It was a sort of an affectionate tug that hauled me into the supermarket, and a quite large white board with 'Imported New Zealand Kiwis - Special Price' scribbled on it that amused me. You mean people fly across continents for these smallish greenish things? - you'd say. The smallish greenish things had stared at me innocently, invitingly.
I have just finished digging into the small, green, rather-hairy-on-the-outside fruit that is not usually available in the city.
I had sprinkled sugar on the green of the fruit having halved it. Now the bowl-like skin rests on my hand, fairly ticklish, bendy and wrinkled. And I think that's what loneliness should be like - the hollow of a kiwifruit. It's a spectacle of sadness, really, that solitary skin. I have no word for it. It trembles on my hand every now and then, the diameter of the half circle quivering. It didn't look very feeble before, with the flesh inside.

The rain attacks with a vengeance now, as if it has a spirit, resolved in chasing away the heat. It seems to be making a hearty progress with the crows, not so much with the heat. Madras weather is sensational - the heat possesses you, obliges you to close your eyes, and for a little while you feel the heat cracks you open and seeps spitefully through the fresh channels; the rain makes one wistful, if only for the undoing of the dominant heat. I can only compare it to a bath after a draining day.
The electricity is off again, and I have displayed all the animal patterns on the wall. Even a dolphin, and I can tell you it's quite fiddly - one has to twist one's fingers like one does a rubber glove. The beatific light that the emergency light offers flickers now, insinuating a spell of darkness. There it sits, on the small desk just by the door, smugly, basking in the knowledge of its worth.

I let out a small grunt. Quite rightly, mind you. It flickers a couple more times and goes off with a buzz. Dare I present you with an image of a winking, teasing girl that leaves one's view when a bus dashes in between?
I stare at the spot where I know the unbecoming lamp stands, willing it to flicker on again. After all in the books or movies, the winking girl always makes her reappearance - from a street corner, tricking the eye, or suddenly and with a flourish. Perhaps in reading and watching though, I have overlooked a certain trait of obstinacy in these girls, because the anticipated flicker leaves me in the lurch.
It is during this course of darkness that a knock lands on my door. A soft rap in the beginning, then it acquires more and more urgency.
I wish I were back in the house where I have lived in the past three years. Simpey would have rushed to the door. As it is, cowed by darkness and low-level intuitions, I feel my way slowly, squeamishly, to the door. Now I bash my big toe against something metallic: what, I cannot quite say, but it stings nevertheless.
Reaching the door, I try the traditional method of peeping through the keyhole to get a foretaste of my visitor, in an effort to pacify my heart. It will not do. The arrogance of darkness hovers solidly in the air, quite like a sultan on his pompous pillow.
I turn the key in its lock; fearing the bandit that looms in front of my door, ready to chop me up into a multiple little pieces, maybe Figaro too. Figaro is my cat. The nerve in my big toe is pulsating maliciously.