Somewhere huddled in the Himalayas Pressed petals of the Gulmohar tumbled out of the tattered  yet treasured edition of a classic novel that Lollita cradled  in her hands for the Book Club reading. Like uprooted and  unmoored forest flora plunging out of the lap of a charred or  chopped Himalayas. Like long-kept, comatose secrets floating  to consciousness and traipsing out of the burdened womb  of Time.

Preserved petals, that were now anaemic fossils of the feisty, full-blooded blooms of the Gulmohar, from recent history’s harshest, hungriest summer gone by. Paled petals, that were now as bloodless and faded as the pallor-powdered face of the  Pandemic behind the latticed tombstones of Time. Bookmark  petals, that were shadowy yet stark reminders of how the  barely buried Corona timeline was itself now no more than  a bookmarked page, a foggy pixellated photograph filtered  through the tissue papers of amnesia, interleaving that fat but  fickle album called public memory.

The Gulmohar petals floated forth from the ancient novel  over Lollita’s honey gold, temple border Ahimsa silk saree,  flecks of faded stars upon a fresh dawn.

Time Warp tiptoed out for a tryst with Time to come.

Lollita craned her long neck, adorned with her late mother’s  triple-stringed pearl choker, as her Trishul nose-stud twitched  at the spilling. Her dainty fingers, dressed in a signature pearl- fringed citrine yellow butterfly cocktail ring, stretched their  slenderness to arrest the Gulmohar bookmarks, spilling in the  manner of garnets plucked from a priceless ranihaar1 pouring  out of a potli2. Every pore, every particle of the patina of her pleasantly plump fortyish frame sprang to stall the scattering,  of things preserved, precious, pedigreed.

In the reticent recesses of the Reading Room, the sole sound piercing the sleepy stillness was of silver cutlery clinking, like chiming bells from the faraway Shiva shrine, upon fragile bone china tea-sets that had survived bubble-wrapped history’s two critical ‘Ps’—Post-Raj to Post-Pandemic.

The French window fluttered wide open its lids as the lace curtains were gently parted. The French window with a  foggy vision. The smokiness of frosted glass. The cloudiness of a colonial past, that it had been privy to, blurred into a post- Independence present and now a post-Pandemic present. The French window with contact lenses.

A window to the Raj era. A contact lens that was a curious confluence of the C’s, colonialism to Coronascape. A frosty filter, a frosted filter, upon which the colonial past fogged into the choppy present, with its new colonisations looming over a cantonment town. A cantonment hilltown huddled in the Himalayas, that stood barricading and braving crass commercialization, creeping colonisation by creepy custodians of the India Urbanising narrative, those invading battalions of builders.

The French window stared outdoors, at a boulevard blooming back from the melancholy mists of a deep dark winter,  the Pandemic. It beheld a boulevard bouncing back also from the shadows of another scorching winter, the faded, forgotten forest fires.

The French window gazed glassily indoors, at the foggy silhouettes of footfalls returning.

Outside, the rebuilding narrative. Inside, the revisiting, the rebooting narratives. Lollita’s molten pools of doughnut dark brown eyes gazed outside, through the milky mistiness of the lace sheers at head maali Khemu Singh’s deft, dry hands plodding and ploughing at the flower beds, to restore to them their lost glory.