These streets feel like home. Where writers sit crouched under dim streetlights, lost as much in thought as in misery, scribbling furiously into old yellowed notepads with frayed edges and incomplete stories. Where you’d expect to see a poet in ragged clothes at the turn of the meandering road, greeting oblivious passer-by’s with dramatic monologues about love and struggle and how art is worth fighting for. Where loud voices echo and drown in each other as women draped in the colors of the rainbow haggle aggressively with vendors offering an eclectic variety of mandarins, watermelons, the most exotic of incenses and cheaply made ornaments painted gold to create an illusion. Children in ill-fitting shiny clothes with one arm outstretched, clasped around the corners of their mothers' dresses, watch the chaos unfold in awe. They stop only occasionally to glance in anticipation at the magician holding what is believed to be an empty hat hidden under a sheath of pale blue silk, extended in anticipation in their direction, revealing only the form of what looks like a bird, before being dragged on along by an unreasonably impatient hand. The opulent clinking of metal against glass serenades the damsels with long braided hair giggling coyly at the boy in the turban wielding the glass. Old women, weary from their travels, with a basket placed precariously on their heads offer fish, dead and alive, at discounted rates. The strength of their voices is their weapon in competition, and the rancid odour engulfing the fragrance of their cheap perfume is their bane. Little boys run around chasing each other on tiny narrow cobbled streets, disappearing every couple of minutes, only to emerge laughing in a frenzy from amidst the unidentifiable tangle of pants and legs and skirts and desperate arms clutching on to their purses. Artists sit on bamboo mats at the corner of the street offering to sketch you, always making the you look marginally more attractive than you actually were. Feeding the customer’s ego always ensured a good tip and hence food on the plate that night for the children.
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Sanjukta Krishnagopal
This is where I put random musings created on cold rainy nights whilst typing away furiously on my laptop. I have been published in the 'creative writing' category' at the Unknown Pen, Youth Ki Awaaz, Terribly Tiny Tales, and Berlin Unspoken. I was also Chief Writer of the Department of Journalism and Media at BITS Goa. I also treat this space as a personal travel blog with practical information. If you are interested in talking about writing, I'd love to hear from you! Archives
September 2022
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