Dust cloud

I sleep in a bedroom. Or should I perhaps say I try to sleep. The place where I live being the beautiful metropolis that it is, simply a pleasure. Last year this time, a whole series of earthquakes caused by passerby lorries ROCKED the bedroom scene every night. A very nursery-rhymish scenario, is it? Statutory warning: Construction of a nearby flyover dispels sleep. But (almost) every flyover once begun was soon completed. So that should have meant sweet dreams again, then? Far from it. I think the stray dogs in the street began missing the noise and the stream of cars that used to pass through our road instead of the nearby main road... In any case, they more than made up for it by scheduling nightly howl-concerts between midnight and One A. M. of excellent quality. And totally free of cost. One of those dogs developed a regular, perfectly rhythmic bark-pattern with a time period of about five seconds. I am certain that the ratio of intervals noise to silence in those dog-bars was none other than the Divine Golden Ratio.

A lot of vehicles, a lot of noise and a lot of dust. How unfortunate it is that we cannot just sweep and mop the road the way we are supposed to sweep and mop our rooms and houses. Going to the supermarket never used to be something I avoided. A short stay in this city has changed this. The problem with most supermarkets being that I need to cross the road to get there. Now tell me, how am I supposed to cross the road? It takes five minutes (alright, let me not exaggerate, three minutes) for one side of the road to get clear. By which time the other side has already got frightfully full of vehicles driven by people who need to honk incessantly to ascertain their own existence. So full I feel that perhaps if I tried to swim across the road I would be more successful than if I tried to walk.

I wonder where all the sand at the edge of the roads comes from. Alright, I know Chennai lies on the coast. But does that make it a beach? If a city lies on the coast does it mean that the sand will be everywhere? Most major roads are swept early in the mornings and that makes it a pleausre to go for a ride anywhere by bus, car or otherwise before the office rush hour traffic sets in. Just observe the roads, say, at 10 am. Just about two hours after their daily sweep. Already there are clouds of dust swirling on the roads, sand is fast collecting close to the sidewalks. I conclude that not only is Chennai a coastal city, it is a desert too, with dust clouds blurring the vision of every pedestrian and polishing people's hair thin. Long live the shampoo industry.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Marina_Sandstorm_Chennai)