At 112mm (the lens’s narrowest end), descending to Vijayawada.
The sun sets over buildings as the city wakes up. People look up from their evening commutes and soak their worries for a longlived moment in the amber light of the day before the third of the smaller lights turns green and then reset their paces. They reach home and open their windows and stand outside on the many amber-lit balconies and listen to Thamarai in peace. I doubt the Thamarai bit. The amber-lit evenings see windows open with and without overturned crosses up top. Lost in a sea of people and buildings and tall cars and short trees and longwinding streets bathed in amber, the opened windows and the thieving, adultering conversations that drop by with the wind find purchase in the folded-away curtains and dried laundry fluttering in the balconies. I hear traces of Visiri from the neighbours’ radio as the station gets stuck for a shortlived moment in a faraway frequency carried over over the laundry and the teacup left over the sill. There are no radios in the city. The windows remain shut and the ones with upturned crosses stay open for longer than they have any right to be. There are no conversations apart from the ones in one-way streets lined with packed supermarkets. Over the air, a dog-food advertisement layers itself over the one for superthin undergarments. People in cars don’t look up in fear of accidentally looking into the eyes of children selling plastic knickknacks and jasmine threaded into uncanny helices. The cellphones keep reminding them their choice of the fork in the road at this hour of commutes and street children and superthin undergarment adverts was indeed, pathetic. The sun sets over buildings as the city lulls itself into sleep.
