Sleepful night

It feels good after a relatively sleepful night, doesn’t it?

The coffee seems to come out better and you seem to get things done better. You seem to reach places on time (or before, in my case) and you receive good words from physical therapists.

All of this happened. Happenstance or coincidence. But it did start with a night of restful sleep.

That too, one after watching the wonderful movie Awakenings. Not sure how I didn’t watch it until 33 years after its release. Robin Williams and Robert De Niro are exceptional.

My physical therapist did say good things — that I can get rid of my walking stick right away and I can be off brace in another two weeks. I really hop that I can soon start jogging or brisk walking in the park that I used to frequent.

Then I went, with J and his close friends, to a new breakfast place I kinda randomly discovered. Expensive but worth visiting, especially because there will be doggos around. I spent about 10 minutes petting someone’s dog in the hour and a quarter we spent there.

I spent the afternoon learning sketching and water coloring. Pretty disastrous results with the latter. Feel like a total amateur, especially trying to attain some definition.

Evening meal at Bademiya. Didn’t enjoy it at all. There is no nostalgia for me especially when things are so fucking loud in the popular joints in Mumbai.

Tomorrow I’m back home, which means more sport-watching and sketching.

Clean Creativity

I honestly don’t have an answer as to why I am still living in Mumbai. The dust/smoke pollution is now even making the rounds in property ads, where websites/apps are advertising themselves to be proficient in telling customers/clients who bad areas in the city are to live. Until you live in a dustbowl of a city like Mumbai—I don’t know if there is a dustier metropolis out there—you won’t know the joys of the evening of a day of dusting, swabbing, tidying, and new set of bed linen.

Yesterday was one such day, when I felt comfortable in being in my own apartment without drifting into thinking how I continue to live in the dusty mess. The surprising thing is that the feeling continued to sustain through today as well, despite the view out the window gently drifting to a sepia/smog shot from a post-apocalyptic show/movie (the post-nuclear fallout Fear The Walking Dead, for example).

Spent a bunch of time reading and sketching. My first day using graphite pencils (Darwent), and it was a different experience. I should have something more to say than different, but I guess it is such a new experience that I don’t really have anything else to say. I might need to get better stationery to use these pencils, because most of my sketching was done on a sketching pad meant for watercolors.

By evening, I wanted an evening out. I hadn’t stepped out for the whole weekend as well. So I decided to take the Metro to explore a new Keralite restaurant (Just Kerala Hotel, Andheri East). The food was exceptionally tasty, but it’s on the more expensive side for Mallu food. I even had a couple of beers.

I returned home to see that my color pencil set has also arrived. The clean (relative) home does make me feel like I should try them out tonight itself. But before I did, I had to write something, and that’s exactly what I am doing now.