At the dawn of my awakening, this thought appeared from the horizon beyond night. Of all the spirited friends we have or will ever have, only one stands out and stays true to its virtue. Loneliness, I wonder, has been integral to each one of our lives. And no matter how much we try to cover it with denial, the truth is that we are all fond of it, in our own crooked ways. We like to be left lonely, at some time or the other, from the plethora of things with little or no meaning, from the many relations that stay with us just for the sake of staying. Truth is we would rather be lonely on a night before fresh rains, or on a winter afternoon that can be well spent peeling off oranges beneath the sun than be encapsulated by a surplus of noise-like people saying noise-like words which get involuntarily discarded. And even for those who have been gifted with less meaninglessness, even for them, loneliness gives that vital excuse, that opportunity of being sad, only to get back to those whose absence have left them so.

In the end, there is only little we can do or gain without loneliness.

Weekends and homesickness

A man riding his cycle passed by me making a loosely curved pattern on the concrete. The sky has no hint of the sunset orange even when it is almost six by my watch. I have been walking through these roads for the past one month now. Roads of a new city, with new trees and a new air all around. The newness here is continuous and spreads over every place I see. The buildings, the unusually tall pillars, the policeman standing on the pedestal placed at the centre of the Chauraha, the purple bougainvillea, everything was moulded in this newness. Newness that was apparently new but actually empty, newness that took only a few days to be explored, and then it was all the same.

I have never been away from my mother. For twenty years we have lived together in a circle having a certain small radius around which the seasons changed from summer to winter and then summer again and inside it we kept growing in frequent changes complemented by periods of extensive sameness. And in the twenty first year of life I have come out of that circle and rushed outside along one of its tangents. So if one asks " What was the colour of twenty one years that we spent together and apart?" I'd say the colour of joy, the colour of sorrow, the colour of desolation, the colour of reconciliation. Twenty one years went by with twenty one different colours, each coming out of a faucet and spreading far and wide till the eyes can stretch. That is where you and I have met Mother, one place after another, in twenty one years.

Kanpur and Kolkata have between them a finite number of differences. But they are distinct.
Back in home there was a plenitude of people, noise and rain. Also there was an abundance of vehicle on the streets. There was this urgency behind travel; everybody had a purpose behind coming out of home, a definite destination full of opportunities that was to be reached in minimum possible time. Regardless of sunshine, rain or moon I have seen series of cars lined down the street, yellow cabs and steel coloured buses running and running far away. Here the travel seems much more random and even though destination was specified for each one of us living here, we could reach it in self-determined pace. Travel here is self-induced and slow, carried out by cycles or occasional walks.
Back in home even work had in itself a constant velocity by which it was driven forward, towards completion. Work there was monotonous and tiring, same old, same old. Over here it often feels like a journey through knowing, the allusions of a new idea, a new achievement encircles it. Work here allows digression into hobbies and other allowable leisure. Back home these activities would usually come at the cost of important work getting potentially delayed and piled up. Over here work floats like a rudderless ship and even after considerable procrastination it always reaches the shore.

Once he has moved away from that usual place where he belongs, one can realize how much space of our quotidian life is occupied by the bonds and camaraderie whose presence have been taken for granted. Now that I am in a foreign land that suffers from an acute scarcity of known faces, these extensive slots of loneliness have come up to the surface. One day, as I was walking back to my room after calling it a day, I heard this noise weeping in the wind. This was the noise developed from the lack of noise, from the empty holes that now remain in place of all that I have left behind. The wind here is not frequent. It hardly blows and when it does there exists the feeling of a queer weight. It is the weight of an insipid sadness and remorse which result from a change that has now lost its newness.

I am no wayfarer or romantic who finds a part of his own reflected in every new place he arrives. The dry winds, the steaming heat and the artificial fountains have further dried up. It is raining in my city. Like every year the rains have brought a maddening west wind and fresh mangoes. What good can newness really bring when one realizes how many stories of his old place are being ignorantly discarded? All I want now are the old parts of my old life assimilated together to make me all that I was, before.

On the other hand, an epiphany came to mollify the cacophonous pain which reverberates within the wind in the void. The virtue of loneliness does not lie in manifesting how deep-rooted were the things that have gone missing. In fact it shows us the strength we have in us to strive through the present with a pocketful of hope; hope that pulls us forward from how we are now to how we once were, intact and complete.

I hope someday it will rain here.

To Jeba, my best friend and the most beautiful girl I have ever met :)

What was the colour of the ten years that we spent together and apart? The colour of joy, the colour of sorrow, the colour of desolation, the colour of reconciliation. Ten years went by with ten different colours, each coming out of a faucet and spreading far and wide till the eyes can stretch.
That is where you and I have met, one place after another, in ten years.
As I laid the bridge over troubled waters