Love after Love - Derek Walcott
Ants
Most mornings I cycle through the winding streets of my neighbourhood. Delhi isn't like Bombay. It is not a morning person. The shutter windows are clamped shut with the weight of the night's manacled trudge. When the city raises its groggy head, brushing the tangle of leaves from its hair, even the dogs look away embarrassed by this inertia. I get a kick out of this secret rendezvous, arriving at the door of the morning, before even the chaiwallas and the sweepers.
This is my escape. My table for two. This is where I meet myself, and make conversation with the winter fumes that escape from snoring mouths. The wind encloses everything with its polythene palm, wrapping the moment.
A cyclist sees the city from behind the iron mesh of their solitude. I move each street with my eyes, archiving the silences that I leave behind. The trail is always marginal. The wheels write a story that lives outside of time. The roads are a howling absence. I sit outside a park whose green is still behind bars. Soon the morning will unlock leisure, like an angry warden. I have arrived too early on the scene, a conductor soaking in the music, peeled unceremoniously from dormant strings, in an empty hall, to an audience of unclasped chairs. I have come even before the cleaners or the ticket seller.
Somebody has dropped pao kilo of maida on the damp mud next to a pavement. There is a small depression at the centre. The earth is swallowing itself. From the crack, as if rising from the planet's core itself, ants slowly emerge. As my eyes accustom themselves to the sight, I see them move, as nothing that has ever moved.
Do you know that feeling of watching a miniature painting, or a Bosch, perhaps, for hours, before it moves? Do you discern suddenly the expression of the stable boy, the welt on the stomach of the girl pushing a wheelbarrow, and most importantly, the hurtling gaze of the washerwoman - a lightning bolt thrown into a crowd of leering men? Have you known that moment when the painting comes alive, when the story of its becoming is no more a mystery, when the wheels of its machine spring into life, and the buzz of its people evaporates from its surface, as a constellation of stares?
This is what happened. The day unfurled. The cars came. The residential buildings stepped back into their positions. The traffic signals began their performance. The people slid into familiar trains of strangeness, like planets slipping back into their ellipses. The world began, and before long, the city collapsed into small talk.
On the side of the road, with the obstinate solace of a writer locked behind a window, the ants multiplied.
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