# The Mythology of Clouds
Bring sleep to both eyes—that sleep where dreams arrive not in color but transparent, where you can see through to the inside, like an X-ray, down to the bone. Let the contentment of rumination spread—that happiness visible in a cow’s eyes at dusk, slowly chewing grass while gazing toward the horizon, where no ambition dwells in that gaze, only presence itself. Bring clouds—like rainfall on ruins, pouring upon ash; the rain that falls on destruction makes the soil most fertile, the grass on battlefields greenest.
History dissolves into dust—kings, queens, ministers, judges all become at last a handful of powder, a spoonful of calcium. Time’s swept courtyard erases all scriptures, all sighs, all edicts. Yet time itself goes nowhere—it simply stands and watches, a neutral witness, history’s only illiterate reader.
Time lifts the edges of graves into its chest—the soil of death settles upon the heart of life. New conversations sprout in another’s roots—in the language of the dead, in the weeping of the living, in the hybrid tongue of the two. Come in radiant madness—in the brilliance of the blue-throated god, throat darkened yet blue despite the poison swallowed, bringing love. Bring clouds—with all the world’s pollen, all unspent seeds, all unwritten poems.
## The Arithmetic of Time
### A Letter of Mist
How many fairy tales have I heard from you—in ponds, in rain, in countless images, framed by seasons of every kind. The shadows of trees fall across the river’s two banks—those shadows tremble in water, trembling too in memory, never still, never quite erased. As day fades, darkness thickens slowly—like frost settling in one’s hair at the mist’s first touch in winter, like cracks spreading across a wall in the pattern of tributary streams. The shifting sky bows its head in reverence—from the sandy banks beyond, laborers return home like birds, exhaustion bundled in their baskets, the shadow of dusk on their shoulders. The monsoon tide swells the breast with the futures of love—as at high tide a boat’s plank submerges in water.
Once happiness used to laugh through your courtyard—barefoot, in dirty clothes, yet with a smile of pure gold. Stories through the night filled the belly—tales of chariots, of spring festivals, of simple joys that demanded no conditions, cost nothing, required no ticket.
Now, beneath the city’s relentless pressure, I count days of sorrow—each day a bead strung on a rosary of grief. Beneath the white light of the office fluorescent—that light casting no shadow, holding no mystery—from the clerk’s desk buried under files, I hear of parched fields, droughts, floods; the cruel weight of the wind, the wind that breaks branches and bends the spine of men. I hear your illness is grave.
There is no time. Yet sweet childhood stories come calling month after month—the full moon pushes through clouds again and again, stubborn as a child. I grow restless—nothing pleases, I search for the smell of villages in the city’s air, taste earth in concrete. If you can, send a letter or two back—through the mist; not by the postman’s hand, but wind’s hand, those two letters written in the ink of dewdrops.
### The Lost Postage Stamp
One morning of some discovery came the news—a rain-letter has been lost along the way, no envelope, no stamp. That letter in which was written the tale of the world’s first love—how clouds first wept for earth, how the sky first bent down to kiss the ground. The pages of familiar bonds are being rewritten, old connections broken—though you whitewash the walls, old pictures bloom again in the rains, beneath the new colors the old hues still breathe.
Yet inside, one dream survives—how can I forget the one I once called from the clouds? A handwritten note, words trembling from the heart—not a song of twelve months, but a hymn of eternity, a melody standing outside time. Let all my discoveries fade—let rust corrode the instruments, let theories prove false—if only that one letter returns, creases and all.
### The Defeat of Death
From tranquil mornings so much has been stolen—a clay horse, ornaments dreamed of by a pregnant bride, the image of a child’s first smile, one no camera caught, the mark of lips on a teacup, washed away like a forgotten password someone once whispered as a name.
# How Much Art Loses Its Way
How much art vanishes like this—sand drawings erased by waves, mandalas demolished the moment they’re complete. Time is the most skilled thief—enters without sound, steals without sound, leaves no footprints, invisible even to cameras.
But the beloved’s chest, eyes, face—the current of touch that flows without break—even when stolen, it doesn’t end, because what is felt becomes impenetrable. Death takes the body, not memory—takes the bones, leaves the laughter. Death, then, is the most defeated, most failed thief of all—carries away everything, yet abandons precisely what matters most, not through forgetting, but through powerlessness.
## Time Beyond the Window
In a moving train’s window everything slides backward—fields, villages, ponds of palmyra palms, trees swaying, electric wires, herds of cattle—all rushing in the opposite direction. But am I not the one rushing? Life too is a moving train—we sit at the window watching the landscape change, pass the station before we even read its name.
Are only they racing? I myself—restless, anxious—torn by endless thirst toward nowhere, my ticket bears no destination. Adolescence comes like a flower, blooming suddenly one morning; youth like fire, illuminating everything while burning everything; then all sweetness dries slowly—rivers become streams, streams become cracks, cracks become dust.
The further I go, the more I return to myself—this is the labyrinth: departure and return through the same door. By day’s end, hands dusty, I carry only a ledger—accounts of profit and loss, a sum that always equals zero. Then the curtain of darkness—death brings forgetfulness without form. Even forgetfulness is a kind of freedom—weightlessness, namelessness.
