I am happy for RCB but sadder for CSK. Now, since my favourites are out of this year, I'll root for RCB.

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A help that's truly helpful is aligned with what has been asked, not with what one believes will be helpful.

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Only those like rain who have a shelter above their heads.

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Bengaluru's weather has improved at last. I was able to sleep peacefully, without feeling shoved inside an oven that my top floor apartment becomes after a usual sunny day. One might wonder what's there to write about this, that too so early in the morning? To me, that's probably the most worthy subject to write on about this city.

To a city which offers little apart from its amiable weather and pretty trees, watching it reclaim its long lost self with daylong cold winds, regular rains and t-shirt temperatures is worth documentation. It is synonymous with recording a page of its urban history, to register this momentous occasion when this country of concrete could let go of the heat it was holding within for months like resentment. This is as momentous as coconut oil freezing at the beginning of November every year in Delhi, marking the arrival of winter. As momentous as the year's first snowfall in Kashmir. As momentous as a lily popping up in my balcony garden after a year of hopeless watering. What climate change is to environmentalists, weather change is to writers. So I write.— % &7.30 am. 9th May. Last night, after two long months which felt like five, I slept without night sweats, without craving for an air conditioner, postponing the thought of leaving this city for good for later. It rained last three evenings, and the city let out a hot sigh. The first rain felt no less than a splash of water on a hot steaming dosa pan. While the first rain turned all the trapped air into humidity, the subsequent rain were purposeful. They arrived like firefighters and doused all the pent-up fire in the city's cemented belly. The air was cool again. It felt as if the city woke up after a prolonged memory loss. Precipitous, incontinent, spontaneous—Bengaluru became everything it used to be, especially with rains!

AccuWeather promises precipitation for an entire week. Evening rains, that too. I look forward to those. Under the pale street lights of residential Bengaluru—the only other thing I love, the rain looks like drops of dreams falling. Sparkly, golden, soft. I like the cool and cosy Bengaluru it leaves behind, a city shy and shivering after a brief kiss. A city that lets me sleep again. A city that lets me dream again—a city where I can stay, once again.— % &

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The reason living in Delhi seems more tolerable compared to living in Bengaluru has everything to do with the characters of the two cities.

Delhi has rough edges, and going out in Delhi most often feels like going to war. In Delhi, you never know when someone might say something unpleasant. Cuss words are the norm, flexing power and connections is the habit. It's hard to trust Delhi—the day to day banter is filled with promising words which don't mean anything. It gives you food for thought, something to come back home and ponder over. Even in case of no unpleasant encounters, Delhi makes you grateful for surviving yet another day without hiccup, without being fleeced by someone or the city itself. Coming back home in Delhi feels nothing less than celebratory.— % &On the contrary, Bengaluru is so mild that its roughest edges will be encountering a xenophobic auto driver, who'd not-so-politely ask you to learn Kannada. Fair ask, in my opinion. Funnily, that's all the angst the city holds against us migrants.

The city never questions our jobs, our working or living here. These jobs of ours run the economy here. Devoid of toxicity, the city makes us question things which are more fundamental—if our job is worth it, if we are making enough to beat inflation, if we should consider switching jobs for a hike. Living in Bengaluru is more existential and lonely, because the city doesn't unsettle us. The city rather accepts us and domesticates us, making us feel like a pawn in its gargantuan capitalistic machinery. Coming back home in Bengaluru, therefore, feels dreadful.— % &Delhi does none of this outsider-insider bullshit. Since partition, Delhi has been home to outsiders. Nobody truly belongs to Delhi, everyone is a migrant there. When the city is made up of migrants and migrants alone, the angst is pervasive. Everyone is an outsider. The city resists your very presence and therefore, every evening, when you retire to your home, you feel like a warrior who has returned victorious after a long fight. With a city that's a pushover. You sleep at peace because tomorrow there's yet another battle to fight. — % &

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I was twelve when they cut the peepul tree in my house in front of me. I'd spent my childhood climbing on that. Although cricket had replaced climbing trees by then, I clearly remember how bad I felt, as if someone shredded the photographs of my childhood. I didn't have a say; elders decided the matters of the house. A new Fiat was to arrive & a garage was supposed to come in peepul's place. The carcass of the fallen tree—its limbs, its trunks—remained in the compound for two months. In a week, the new car arrived to inaugurate the new garage. Grihapravesh on tyres than foot, they joked.

Half of the peepul's trunk was chopped off to make a sofa & a dining table. The rest, sold off. To cheer me up, a cricket bat was made out of the trunk—sturdy enough to survive the fast bowling of twelve-year-olds. At 17, I left for college. At 34, I returned for good and noticed the garage had turned into a cobweb infested storeroom. The Fiat was sold off after grandpa's demise in 2004. I foraged through the stuff and found the last surviving piece of the fallen tree—my prized bat—laden with dust, still sturdy. A fallen tree had survived what a car, a garage and its owner couldn't. One's end.

