Dear friend of my heart,

The sweltering mid-summer afternoons here in Dehradun are not half as unbearable in the placid shade of Mahogany trees, sipping on a jar of liberally iced Americano, pouring over a Wodehouse, in the rare company of a chummy cat, called Jojo. I have been writing, you see, and when I must re-write to tidy and mollify the agitated manuscript for my book, that was written through and of my sweltering twenties, I get restless. Twenties, I muse, are the boiling afternoons of life and mine are drawing to an end soon.

I look at the bright late-afternoon summer light riddling through the thicket of those trees at the café, casting sepia shadows on the smooth lemon-yellow wall. It feels like I am living a memory, it carries an almost spiritual karmic tinge, a sensation that we have lived though this before in some other time. I feel drowsy.

Nostalgia of the late afternoon shall progress into the melancholy of the evening when the force of this remembrance is lost and nothing remains to fill that emptiness, just a stretched out feeling of having lost something that I have never had. The spiritual weight becomes an existential weight, and I feel the joy to be slowly overpowered by sadness, a metaphysical sadness. It is not without its pleasures, it is not without its strange exhilaration, of having forgotten something that I never knew, of having lost something I never had.

Musings of a drowsy afternoon, dear friend. Let me drowsily introduce you to the late-spring garden.

I am thinking of writing to you more often now and in a different way. Eager to hear from you,
Yours in wonder and amusement,
Prashant Nawani