Results of a fruitless morning

Before starting this note I was stranded in a weird abyss. It was a calm quiet September morning. It started with the usual chirping of birds, swaying of leaves then soaked in the first golden hues of daylight. The surrounding serenity was in perfect sync with the little activities going all around. A city morning is always like this, a shade between orange and grey to be precise.

My early morning experiences are countably few. I was in school, the one which made us believe,

Early to bed early to rise
makes a man, healthy and wise.

Somehow I very vividly remember those mornings of my schooldays. Like every little girl I would flock to the bus-stop with my mother, neatly dressed in white socks and red ribbons. Looking at those younger times one thing that keeps coming back to me is the newness in which the world was moulded back then. There was an omnipresent surprise in the little big things I saw around me. Starting from a friend’s new pencil box to some palatable food packed in another’s lunch box, there were so many things to look at and stay engrossed. The new songs of an unknown bird which sat on my window, the mild breeze spreading a milder pink in the early hours of the day and the remaining traces of previous night’s fog would make every morning bathe in a mystic charm which I somehow learned to appreciate. As the dawn slowly gained its lustre, the big blue bus arrived to take me to the abode of knowledge I then loved dearly. With sleep being a dear friend to most children, the bus would then carry an uncanny silence. Since I was always a talker, instead of sleeping like most of the kids I made the most out of those journeys to school. With the fresh fragrance coming from garden flowers I would see my world, my city and the same known faces in a renewed amazement that filled an endless corner of my heart afresh, every morning. The marigolds blooming in the houses we crossed every day, the strange uncles who stacked newspapers on the rear of their cycle and myriad faces which initiated little by little the chores they had to do, became my morning herald. Every morning these familiar sceneries filled me with the belief that the world was in its own peaceful state, that I would go to school learn something new and have fun with my friends. Yet there was something new to this sameness, a new pet arriving at one of those houses or an unknown song being played in the ancient radio which my school-bus owned. I felt happy and the world seemed perfect. At times the silence all around was dispelled by talking to myself. Speaking of my old habits I think this is the one which I miss the most now. But childhood was a bliss we all have savoured. It gave us joy, laughter, seasons and what I mentioned a while ago; it gave us pocketful of surprises. The world was beautiful and innocent. Though it led us nowhere, it took us everywhere we could ever think of going.

With the years going by, this place of my growing up became less unknown, less unseen and sadly much less surprising. It is not the world, I think at times, but me instead, who changed too much, moving to queer latitudes, so far away from sweet surprises that even the most bizarre things stopped making their mark down my heart. As my school going days reached their fag end I realise how poor a student I have been all along. That I have forgotten my nursery lores was painful but the fact that I could hardly find those surprises made me ashamed. The world stays wonderful even now for little kids of tender age, just that the child in me was gone and the warm pleasant simplicities which filled her life were lost in more difficult translations put forward by time.

I am no poet who will make her growing up a brilliant chapter of shining epiphanies and delightful adventures. I grew up like every other child, seeing a lot and retaining only a little. Of the few capabilities I have mastered over in these years, the most important is the one to remember. The ability to hold on to translucent episodes dating back to times which have now turned tangerine is the only satisfying part of growing up, especially for someone like me, with no parallax angle attached to her existence.

The best part of childhood was the endless faith which I attached to miracles back then. All the stories I heard, all the poetries I read appeared true, keeping behind an indelible impression which belongs to my memories now. That good faith has evaporated somewhere in thin air and all the wonders I had invented with it have turned ochre by now. The deities do not speak anymore; Christmas seems a little less interesting after Santa came out of his veils. Even now I wish mother kept that truth about Christmas disclosed from me. It did hurt back then, to set my belief on something for years, like an impenetrable sheath, undisturbed by random breeze and then suddenly the cloak was removed as the faith was left to rot, naked beneath the sun. The poetries written in the soggy pages of my old diaries rhyme no more as many a musings gathered from a dead poet’s pen go in futility.

If it is thought that the surprises in a little girl’s life were only happy ones bringing in Turkish delights for her, it will be wrong. As much as she knew to be amazed in utter glee at the many instances which called for such expression, pain also had its share in it. Pain and bewilderment together made her adaptable to the harsh facets of life. There was learning in it and a lucid explanation of how to cope with things which fall on us uninvited. These lessons have rooted themselves in the little girl’s being, at depths she can possibly fathom. Every blow which life threw at her back then would keep her agape for a while and then slowly sink in leaving behind trails of further contemplation. The many facts of life which came before her that way were priceless and unforgettable. However in an effort to memorize these facts she let go the trouble of being surprised. Even now, when the face before her in the mirror looks older, she receives pain, a lot of it. However that feeling of an innovative recovery which came before, as she would get up from a pit every time, has now vanished. Everything has become too much poignant by now. There is no monotony to blame for this, just a missing sense of surprise and the healing touch of a discovery.

As these wandering thoughts came and went by on that unsuspecting morning, I suddenly realised how idly I have travelled by the old memoirs of childhood. The surrounding nature which was then beneath a veil of gentle vagueness in its beginning had become prominent by then. I was surprised to find myself in such an unbreakable trance for so long, forgetful of everything around me. Yes I was surprised to find an unsettling enigma in me with all these thoughts and after a long time I got back a little part of my childhood that morning, fruitless as it always was, yet very very fulfilling.