Zuri

Zuri is a name of Swahili origin and means 'beautiful.' Courtesy: Google search. Shalmali (I love the way the name rrrolls in the mouth), mistakenly wrote my name as 'Zuri', purportedly in a state of jet lag. As she also happens to live in Zurich, the mistake was understandable. A laptop and a 3G dongle happen to be my most faithful companions of late. They don't mind my carrying them wherever I go, which actually happens to be quite a small distance. Well, as much as one can travel in a third floor apartment having a 1000 square foot carpet area. These two devices tell me the meanings of everything I want to know.

My name Juri, is an Assamese girl name meaning 'stream' (a repeat information from an earlier blog) and a Slavic boy name also having variants 'Yuri' and 'Jaris.' My Assamese name was personified by me. I used to be quite a crybaby as a child. I wish I had been named Zuri. It would have been nice to personify this name.

Shalmali is 13 years older than Ninad and 13 years younger to me. I met her for a few hours and conversed for much fewer. She is striking to look at. Her kohl rimmed eyes and short hair, all in lovely ringlets, sit well on her attractive features. There was harmony in the way she dressed, her kurti, jeans, footwear each looked like they were made for the other. She is a scientist and an artist. Aditya, the mysterious beautiful blog writer I mentioned in one of my earlier blogs, married her and got relieved from his internal and personal conflicts and had to stop writing. God bless both of them.

6 months can be a long time. A lot of things happen in 6 months. A school boy gives board exams and reaches junior college, 2 babies are born, several people die, 3 cousins get married, pay hikes happen, people get promotions, relations between spouses change, labs get accredited, people travel across countries, silver jubilee class get-togethers relieve 20 year old nostalgias for some time, resident doctors complete their postings in BMT wards and life moves on in general. A lot of things.

And yet I landed in Mumbai 6 months back and I feel that I landed here just the other day. Fleeting desires to flee the city did visit me occasionally but were brought under control. And yet now that the time has passed, I don't know how I did it. My travelling was confined to an area of 4-5 kilometres in these 6 months with nothing exciting happening. I can only thank the laptop and the 3G dongle for keeping me relatively stable in the state of inertia I had to submit myself to.

Tempers in Mumbai have cooled, an effect of the cool environmental temperatures brought about by the unceasing rains and the dark grey clouds effectively conditioning the air below them. Assam, on the other hand is a victim of soaring temperatures. Temperatures higher than any recorded in the summers of the last 50 years have been reached. Power cuts, rampant in Assam, are making the misery greater.

I hope, for the sake of general good, that the weather becomes kinder than the ministry responsible for power generation in Assam. Mother Nature is easier to appeal to than the two legged in power.