It is so hot out there. It is like walking thru a hot oven or something. And to think that summer has not started its works yet. You can get roasted crisp if you stand still in that heat for one hour. But it is not so bad to walk out there, to tell you the truth. On the way to office, I was walking across this small playground constructed by industrious youth of that locality. They play cricket there. Some weird kind of cricket where they bowl underarm. They seem to enjoy it a lot. They have even tournament for that where they even display a trophy (complete with red ribbon and all) by the side of this small ground. They seem to be very passionate about it. They have flattened the ground, built a small basic room to store their things. One side of the ground is road, so they have put a net on that side so the balls don’t go to road often. They draw lines using this white powder and all. It is almost red earth; dust will rise like clouds at every step. I only wish those do something worthwhile with their lives and if they are so thorough in their life also, it would be good. Not that they are not, I just don't know. They seem to there every evening - not during the day time though - nobody will be there.

By the side of their recreation room, there is one small capsule sized play pen for small kids. Some small kids will be playing underarm cricket there too – dust hanging around them like mist. And there will be this small girl who yells “no ball” and fights like mad with the other boys over runs and leg before.

There is this small grocery store owned by a silent family by the side of this playground. Son, father and sister take shifts managing the store. Son is very calm guy. He will be out in front of the store watching those guys play - he doesn’t normally get involved. But he seems to know everybody who plays there. He stays directly above this store and plays old Hindi music at night (nowadays I am returning home when MTV starts playing “Graveyard Shift”) which seems to include all my favorite songs.

And there are million other small things around this peanut sized place. I used to walk in between these around two and half years back. Then I went out of the country for two years, came back, took an apartment in same complex and am walking through the same playground again with same guys playing underarm cricket. It felt like “Groundhog day” today, like I am taking this walk everyday and the calendar is not moving forward at all. It is like last two years didn’t change even one small thing in this place. Now I feel I haven’t even gone anywhere – just woke up from a deep slumber and happy to find the same old things around me. It is like at the end of a long hard day, you wonder whether something you did in the morning happened on the same day or not. It feels so distant.

I think sometimes we want to get out of this “Groundhog day” and sometimes you want to continue living in it.

I think I can as well write a boring book out of this, but enough of horsing around that one small place for one day.