Banal Chores

To walk and buy a notebook and a pen it is not a banal chore but rather a quest thru labarinthine alleys a jungle of trees (in which I see everything, every tropical bird, every monkey carrying her young, every glossy leaf.) One is surrounded on the streets by poster advertising, layered and thick, each panel like an abstract expressionist painting or decollage worthy of museum-admiration. The vast amount of people spread out before me the street's familiar beggars atop their livingroom (blanket over sidewalk) complete with naked children, anonymous businessmen fat and smoking Benson & Hedges, random crowds coagulating around (inevitably) a cricket match broadcast. Thru the screaming, life-or-death traffic I wade and again I'm side-walk bound where every five feet there is a charcoal fire being fanned to life exhaling clouds of opaque smoke, a tea stand and a sweet stand right after that, complete with crowd of drinkers and onlookers, beadie-fumes and innumerable marks of red spittle like spackles of blood over the pavement. Animals and insects whirr through the traffic as well, flea-bitten dogs, their multiple puppies in adorable disease-ridden piles, rats scurrying through tiny holes even in broad daylight, all to be stepped over, avoided, danced around, dodged by the parade of padestrian traffic. At the end of the road, down a narrow alley, behind a tea stand, over several collapsed dogs, weaving thru people walking and buying and cutting me in line, I find my notebook-pen-wallah embedded in some crack in some wall. And even then I still have to barter a good price. And so, even after a seemingly banal chore, one must go home and take a nap.