One-Week Story, Part One

Monday morning and my skin now smells like it was meant to, it tends to happen when you've spent thirty hours in a train with warm air flying in and whipping hair and clothes and odours around the compartment. There's a peculiar yellowness that the world outside a train takes on in the summer, and somewhere along the way it comes in through the windows and settles on the passengers till everything is a warm yellow tone. Not a golden yellow but a deep ochre, you can see it in the fields outside and in the mounds of earth and the plateaus that flash by. You can even see it in the rivers.

I told you about this yellowness sometime back and you said, what about the grass tufts? There is dry grass that springs up between railway tracks and around fields, even along roads, but always in long lines of circular masses. And it's grey.

I told you they weren't grass tufts at all but fuzzy pods of some wispy alien material dropped down by a spaceship. Or, I said, it's like they're droppings. From some really, really large bird with a bad tummy. Nothing else explains the way the grass is scattered here and there. And I looked at you, suddenly mortified, fairly certain that you would tell me to shut up because I was drunk.

Instead you said, let's take a train to somewhere with all this grass, we'll walk in it and find out where it comes from. And because I'm singularly trusting and more than a little unemployed, I booked a ticket and here I am, smelling like I was meant to at two in the afternoon, wondering where to get off, and if you will be there too. I stop looking at turmeric mounds outside and spoon posterpaint yellow daal into my rice, and feel stupid.