlier with her, this psychological overhauling of incessant thoughts crowding her rationale, and clawing her to cocoon into her deepest insides. She was, if not clinically, certainly allowing her undoing, creatively. In simple things, like figuring a different way of doing her wardrobe, and constantly craving for change, she was compelling herself into a competition with self. Each time she took up an odd job, she had to outdo it from the last of near-perfection. She drowned herself in dust to cleanse her thoughts. They refused to leave. Radhika was suffering, from the syndrome of abstract commons.
She took a longish bath, and changed into clothes that made her feel good, or she deliberated herself into feeling so. And went out for a walk. Through the weekday streets of her neighbourhood, she observed wells of plots. Ruthless and regardless of their viability to feature as components of her scripts. These were fragments of sights that built up to a fragrance of sound. She took it all in as she walked passed chemists, and stationery stores and bakeries. She took them in to fill up the vacancy her soul had just registered. She let them remain even as buses and cars went by.
Her room quilted over her the familiarity of comfort that a nightmare did not to gentle sleep.
Coffee to her left, cigarette burning on the ashtray, she hit the keys intending her next novel, "Her room quilted over her the familiarity of comfort that a nightmare did not to gentle sleep."
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