Anjum hasan biography of barack gas

My heart beat fast or did not beat at all; I could not say all that I thought and thought till words deserted me. I loved too abstractly. I dreaded how all there was to give was me— All through the day it stays: the sadness of coming into a wet city at dawn, not speaking, neither of us, when one by one the neon lights wake us from a cramped, dream-ravaged sleep, driving home in one long curving sweep Late summer, and mornings have nothing to do with evenings, evenings untouched by mornings.

The ghee light pouring over streets and terraces out of a bottomless sky, loving everything all morning, taking nothing back, concentrating in the small gold champak flowers that men greedily balance on branches for. Late summer sounds - dogs and nadeswarams, the last rites of weddings, bikes with almost disco thundering, crack-lunged buyers of old paper, buckets filling anew, and the butter light melting in its own heat against compound walls and parked cars: the generous light in which butterflies turn the same colour as the champak stars among the last clumps of jacaranda, and the cassia tree flowering and flowering in wilting yellow like no one told it to stop.

Hasan was born in in Shillong, Meghalaya.

Slow drip of late summer thoughts - forgiving one's faults, everything becoming a plan to find a place where it's always this late summer merge between drums and bees knocking hard against panes, the dish-washing clamour, and the flickering voices inside that one sits trying, with both hands, to keep alive, not realising that this is that place, this is that place, and when one does it's too late because the palms striped with sky are thrashing about with something that almost has a human name, and then it rains and rains and rains.

Later the children come out and collect in corners like wet ants. The air is crowded with their new-born questions - Are you pushing me? Is that a snake? The man who runs the sports goods store that also sells old unopened books and board games in faded boxes, sits with his tattooed arms folded in the sun. He drinks a lot of beer and doesn't ask stupid questions.

Anjum Hasan is an Indian novelist, short story writer, poet, and editor.

His friends loiter around small music shops all morning, in slippers, with their shirt-tails out. The distant air lights up the furrowed edges of the hills. Sometimes he wants to describe the smell of brown oaks ageing in the sun and bakeries where boys in dirty aprons lit their ovens in the early summer morning. But the tattooed man dozes on when his friends talk and the sun whitens the spines of pale detective novels and books full of blond-bodied girls and cross-stitch designs.