A Winter Love Affair

I turn to you like I would turn to a drug. Except I don’t do drugs. But wait, I believe compulsively soaking in the morning sunshine and sinking my nose deep into shiuli flowers also count as drugs, minus the grave bodily damage – ta da! But, I digress.

So I turn to you like I would turn to a drug. You lighten the darkest of my afternoons, when all I can see from my silly, corner desk at work is a sombre sky. I have such a love affair with you that it seems sad beyond the grave that you will be gone in a month or two. Relegated to cold storage, ignored, graying and dehydrating.

Oh, did I not say? I am talking about oranges. I have been an orange aficionado since I was in primary school. In fact, they were one of the main reasons I loved winter so much. Every afternoon, after finishing lunch, I would take two oranges in a bowl and sit out in the sunshine. I would carefully un-peel each wedge so it took me a good half hour to get through my fill. And every minute was worth it.

Today, I am deprived of my once daily orange-in-the-sun ritual. I am cooped up in office during the best hours of the day and venture out only when the roads are full and the air is dull. But my love affair with oranges continues. Here in Maharashtra, we get some of the best oranges of the season. They will last for a few more months at most, during which I intend to leave no stones unturned to source them. And then they will go, hurrying away with the winter breeze and the early sunsets.

Nothing lasts forever, not even angelic oranges. Except perhaps the dratted work-week which is more often than not interminable.