a sea in between

This goes in after a month and there’s literally a sea in between, i have quitted the job of being a compromising journalist, called it quits and decided for once i’m not going back to that business for anything, and i enjoyed two weeks of sitting back at home and reading Les Miserables, the unabridged English translation I had dug up from my mamabari sometime in 2001, the yellowing book, bought sometime in the 1950s, its spine collapsing but its crumbling pages still carrying the marks of the binder’s fault, i am the first person to read this copy of this version and I now know what a man like Hugo has to say in spite of his didacticisms in a book that took him 17 years to write, more than Jean Valjean, I’m more impressed with the unnamed conventionist who meets M. Bienvenu before the radical revolutionary’s supreme act of defiance, and the Baron, the sergeant Pontmercy, the father of Marius, who quietly grew flowers till the end of his life, and I gobble up Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha, the ending disappoints me, read Doctorow’s Loon Lake and imagine the America the was never to be, taken a trip to the sea, burnt up my skin and caught a flare in my nostrils, and read Ellie and the Shadow Man by Maurice Gee( a disappointing New Zealander whom I don’t want to read twice, watched the evening melt down into the night while the sounds of the hammers fade away from the building they are constructing right opposite to our balcony…. Here it is, I have left the city, which once used to be the capital of British India and landed in the city of the nababs… the journey begins… from here?