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                                              Canvas
She tried to get up from her bed.It was going to be evening.The sun was almost setting but the intense summer heat was all consuming.She jerked her gnarled hands and   thrust her feet into her well- worn out slippers which were now loose and  ill-fitting.she was a little disjointed as to her next move.Well she had to push off to the near- by park.prior to this she had tried her best to dig into the note book which she always had along side.nothing seemed to be materializing.A non-sense compulsion of repulsive obsession.A slow breeze was building up stealithly  trying to pierce the invisible hot sheets  of burning air.She quickly changed into her shoes.They were the sturdy branded sports shoes left behind by her child who was away from home.She had many pairs of these branded shoes which were bought by her child from time to time to make a show of each and go for newer ones.She would only look at the rows with drooped jaws and wonder in her eyes.They brought into her a strange ennui a déjà vu  which took her back to her olden days when she would be poring over the old classics and juggle with T.s.Eliots The Waste Land. The deep western ennui  originating from material opulence and numbing indifference to human emotions had not yet entered the Indian psyche.The verses emanated  the dark humours of utter despondency.That time it acted as a drug to indulge her raw feelings which did not touch the seminal core of the human sensitivity.But now looking at the rows of these  branded shoes and the innumerable cluster of objects of the same genre a deep and dense plume of vacuity  enveloped her.
She tied her laces which she never knew how to do them.She never disturbed the twisted maze  but only tugged and pulled at them till they secured her feet and enabled her to march forth on the rough and tumble  side walks of her park going round and round till her patience gave way and she took shelter under some groaning dust laden tree standing on the sides of the pathway.  She rested the phone in her lap though she never made use of it. There was hardly a call she would receive but she carried it as per habit ,it being a part of the rest of her accoutrements  and generally she brought it to check the time.But now she looked into it.There  rose a strong urge to check the message site.And then suddenly she wanted to take a snap and forward it to one of her close acquaintances but she stopped haif –way.She looked at her picture in the camera roll which she had forwarded to her child .The picture was a wedding photograph of her and the bride.’you look a mouse. At least you should have applied some make up to cover up the drabness and the hollowness of your aging persona’ .In the bright light of the outdoors She looked at  the picture with the renewed eyes of her child.The eyes had a  sunken appearance and the look was vacant but had a  strange craven look,the lips were pressed hard perhaps to press out the surrounding wrinkles which as a result had flattened out the mouth making the chin prominent.She laughed.Her face was an apt canvas to be painted in any original way.She herself wished to enliven it  with brushes and such make up tools which could  reflect  the arrogance and the pseudo-sophistry of the society around her and she could  gell with the whispering  phantoms in the group who curtained off    the moulded   decay of age and neglect.




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