Morning

Early morning is a different world from the rest of the day. It’s the beginning of the day, new, hopeful, but reluctant yet to declare itself brightly. It’s not quite night. It’s not dark, not mysterious shadows and shapes and suspect figures slinking, not shapeless forms huddled in deep sleep, but it retains the shadow of night’s cloak. The memory of night hovers over early morning.

Early morning people are different — day people, but newly emerged from night. Most of them are people who would shrink from the night, would not be bold in the darkness. Daylight makes them feel safe. Yet, they too bring with them some of the cosiness of the house at night, some of the rumpled, groggy, sleep hangover. You can feel them sleeping still, snuggling down for five minutes more, swinging their legs out of bed, turning over grumbling, or sitting upright and beginning to count the coming day’s chores.

The people are part of the landscape that you see, the still air, the still-empty road, the dogs stretching and sniffing at interesting pavement splotches, the flowers shaken down from the silent trees by the night wind, the sleeping forms on the pavements stirring, slowly wakening. The people, clutching milk bags, counting little round loaves, jogging, are part of the things you see as you amble homewards, feeling the night’s fatigue in you but also aware of the day’s newness, outside you and distanced from you.

And then, a sudden woman in T-shirt and Bermudas waiting for her child’s school bus looks at you, you catch an unexpected eye — you never catch anyone’s eyes in the early morning on your way home from night shift — and you suddenly realise that she is wondering who you are; that you are part of her landscape. She brings with her an entire world of her own, she sees from inside her a scene in which she plays no part except for being there to see it. She is seeing you and everything around just like you’re seeing it, and for her it must be such a different picture. The same people, dogs, roads mean different things to her and to you. What does she think of you, hollow-eyed, hair messy, clad in jeans and shirt, clutching a bag with papers sticking out, rushing along? Does she imagine that you are a social worker, hurrying to save a desperate soul? Or someone going to early classes?

Or does she, really, guess at the truth as one of the possible scenarios she assigns to you, the funny, stooping, focal figure in this morning’s picture? Does she think that maybe you are a night shift worker in a newspaper, that your eyes are swimming from peering at type and your head is reeling from all-night alertness? That you have played a part in producing the newspaper that will catch that early-morning eye later in that day and will lure her into paying two rupees to find out which child it was that died due to what kind of neglect in which hospital?

Does she know that sometimes, when the night is a tiring one, you long to do it the other way around, to sleep at night and get up in the morning — just like her?