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Delivering Safety:
A Musing— % &It's 1.30 am. You're driving back home on your motorcycle through the cool and windy roads of Bangalore. The city seems to have folded in a third. What would take an hour in the day is now barely 20 minutes. It is the only time when Bengaluru streets are bare—you can breathe in the clean air, not hear the cumulative hum of the gazillion combustion engines, and the city's infamous traffic has momentarily become a living history. The silence reminds you of the silence after a sigh. The city is free of its residents, at last, at least. — % &There's no speck of humans in long lanes. Even the sentinel strays are too sleepy to bark, completely disinterested to chase. It seems a long day has gotten over, your Enfield's sputter is the city's snore. In the circuitous crosses that make you go ABCD and mazey mains that push you to recite the table of 1 on way to your home, you encounter a lot of shady and empty patches. The very roads used to somewhat terrorise you not less than ten years ago. You'd wonder what if someone—upon seeing you ride your red Thunderbird solo—chased or intercepted you and robbed? Such stories weren't unheard of from where you come from. — % &In 2015, you'd race hurriedly through these deserted and doomed alleys, your pulse on a perpetual high, abating only once you reached home and locked your door. These what-ifs don't bother you anymore. No, not because you are older, and hence, braver now. Despite your large frame and infinitely larger male privilege that has let you be out alone on the road at this hour, you're still quite chicken-hearted. Your chutzpah has more to do with one simple thing that has changed on the roads at night over the past decade. Given how deplorable Bangalore's infrastructure is, it is certainly not the quality of roads or street lights and CCTVs. The change has entirely to do with humans and trust.— % &Earlier at this hour, there wouldn't be anyone trustworthy on the road. The police patrol car were far too few, and far too infrequent back then, as they are now. Every purposeless person on the road would feel like an open threat. But now, there's someone else, someone new, someone far more ubiquitous who evokes trust, familiarity and a sense of safety on the road. It's the Swiggy-Zomato delivery person, the branded stranger crossing you every few hundred meters incessantly, flitting past like a bumblebee on noiseless whirring Yulus. They're someone you don't know, yet you do.— % &You exactly know why they don't have time to loot you, to snatch your phone, to stab you and run. They have food and groceries to deliver within ten minutes, five stars to earn for that mighty tiny bonus on a timely delivery, they can neither spill nor stop otherwise their health insurance might go amiss. The job at hand is urgent enough for them to not stop to trouble you on the road, yet not urgent enough to not stop to help you if they see some other miscreant troubling you on the road. They're a travelling witness, a wordless companion that turns the solo rider that you are into a crowd of two, a noble human on your side by default—they served you food not too long ago! — % &No, you're not interested in romanticising their hardship. You know anyone can be evil, anyone can turn into a criminal, but statistically, only a tiny fraction of delivery guys would turn rogue, that too on the road. You believe this in earnestness, and not because you're idealising their struggle. You just trust their reality. You know they're doing a job, which means their KYC is complete, their background is verified and they will not dare do something to come in the eye of the law. To the one in a job, the fear of losing their job goes far deeper than every other fear they might have. An employee is the least free person on the planet because they're addicted to the drug called monthly salary, around and with which their life is built. Salary is life to such existence, else one won't be in a job. And the lesser the salary, the more the fear of consequences.— % &To commit a crime, one doesn't need poverty or hardship as much as one needs the lack of fear of consequences and free time. Which are two things that an employed individual doesn't have. This reality, and this reality alone, gives you peace, and while you could have thanked the delivery folks for their trusted omnipresence that is helping make the city safer, you very clearly know what you're truly thanking. Capitalism.— % &

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THE PACKAGE: A SHORT STORY

The stinging sound of the doorbell woke me up today morning. Groggily, I dragged myself to the door. A brown package was kept outside. I tried lifting it but it was too heavy. I somehow managed to drag it inside, my sleep now history thanks to the curiosity that lit up my face. I ran to the kitchen to get a knife to swiftly open it. The package had books, a hundred copies of the same book in a yellow cover. Someone must have been mistaken, I thought, and took out one book from the lot. The title read The Dream and the author's name was Harsh Snehanshu. I blinked twice. Was I dreaming? Was it for real? I slapped myself and it hurt. I was wide awake, dumbfounded, wondering if someone had played a prank on me.

Reluctantly yet excitedly, I opened the book only to discover it was blank—all two hundred pages of it, barring the first page which just had one handwritten note: "You always dreamed of publishing a novel. I published it for you. You just have to write it now. Shoo, go get started! Love, Sis."

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"Aaaa. Don't cut me," the mango screamed.
"I didn't know you could talk," I replied, shocked.
"I'm the king of fruits. My words, only kings can understand."
"I'm not a king. Why am I able to understand you?"
"You're about to become a king."
"I live in India. India is a democracy. There's no space for a king here. How am I about to become a king?"
"You're going to marry a foreigner princess."

This happened ten years ago. Since then I haven't had a mango, out of respect for a fellow king. Since then, no princess came but I have been waiting. My marriageable age is gone. Not once has mango spoken again. I didn't cut mangoes but you know what, mango ne mera kaat diya.

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My loneliness is such that it can only be curbed in the company of another equally lonely person.

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