love and time..

Love and time

The warm smell of coffee travels up my nostrils and my vision clears, as does my thinking. The picture frame of grass and green leaves that I just left behind at the open window brings comfort: I can feel the soft touch of the leaves against each other, murmuring, whispering, as the wind flows past them gracefully like a ballet dancer in a slow, moving poetic ecstasy. I wanted to hold all the beauty around me, to curl my fingers around the edges and gather it all in the inside of my palm…..while memories floated fast, some long forgotten, some quivering in a dream-state, struggling to come out of their soft casings into freedom.

I remember myself as a twelve-year-old girl mesmerized by the ravaging wind outside, that cut down trees and blocked pathways, scattering rain just before the storm arrived in its full rage. I remember I was shocked, mesmerized, seduced by this stark, absolute power of nature and the way everything else would bow before it. I loved, during that time, red earth-dry and also wet with rain, the wind in the trees at night, the sight of the empty street on both sides of which the small shadowy houses slept peacefully at night. And also the stars in the sky…so still, so benign, as if looking down kindly at the beautiful scene below. And there I would be, looking at everything and wondering at it all…terribly in love with it., as if I would find some clue to an infinite treasure if I kept looking. all around me, well enough.

And now, so many years later, suddenly tonight by the window, the memory of that old force came back to me in the middle of so much coffee and conversation struggling to overtake each other in the sunconscious. I wonder if I have missed many times already, the sound of such a memory which might have come knocking by, drowned by the ever-present conversations within me, and without too.Nevetheless, its is a delicious, wonderful feeling-this putting the pen to paper, the feel of starchy paper beneath my fingers, the movement of the pen on its smooth planes, as if with a life of its own…

I wonder if this silent euphoria in my mind is a result of a thirst quenched after so long a time, or was it always there, crouching just outside the perimeter of the seen and the heard.

The open window has always been a comforting sight, a reminder of many things…tonight, it is a reminder of dreams ,of happiness, of exciting knowledge just round the corner, of childhood, of trees, stones and leaves .And of infinite happiness.

Once upon a time..

Waiting endlessly at the end of the sunrise to see what lies next, the field rat moves among the sheaves of grain, picks nimbly at an ear of corn and gathers its little families into their rat hole homes; the birds in the sky make their way home, threading through the telephone wires, watertanks and the gathering gloom of the evening.

Down below on the road, the fresh tire-tracks made by a vehicle on the road, loses its shape at the heel of the boot when a fat drop of rain falls and scatters the dust around…making it look like a small volcano. Last night in the rain, the small sparrow had found its nest in the winter-dry tree with small dusty leaves clinging limply.

The field rat is now scurrying over right this very spot, returning from the sojourn it makes every evening to the other side of the road where the small cottages have been built and are home to the old man, the frail woman, along with the girl with the round eyes and the little boy with the perpetually runny nose. The radio blares in one of the other huts and slowly , one after the other, small, flickering lights are lit in the evening gloom, to usher in the delicious, wind-sharp, cold-heel night.A flame dances in the wind, and stands still another time and slowly, the insects of the night, small and winged,hear the air crackle around them in their mud-hole beds that they creep into during the corners of the day….slowly, as if in a trance, they move-fluttering, searching for that fire that will warm,singe,light up, destroy,burn,excite, color, blind, transform.

What is the moment that gets caught amid their silky wings when they venture too close, too many times, until a gentle lick of the flame embraces them and transforms them into notes that lend to the music of the night-for that night, giving themselves to the slow perfection of that moment which crawls into the morning…what of tomorrow?

gibberish of a moment

Finding the first word among a string of others that will follow appears to be the hardest thing. How about starting with the small, absolute rings of waterwaves on a pond, that a fresh wind brings in now and then or the loving wings that dip its edges delicately into the water in a graceful motion before the little bird flitters away from the water upwards to the sky again…

I often feel that the ‘pelican’ is a very delicate word that can drift in between the mossy waters, shivering uncertainly on whether to endow its entire meaning into the flowing, moving spirit of a bird or into something else, something sinewy, beautiful, small or big.

The child of the jungle would easily be able to swoop from one branch to another, clinging at the gnarled root hanging down over the swampy waters before it embraces some cool, round, covered comfort. (Would it understand the meaning, the taste, the slow melting-in-the-tongue quality of the pelican I wonder…faraway, mysterious, yet near - almost achievable; would it feel the tingling sensations that begin to rush from head to toe but stop somewhere down the bridge of the nose or the glide of the fingers.)

It is in this world that you play within the fateful vapour-rising waters and skies…peep outside the window and it promises to be a rainy day, fresh cleaned from recent rains-rainwashed skies, limbs achingly tired, the imagination painting pictures that overtake the eagle in mid-flight and give to it an other-worldly beauty that the bird had no way of knowing…the tiger’s claw, the jungle’s smell,little mowglie’s shout..all intertwine to complete this reality.