## The Mythology of Grass
One day I’ll become memory—you, I, albums filling a house, photographs yellowed with time. The household of beauty will sleep—long, deep, dreamless sleep, like a bear in winter. The morning songs will stop, nothing will remain—temples, minarets, dungeons, hands raised toward sky—all will vanish like sand castles.
Only some fortunate earth will remain, grass in chaotic colors—holding through sun and frost, day and night, the playful image of sky, filtered through each season. Grass—trampled by everyone’s feet, bearing no name, claiming no place in history books, unmentioned in anthems—perhaps it alone becomes the world’s final witness, most reliable, for it has no side. Every empire will crumble, every language fade, every flag rot—only earth, grass, and a melancholy sky will sit silently together.
## The Economics of a Honeycomb
Somewhere the intricate arithmetic of time is written—in the rings of trees, the layers of stone, the wrinkles of a face—each fold a ledger of a year. Soft green beside a broken plow, the warmth of affection in some village’s dusk—this warmth has no unit, cannot be measured by any thermometer. Through breaking mist peeks the morning’s face—tears, sweat, blood, and happiness collected in a teacup—held between two fingers, yet heavier than empires, because empires fall while the taste of tea remains.
When contentment departs, honey accumulates in the heart’s darkness—honey no bee made, no flower gave—created only through waiting, patience, solitude, sleepless nights. Trivial as it is, life is eternal—like roots of grass, even torn, they rejoin. ‘Love’ might be a meaningless word—yet in time’s caprice, it alone commands life’s highest price, a price no currency can pay.
## The One Who Lost the Key
I searched long—in trunks, cabinets, pocket bottoms, between book pages, inside old coat linings. Found nothing. Where did I lose that key—the one that opened childhood’s door, its handle worn by my mother’s touch? As a child, holding that key set my veins ablaze with kites, memories descended in waves—like a child descending stairs, step by step, tumbling with laughter, for falling was still unlearned. From distant seas someone beckoned, sailed the boat of desire—sails full of wind, the helm turning in imagination, with only rainbows drawn on maps. In that key immortal birds unfurled their wings—birds whose feathers held seven colors in the sun.
Now everything dims in doubt—evening by evening, window by window, lights go out, the houses of the neighborhood close their eyes.
Let the day go, let time slip away. Then let the nights come softly, dissolving—those nights where every door opens without a key, because there are no doors, no walls, only horizons.
**6. Grass and Geography**
**The Stubbornness of Sprouts**
In the sprout lies the earth’s eager yearning—that yearning which pierces stone, cracks concrete, insists with all its heart that the impossible becomes possible. You dwell in the depths of the soul, tender and devoted—radiant, effervescent, brimming with luminous joy, like a river overflowing its banks. The lamp that burns even in heavy rain—whose flame doesn’t die even when water touches it, because its fire is not of oil but of conviction—that is you.
A sprout heeds no command. Who ever stopped a sprout? The force that breaks a seed’s shell can break empires too. In an eager sky, it unfurls the wings of new leaves—all exuberance, all color’s weight laid bare in sun and dew, hiding nothing, for there is nothing to hide. And the earth holds everything in silent embrace—what can hold will also let go, what grips cannot truly keep.
**The Resurrection of Green**
Autumn has begun—cloud-seedlings scatter across sky and earth, an invisible hand spreads soft carpets, arranges the world’s drawing room. Along the path’s edges, creepers weep grace—as time does, slow but relentless, the way water drops wear away stone. Trees tremble with the palsy of age, kasba flowers wave their white flags of a hundred women, fields innocent with grain—in each grain, sunlight, rain, the salt of a farmer’s sweat—three ingredients, cooked together.
And alongside this—perhaps more precious, perhaps more urgent—green life is being reborn from sorrow’s soil. Green never loses; it only waits, beneath winter, beneath snow, beneath stone—lying patient in the earth’s deep places—until it finds a scrap of light, a drop of water, then silently prepares.
**Between Rice and Echo**
Still the sky sways among the grain—a procession of wings in sun-scented dust, the air full of storks in their graceful yearning. Not a river, not a name—but a chest full of resonant crowds, whose language is wind, whose song is birds, whose grammar is the turning seasons. The rice-field speaks a thousand things—words only the river knows, which it has been telling the same listener for a hundred years—the earth—and earth listens each time anew, surprised each time.
Sometimes the sound of dew wakes something strange in the quiet corner of the chest—it has no name, no identity, no passport; it simply is, like gravity—invisible, palpable, undeniable. Some time passes bowing down—in the posture of prayer, or exhaustion, it’s hard to tell. Then one bewildered morning I suddenly see—on the silk-cotton tree’s branches everything is new again, red flowers bursting forth, the tree itself become fire, yet it doesn’t burn—it gives light.
**The Grammar of Solitude**
Let it be—this field, these ponds and channels, distant villages, rows of trees in the hazy horizon. Let the dense groves not stir—they are already where they should be, they need no GPS. The tall palm trees wave their fronds in a mother’s affection—asking no price, seeking no thanks, only gazing upward, solitary seekers of height. Clouds drift through dust’s veil, bringing seasonal dialogue—green pigeons across the fields, plovers, hornbills, each with its own note, its own complaint. In this lies happiness—simple happiness, no side effects, no expiration date.
Don’t break this solitude with shrill noise—solitude is fragile, once shattered it cannot be mended, like glass, like trust. If you find the time, come alone and quietly—from one pause to another scene, from one breath into another life.