for most of my adult life I've slept alone in a bed. so whenever I live with hubby I have sleep issues, he sleeps earlier than me, usually as soon as his head touches his pillow, while I pillowless, have to read to travel to another world before I feel drowsy. and then he wakes up before me. I now sleep with cotton in my ears and an eye mask, but even then his movements both in his sleep and his wakings interrupt my very flimsy slumber. 

last night he woke up for a leak, and therefore so did I to make the best of a disturbance. he goes to the toilet within the bedroom and I to the one just outside. I was struck by the light streaming in our living room windows, the place looked like a stage flooded with white light. I peered out the window, I knew the moon had been waxing the last few days. and there it was, a grown full rounded ball of warmth. complete with the halo around it. I smiled at it. now it would begin to wane and so would my creativity with it. 

the moon is like an old friend I've taken for granted. this year though, with this pandemic upending everything in human life, the full moon feels even more magical. since I've hit my 30s, how often have I stared and smiled at it thus. but now I can imagine a day when there'd be no moon. I can imagine the end of everything as we know, just because so much has changed. 

In the last two days, in bits over meals, k and I watched Lunchbox; him for the first time, me revisiting. I'd been irritated and impatient with the movie the first time I saw it, annoyed at Bollywood for juicing romance out of every meaningful human interaction. But this time I realised how sensitive, how real, each dialogue, each written and spoken word, each look and pause, and everything unsaid, was in this movie. the scene in which her mother tells her that she's simply hungry now, just after her father has passed away, that after months of worrying about being left alive without him and of taking care of his wasting body, all she desires is some parathas because she's hungry; that broke me down. I wept thinking of all the women my mom's generation, in India at least (maybe elsewhere too), who lived like an appendage to their spouses, who couldn't imagine outliving them, living without them (for what?), who lived their lives without any ownership over them. since my Mausa's death, I've seen my Mausi slowly become her own person.

I've been video chatting with mom and lil sis, together, every evening now. since that day when lil sis wasn't well and we all thought it was covid and because she lives alone we were debating how best to take care of her. today sis told us one of her seniors at work in Hyderabad had a sudden stroke and possible brain haemorrhage after a bout of working out, and is hospitalised since then, unconscious. we got talking about age, and health, life and death, covid and cancer, Irrfan Khan and this hospitalized guy, about responsibility of oncoming disease and of chance and luck. we are each a flimsy thread in a flimsy world, at the mercy of chance, but also with choices, and senses through which we feel all of this. The glowing moon, the starry gulmohar, strange birds now regular visitors. A kiss. all so flimsy but in that moment, so all encompassing, almost overwhelming.