Nandita
Starry Night

There’s a picture in my head: Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, and oftentimes I find myself inside it. Inside the painting inside my head.

An animated blob of insignificance against the backdrop of a masterpiece. That’s what life in a dazzling city feels like - hypnotic and smelling of acrylic. I can almost taste the starlight, purging my body of dents and shrapnel and parasites. The obsession with guilt washing away.

The street is inevitably lined with cafés and bookshops, and I’m sitting cross-legged on a bench at the edge of the sidewalk. Behind me, a stream of continuous curses, audacious accusations and wilful witticisms. Philosophers at work and philosophy at bay.

I am rather drunk on the scent of lilacs in the air tonight and gin only makes it worse. My flask is empty now. Behind me, an empty beer glass crashes into the café-door. I shrink further into my bench; arrogant, unwomanly. And if today was the day I were to receive a flying butter-knife straight to the nape then, what the hell, so be it.

I close my eyes and wake up an eternity later, dishevelled and fallen, on a cobbled street. Looks an awful lot like the one I walked as a child, the one that used to take me home. Somewhere far off a clock strikes twelve; the silence of the night is now a carnival for crows.

A stranger’s Harris Tweed overcoat hangs a couple sizes too loose on my shoulders, the stranger nowhere to be seen. I stumble on alone, singing an ancient song, one step after the other... the other... the other. A pair of black stilettos dangling in my hands, I can feel the morning rain under my feet.

I walk alone under a sky wild with stars, looking for the place I once called home. Until finally, with one last stroke of the brush, I find a soft place to fall.