Ma left this morning, and while she stays
over.. its almost always my teenages revisit – the angst, the bile, the
ridicule and inexplicable resentment… it
is when she leaves; the absence
is acute.
How could you be nostalgic about things you have
never had? The cozy yellow warmth of the family evening? The huddled up winter
afternoons of banter and chatter? A general familial bonhomie?
Those run of the mill naïve things of human social
existence? The absence of it all? The acuteness amplified to the degree of
pulling you in a black hole?
Its afternoons like this, when even the skies
perhaps get muddled up and do a trapeze from the summer solstice point - the
wind almost autumn laced; that his being at school too is like a dredging up
nostalgia.
As if his infant, toddler,
teenage and adult selves have converged in one; stand there stroking my 60 year
old hair – “Ma, it is all fine!”
How a certain distant car sound, someone’s kitchen
at work, birdsongs – all medley into the montage of those fragmented, pebbled
moments of long time, even life time’s ago!
I sit quietly and reach into the old forgotten jacket pockets…. Feel the
shards of all the assortments … not always my own.
Some of them (okay fine, most of them) are the
ones… when on just an afternoon like this…I quietly tucked myself up in
invisibility cloak … being an audience to someone else’s
drama/moments/cheer/grief; an outsider – yearning to be part of those stories.
And just like that, my pockets began filling up,
now the shards still sharp, some blunt… but all of them still there. A good
memory is a blessing; they said? Yea right, you don’t know half of it.
Sometimes I think I can smell my long lost lives,
perhaps am a part of Narnia or Neverland? How about Hogwarts? I just have to
close my eyes and see the wild wind swept long curls, braving the cold and
happy(?) as a clam in one of those mansions in the pages of faerie magazine. As
real as me here and now; sometimes more!
Empty feelings magnetize to an old couch and slowly,
meditatively I sink into self. Narcissa really!
I have always had dreams which have this sense of
fantastic, other worldliness about them; the sky, the places, even the people
and upon waking whatever it were about, feel close all day. Touch of it seeping
into the bones with almost improbable sense of intimacy.
There is always a story building up somewhere inside,
the idea, the plot-line, like pitter-patter, sometimes a sentence too, maybe a
dialog – a book waiting, bidding its time.
The trick is to collect them all and construct
something. The challenge is to show up on the pages
Outside the window, day turns to dusk …
Copyright © Neerja Yadav