joie de l'écriture

Two eyes popped open under a tuft of black hair that carried the smell of some unfamiliar baby shampoo. They had a look that would put a seasoned gambler to shame had the reels in the slot machine come to a jarring halt wiping him of his fortune like how a dab of cold cream could disappear on the skin on cold winter mornings. On one such winter morning, through the slit in the wooden window fixed in an unclothed window frame, a ray of the morning sun arrived into the tiny room bouncing off a million dust particles that floated in the air like figments of imagination that were sometimes conceived in the otherwise dormant brain of the waif. He lay there warming himself in the little comfort that the streak of sunlight offered him. His eyes were transfixed to the dark damp ceiling of the cubicle and thoughts ran in his mind, the speed of those bicycles that had chased him the previous night. Bicycles that carried plump uncouth men in tattered clothes and bunch of steel chains around their sweaty necks that jangled as they rode on the freshly tarred road. He turned around to one side and looked at the blue polythene, the size of a beanbag, stuffed with knickknacks that carried labels of “Made in China”. A new day at work was about to commence for a little life “Made in India.”