When in July, and after that

Dear lover,

I wanted to share a queer experience I have been having lately. It is an experience indeed, novel in kind, something that will rarely happen to me or anybody else. I have been feeling a lot more than usual these days.

It is difficult to span these happenings within a framework of time. But if I am to give you an estimate I'd say it started by the end of July. Well, when in July a lot happens to me and this time I had you to rejoice with. The idea of being born in that month and then to have this wonderful life which in turn has you makes me beam up and feel grateful to the deities if there are any. With the rains and the cloudy sky July always brings stories to me, stories which only i can hear and this very thought makes me feel gifted, enchanted. But July nights are difficult. The redness in sky after a heavy shower reminds me of tired eyes draining out their own grief due to loss, despair and a sadness only I know. What has perished and rotten and turned to ash will never rise up, I understand; then again it is the empty space inside which rattles the most and the loudest of all that I am able to hear. In short July makes me see much more than the other months. It has always been this way. This time I have had my fair share of happiness. The evenings I spent with you were romantic. They have made me grow and bloom as well. I have lived the best I know as with you I have gained a certainty that I can do it. Thus between little tears and trembling laughter I have drifted and swayed.

Before I proceed, I'd like to mention another thing. If I can remember some faint excerpts of a previous conversation with you, I suppose I have mentioned my longing for travels there. To be honest the desires were not exactly for innocent roaming around-s. They were more similar to a feeling of homelessness stirred from within by an intolerable restlessness. As if I was summoned during this time of the year, by friends living far away, by faces whom I have not met but who are seemingly important. In fact the thought brought with it an invite to conjectures in which I was required. Maybe it is a delirium of a puerile, imaginative mind which has wished to wander lonely for a long long time. But I have not been that troublesome to wake up one morning and slip away from everything I was a part of. A sense of responsibility, a fear of unsurity and an array of known faces have always dragged me away from the door. Then again as Rushdie once correctly wrote,                                          

~"Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd."~

I have always tried to find and make meaning out of everything beneath the sun. At times it appears like a fun game but always it is not that easy, that probable, that predictable to make inferences. if journey to conquer vices and voices would lead me to darker alleys of hapless soul searching and indifferent junctures of a previously decided destiny, I will appear to be nothing but imbecile. Thus travel has always lived at bay, far from approachable vicinity.

With travel gone, vision becomes my stronger sense. This, coupled with an inner sensibility, has tried to reduce my zeal for running away to more possible visits, brief and mute to frivolous desires but sure to provide a latent realization. And these realizations make the real journey from the zenith of ecstasy to deeper chasms of despondence. Faith has always been my stronghold. The faith in good, the faith in friends, the faith to rise from a fall and a faith to win everything I have ever wanted; my faith is indisputable. Probably that is a cause for me getting hurt frequently. And on this note I'd go back to what I started writing. 

I have been feeling a lot more than usual these days. Little things plunge me down to myriad realms of an endless blue. That little child who was turned down while she was begging for alms, her sad eyes are imprinted in my mind since then. That sight of her, standing timidly with all the humility of world and a promise to demand the slightest share of my penny, it not only saddens me but keeps me awake. The knowledge that my old country home is falling down constantly pains some part of my being now carrying a huge burden of remembrance. How surprising I find that even its distant existence mattered so much to me unknowingly and now that standing at its doors once again has a shadow of impossibility over it, I cannot be any less heartbroken. Just days ago my neighbor lost her unborn child while another one is about to arrive in my own family. The variety of events along with the extremities of antonyms make me stand befuddled as life moves on. Bemused and not knowing what to do I turn to you. The light in your eyes gives the tacit indication that I should do what I am good at, I should write. This has perhaps been my most liberating experience of writing. The dreamer I am, the little thoughts brought in many a word with itself, from Rushdie to my own. But with the 'dimming of the day' everything seems to have settled down. The vast pasture before my sight has become befitting to all the opposites which exist. And with the many colors of life, death and merry, the absurd dreams and vague ideas become brighter and more realistic.

Yours truly