Stranger

I find myself thinking that I will become like the bookstore, a relic dissolving bit by bit into the city while change flows all around it. I can almost see myself thirty years on still staring at the window, except that my face is stained and marked and dusty as well. I wish there was someone who would give me a chance to try my hand at something better, something I am capable of.....

But they're sometimes on my my mind, and it seems to me that I notice the things and people nobody else does, the decrepit and the defeated and the solitary, perhaps because I identify with these aspects so closely.....

Why do I see these things and nurse them and take them home with me when I have gone back to the flat after fighting with the auto-rickshaw drivers or having warded off the hands trying to grope me on a bus? I sit with the lights off in my room, and wonder what I am doing with my life and why the things I looked forward to during college never happened.....

Surface, Siddartha Debb