Bringing in the New Year

Had spent most of the daytime hours (primarily drinking in the sun-splashed vistas) on the 31st and most of the early hours of the 1st (gazing at the sparks shooting out of a bonfire under an eclipsed moon) at a friend's farm.

Found the entire experience surreal, need to go there again and enjoy all of it yet again, slowwwwwwlyyyy....

The farm is basically nothing much (thank God for small mercies like this), it has no walkways, no swimming pools, no benches and in fact no farmhouse either.

What it does have is some hundred odd (I mean, I didn't count them) guava trees heavy with fruit, some coconut palms that look decrepit and lost rooted so far from the coast, an acre of so of winter paddy and pockets of teak and bamboo grown over with lantana.

I was offered many an over-ripe guava and every time kept desperately dashing into my memories to try and recollect what Gabriel Garcia Marquez had to say about the tropics and the smell of a guava. Found it finally :-)

"... Graham Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics . . . with a few disparate elements connected by an inner coherence both subtle and real. Using this method you can reduce the whole enigma of the tropics to the fragrance of a rotten guava. ..."

Surrrrreall, no?