“Strangers passing in the
street
By chance two separate
glances meet
And I am you and what I see
is me”
Pinkfloyd has shown much insight while penning these lines down
in the legendary ‘Echoes’. Every time during my endless auto rides covering the
revolution between my home and university, I see them running before my eyes.
During these times the city appears very ruthless to me, none looks at another.
Once I remember crying my heart out while going to college after a heated
debacle with mother and none seemed to pay a heed, the hustle around went on
undisturbed. People around took me the way I was, dazed and shattered; and that
hardly bothered them. Indeed to them, I was what they saw me. Again on radiant
mornings my perked up self ends up finding a symphony in every trivial object
of the sordid metropolis, they dance along with me. There is an immense bliss
in forgetting, the world forgets yesterday and starts afresh its vicious cycle
with every turn round the sun. Flood to famine… birth to death…. the wind
blows, the flowers bloom and man grows. Yet the irony lies in the memories, it
breathes through the past, the past for which we consider our now to be a
‘present’, dear and prized. That night appeared to be like a regular one,
standing at the threshold of bifurcation, with one road leading to oblivion and
another leading to remembrance. But it stood senile right there as I entered
the wretched vehicle. The blue lights hovering over me created a mood
psychedelic enough, tending me to remember old pathos and forget primitive
vices. Doldrums descended through the winds taking a seat beside me. The breeze
started playing a merry game with my shadow wobbling it time and again. Amused
I was witnessing them in this zest, it being the one I and my lover play with
the sea of shadows surrounding us every passing day. In a while a reverie was
being weaved, of dreams coming to me and then going away. Dreams I believe are
transient on a usual estimate, yet they have an uncanny way of hurting us
through abstract hurls. They are like insolent beings who never elucidate their
actions, or like a nagging wild flower in your porch, growing on its own only
to wilt away with time. I have caught a bad habit of jaywalking recently,
during my endless romantic strolls with a person who tries to dream through my
eyes. The roads lead us to sunny Scotland farms where brilliant Chrysanthemums
sway beside Wordsworth’s lake along with the Daffodils, making us
relinquish the hearth and home here. But seated here in dark, I find winter
mist settling over the white abode with green windows, where the heart wishes
to flee. It was love’s valiant effort to levitate hopes so high. Then again
blued as I sat there, an image of loss received formation, showing old
friendships drifting away from me to distant lands of obscurity. Ripe bonds
being devastated when raised over the warp and woof of endless expectations.
Owing to its obstinate tendency, the dream has withered by then and it started
raining outside, in that eerie night of first spring. Erratic I find now, to
leave behind the musical cuckoo or first blossom amidst Sepia trees, and
instead write about an odd standalone disruption in the beauty, which made me
high. The opium I took in that night lingered for long. It made me forgive old
miseries scuffling on the way to remembrance and displayed from a brilliant
bioscope pictures of ancient revelry, which was lost in my myopic vision. The
rumination ceased finally, withering down the pungent complaints, as the
animated drizzle moistened my hair taking a flight in the gust all that while.
I did not bother to collect them back; instead I tried seeing the tunnel now,
at the end of which my brother stood with his good old smile and a glowing
beacon, waiting to take me home. I closed my eyes to see him, instead I heard
him calling my name as my lover occupied my sight singing a song of rain,
etching his heart through it. I smiled as I got down, waving the auto goodbye……
