IN BETWEEN MORNINGS

2.45 AM might seem weird. A little strange! A lot more insane! But definitely an incredible hour for me! I am in the venerated company of my imaginations of a morning, predicted to arrive any moment. This morning is no ordinary morning. It is a Sunday morning. A morning when the body psychologically wishes to stay pinned deep in the bed but its physical ideas beg to differ. I would say that I am not lucky enough. In my professional years or personal years of accidental encounters, I can recollect only a handful of Saturdays that I went partying the night out. I think it could be the company of friends, I kept which didn’t help me in developing obnoxious habits of leaving on a Saturday afternoon and arrive back home by a dying Sunday evening. Our families had some rules and we followed it with our eyes wide open. Now that we are grownups, married or still bachelors, earning and yearning for more; we are still bound by rules.

The rule that I love to abide by is to never miss the mornings. Between the very first mornings of 2014, January 6 and some more lately were reported to be the coldest, our city had ever experienced. I found it absolutely unbelievable myself. I had never gone out jogging, wearing a sweater. I had never stepped out concealing my ears, with a woolen cap. I see my mom wrap herself in a shawl, from top to bottom, seeming to be on an undercover mission to gather the greens and reds from the plants in our neighborhood for divine offerings. I see my sweetheart; hiding in a pink colored sweater and never wanting to liberate from its woolen confines. And then there is me, wandering in between mornings. Sometimes staring at the nearby school and sometimes pausing myself while the National Anthem is being sung. There are two schools in our vicinity. One proclaims to be an English medium school but whatever I have overheard from the sound waves traveling out of the classrooms, might be bad news for the future of students. The other school seems like a compromise between the aspiration of being a partly Marathi and partly ending up being a Hindi medium school. There is a vast level of disciplinary difference too between these schools. In between mornings, I have started taking keen interest in distinguishing the two schools.

The kids coming to the English medium school are always in a hurry to make it to the school before the first bell goes off. But the kids going to the other school simply sleep walk. Their parents keep them entertained with folklore from hinterlands, they might never ever visit. And I find them caught in a direct conflict with teachers. I love to experience such drastic differences during mornings.

One of my closest friends asked me recently – Why do you wake up so early?

I replied – For Happy Hours.

Mornings come with their own share of Happy Hours. These Happy Hours don’t serve beer at half prices nor do they make fake promises. These Happy Hours help in feeling relaxed. Take for instance the morning of January 14. On the occasion of Makar Sankranti, in the early hours of yet another morning; I heard the prayers of a temple merge with the echoes of an azan from a mosque. I heard the church bell ring in the background. If this seemed like a divine intervention to realize secularism, I was being a witness to it.   

To be honest, I addictively look forward to every morning. I am enjoying this addiction. Maybe the mornings are growing better with the kind of things, I see around me. I see teachers and talk to them. I see students and walk with them. I see seniors and help them. To every morning that I wake up, I feel indebted for the infinite experiences; they leave me feeling rich with.

For over five days, during every morning that I have been taking giant steps, I have been keeping a close watch on a stray dog. This dog is trying to make new friends. He slowly trespasses boundaries, lifts its leg and bathes the rear wheel of our car. I try to shoo it off by just yelling at it and at times acting to hurl a stone at it. The four legged thing, runs a few yards and returns back to repeat the same mischief. Seeing him mark his area, the dogs in our colony have gone berserk. All of them have been making generous offerings of their liquid remains on the wheels of our car. I only hope that they don’t take a unanimous decision to start watering our plants.

Apart from dogs, during mornings I see cows, donkeys, crows and cats; busy with their own chores. I think the cats are born lucky. All the odd and even breeds of cats have found a good refuge in our neighboring three homes. Our immediate neighbor feeds them with fish every day. To make their bones grow strong, they are also fed milk and other resistance enhancing potions. These cats walk on the asbestos sheets, sleep on the hoods of cars and get into ugly tiffs over matters of pride and prejudice. There are black cats, browns, whites and yellow too. One of the male cats is a serial dater. He always preys on the newcomers in the colony. But I think his charm in the world of cats-with-claws helps him continue being the Emran Hashmi among all.

In the mornings where I see dogs getting competitive and cats getting obsessive, I also see the cows. They seem to be in no mood of a competition. Every cow walks like a mafia don, chewing an invisible something in their mouths and pushing its face; deep into the unclaimed bins of doom. The crows on the other end have grown extremely notorious. They have started puncturing the calm of early mornings by starting to caw caw from as early as 2:30 AM.

But the sweetness of mornings is not lost. I wonder if all Indian mornings are this beautiful! I wonder how the International mornings maybe. In between mornings, I jog out in search of imaginations, inspirations and interests to support my personal writing. These mornings provide me strength to fight all odds. These mornings help me to dream about all evens.

In between mornings, I live my own mornings by becoming one through prayers and offerings to the Supreme Divine.

3.45 AM might seem weird. A little strange! A lot more insane! But definitely an incredible beginning of an interesting Sunday morning of Happy Hours for me, The communicationist, A hungry writer, A thirsty writer, An observant, A speaker, A listener, A singer at times, An untimed photographer, A Train Spotter Updater and now (almost) A historian of early mornings.

-vociferous