The afternoon sky has a very peculiar color, buckets of whites have washed the blue haphazardly splashed all over it. The blue bleeds itself to the whites and the sky turns into a ball of white fluffy cotton with a blue undertone.
The monday afternoon people have seen this sky. They are a breed of people found outdoors at a park, on the street, inside an open cafe, on a balcony, on a porch, or on a terrace — anywhere they can see the sky. They can be anyone a student who hates school, a housewife, an executive fired from her job, a delinquent, a homeless, an artist who paints the sky, or just someone who understands the language of an afternoon, especially a Monday afternoon. I call them the ‘Monday afternoon people’.
I am one of them. On a monday afternoon when everyone is inside glass cubicles making a significant contribution to their lives and the world they live in, the monday afternoon people like me are sitting under the sky looking at the birds dotted by floating clouds. I get a thought in my head. Don’t birds get bored? They have been doing this every day and will continue doing this till they drop dead.
And then invariably, the question comes back to ‘boredom’. Are we bored? Is that why we sit under the sky on a monday afternoon or are we bored of the cubicle life that we now sit under the sky? I have looked at the afternoon sky, the morning sky, and the night sky for hours. I don't have an answer to why. Was I bored? No.
Those moments of watching the sky on a monday afternoon, have a cosmic connection with the watcher. The concepts of boredom and productivity, of employment and unemployment, of purpose and vanity — they all disperse.
You are in a state of non-being, like the clouds, floating in the vast emptiness of your mind, which sometimes we also call the world. The sky is an infinite nothingness, the blue and whites are optical illusions, the birds and the monday afternoon people are the same — one is flying in the sky of nothingness and the other is floating in the mind of nothingness.
I am sitting at an upscale cafe hidden inside a plant nursery and a lawn. Sipping my cold brewed coffee. The sky opens up to a roar and a current. The fallen leaves on the manicured lawn fly headlessly in a state of trance. The colour of the sky is no longer white and blue. It is still afternoon. But dark afternoon. The birds disappear. The monday afternoon people are still there — in the cafe, in the park, in the street, on a bus. We watch the gush of water pouring straight down into the soil and the concrete, the roofs and the glass walls, the trees, and the electric poles. We are all drenched along with the birds and the leaves. We take shelter wherever we can — under a tree, under a bus shed, inside the cafe, in a supermarket — but we make sure that the sky is still visible from where we are. We watch the sky pour and wait for the colours to change to whites and blues. Again!
We wait till next monday afternoon! We have time.
