Settling in and moving on...

Her whole life flashed by in a matter of seconds. She stared quietly at the green outside. Boundless pastures and fields that filled her window and view. Thatch-roof huts, wide fields, small riverets, peace, lack of waste, lack of crowds- it was the neo-paradise. The travelling soul was not ready to settle, geographically or mentally. She searched for her roots but couldn’t find any. The home was far behind and far ahead. In the middle were patches of uncertainty. She did not know brick and mortar, she knew canvasses- to paint and to live in and to love.

The body was bound but the mind was free....

Small only in size

The city to city hopping had made me forget all about the small town India. All that remained in the name of small town memories were in the form of second hand information from the book – Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. It had been 8 years since I went to my parent’s native town and even longer since I visited a village. So the rude shock of road travel in U.P took the mind screaming through small shops, clustered and congested roads, crowded side walks, solitary bakeries, numerous chai stalls, painfully slow life and big dreams. Big trucks loaded with hay, urea, men, women, beds and even hand drawn carriages.... Where else in the world will you see such a sight? I wonder if one day there would be a city to village exodus, whether we will all one day go back to our agrarian roots and farm for a living. What an utterly delightful idea for a soul tired of city nuisances!

I feel my will to write fading as soon as I hit the Delhi airspace. Gone, I can feel it leaving me, like a ghoul.

The vines had bloomed, the grapes were sour. In this line you will find a positive and a negative. But she chose the bloom and the positive, hoping that the grapes will sweeten with the passing of the season. She had been fighting new demons off late, surfacing every now and then in the mushrooming web of thoughts. She wore a mask of impenetrable loneliness. She could not address the most obvious; she thought that the problems may iron themselves out. Like when it is cloudy outside, and we yet refuse to carry an umbrella.

Of journeys and roads

The incessant traveller in me has her wish fulfilled ever so often. Call it deceitful planning or a heavenly intervention, but I don’t have to bear the Delhi bore for too long. I meet strange, wonderful, pleasing people all the time and that gives me something to reflect on and to write about. I was dreading my direct flight to Chicago, but I my neighbours on either side were very pleasant accommodating people. On my right was a young man of 18 who shared my music interests, we ended up listening to each other’s music and talking about life. He was starting college and was born in the 1990. Titli and I always used to wonder how people born in the 90’s would be like, and since we did not know many people that age outside of the battery of cousins, we really did not have an opinion. However, Ankur was a smart young man, with a good attitude and a lot of perspective on almost everything that we talked about. So the generation next- given the Internet, the savvy new gadgets, information explosion, and a hoard of other factors- are a lot smarter group of people than we were at that age. On my left side, were a mother and a daughter duo who were a lot of fun to talk to too. I have met a lot of Karan’s colleagues and completely enjoyed their company, whether it was a family of four, or an elderly Kenyan-Sikh couple or an elderly couple from the States, they all had a memory rich of experiences that time can only add to. Each journey made, each new twist and turn in the road, brings along new uncharted territories, where the only way is ahead.

Love and words

Love and words for me, are the two most compelling passions in the world. And I often use one in place of the other, I think them rather interchangeable. Once, I met a wonderful old lady on way to Bombay from Poona on the Deccan Express and she told me her very heart warming love story. I have never really penned it down; I shall do it today before memory and time take it away from me forever. She had grown up in a predominantly Gujarati area in the city of old Bombay and belonged to a deeply religious Hindu family. She went to an all girls school and she loved reading. SatyaBen, her name is, and she and her friends went to a football field to watch their brothers play in the evening. She was always escorted to and back from the field by her brother. One day he went out of town and she sneaked out to the field by herself. She noticed one particularly handsome and athletic young man and started secretly doting on him. Every day she went there only to see him. He got a whiff of her affections and one day came by the school at closing time to acquaint himself with her. They fell in love. Minor omission- he belonged to a strict Muslim family. Her trials and failures at convincing her parents to let her marry him, his relentless pursuance of his own family, nothing yielded anything noteworthy. Finally, they eloped to Poona with help of certain daring friends and married in a temple. Their families still don’t talk to them. They couldn't bear children and they adopted 4 children and have raised them to practice a religion of their choice. One of her daughters, who was accompanying her, kept smiling throughout the rendition. I will never forget those two faces...etched in my mind forever. Love makes people do ridiculous, crazy, beautiful things... And words express them better than any action can.

Void

There exists and subsists a feeling of emptiness and the need to fill a void. The writing inked out more void, it failed at exploring the answers. The swaggeringly deceptive eyes told no truth and none emanated from the depths of the heart. But there was no communiqué from the mind to indicate the nature of the void. It is just there, lying in the abyss, nameless, indivisible, invisible…

Angel or Demon?

The uneasiness grew inside me, making just sitting around nearly impossible. I went out in the heat, I went out in the dark, but the restless soul knew no respite. Little harmless lies had become hard to bear, and I wondered about my own set of lies. A pack of cards in my own hands and blaming the other side of indulging in debauchery. A maze of contradictions and a path of divisiveness. Indulgence is all that the winged creature wanted. Were the wings, the devils or the angels? Who knew...?