Living, as it is.

The ghostly apartments. An enormous high rise with broken windows, scathed walls. Spat on walls, red pan stains. A tree nearby, leaning up to the first floor, that never bore fruit in the last five years. Silence in its corridors has lasted so long, it has settled in like dust on windowpanes. It is like a man now itself, the silence. It ensures its presence when you walk through, and your footsteps echo. Louder. Overflowing dustbins. Stray dogs and bitches, looking into for an early breakfast of leftovers. The furry ones, the white ones, the ones that look like soft toys, still inside, never left out, fed on milk, tied in chains. A hurrying kaamwali. Sari in place, starched and pinned. The sleeping watchman. Barely present inside his dreary mosquito net. Old man with a paunch, returning with milk packets, from a morning jog or a laughter therapy with comrades, going to shake wake up the dozing wife, and coax her to make tea. Newspapers thrown into grilles, stuck into the gaps under shut doors. Faint sunlight. Mild breeze. Poodles from the rain of last night. Morning yawns. Of reluctant children, to be sent off to school, with heavy bags and slung shoulders, they would walk down these stairs in an hour or so, to wait for the school bus  teeming with other children with slung shoulders, near a gate that has the name of the building cut out on it. Spelt wrong.Their mothers shall climb up again, after seeing off the bits of their heart. The thin ones would scoot up may be. The fatter ones, their sagging thighs, and panting hearts, under shabby nighties, would be counting on it as an exercise may be. There is no elevator. No elevator guy who stares at you as you walk in and out. Just the watchman, still asleep.

Towards the rear end, is a quiet flat, with a young girl in it. Who goes nowhere these days. Her room has a window, that faces between east and north-east. A tree of coconut whose branches almost enter her window, like a begging suitor on sunny mornings, or as a jilted lover on stormy nights. Like last night. Her life has been paused, apparently. She lives in her past present and future, all at the same time. Living, as it is.