Unravelling is an interesting word. It could mean a breakdown. It could mean you are finally seeing things in a perspective that doesn’t fit the worldview. So whatever constructs you’ve built up start crumbling. No one knows exactly why it happens. It could be a free-floating moment that you suddenly encounter that is so truthful, so powerful that you are forced to look at your life. Look hard and see all the war paint you’ve slapped on to hide the chinks. It is called an epiphany. It is a large arrow in neon lights telling you where to go. Things get a little easy then. Because you become a risk-taking child of the universe and all that crap, overriding the panic and Be Safe sensors. The middle-class fears of homelessness, joblessness…fear, period, of anything outside the construct are abandoned and before you know it, you’ve transformed your life before the familiar concerns lock on again. And even then, you don’t pay as much attention to them because you’ve walked off the cliff, tasted flight and don’t care a fig about the ground anymore. It is a little more difficult when you don’t have an epiphany. Then it is just a nagging but vague feeling that something is wrong. And you have no idea how to stop self-destructing. Unravelling. When conversations, scenes, your friends blur and nothing is in focus anymore. All you want to do is tire yourself out so much that you just collapse on bed and let sleep anaesthetize you. And in the morning you just want to lie on the tiles and stare at the individual grains in the floor’s mosaic. You don’t know what’s wrong and you don’t know how to fix it.

There was me crawling across wet, squelchy, quicksand mud, screaming "I Will Not Let The Forces Of Nature Defeat Me" as lightning ripped the sky open and the several million angels simultaneously peed. Natasha watched from safer ground, keeling over with laughter.
That was the state of Bombay roads yesterday. And all I did was cross one lane to go to ITC Grand Central. The mud sucked in the rubber slippers I was wearing and I had to then leap across corrugated iron sheets that lay over live electrical wires. End result? I walked in to a five-star establishment barefeet but alive, laughing like a maniac. To their credit, they didn't stare...much.