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| Photo credit - Vijay Narayan |
The dusky scarlet of nightfall
dissolves into velvet inkiness and a distant star spangled heaven shimmers in
my eyes. The throbbing restlessness of the city withdraws. It slowly retreats
to someplace I don’t know. I can feel it relinquish its hold over the frantic;
chaotic; purposeful urgency we call life. Every living moment, each dying
second: trying to be a bit more. Feel a trifle more accomplished. Earn a little
more respect. God! to feel loved. Hurried and rapacious…I don’t know to an
extent of pointless necessity.
But in that deserted silence when
the time stands still, I let my heart succumb irrevocably to a numbing calm. The
dewy fragrance submerses my senses. The consummate darkness enshrouds my
existence until I know not where I end and the night begins. A lonesome moon
peeks through the silhouetted branches and its soothing silver is a promise of everything,
everything beautiful. I see the drifting clouds alight in the moon’s splendor
and I am free. I am free from the prying public intrusion. I am free from
judgment. I am invisible. I am me. It’s in the
dead of night that I feel alive.
A cool breeze carries the faraway
rumble of heavy-duty trucks. From someplace far off, maybe where the world ends
or from where it begins. I love this sound and I strain to hear its diminishing
drone. Just then a car passes on the adjoining street. Its front-lights play a
shifting pattern on the ceiling. And it agitates the gentle roulade of
thoughts. Up until now the slowly surging and receding waves were a dimmed cadenza.
But now you come crashing back.
And you shatter the sedate stillness
in despairing throes as your deep gruff voice fills me and every fiber of my
soul. I try to hold on to the fleeting glimpses from another life. Distorted,
amorphous and evanescent - it’s a psychedelic blend…Possibly because I have
buried you somewhere in forgotten alleyways, possibly because I have closed so
many doors to the past. Still it’s so strongly reminiscent of you, that
formless whirlwind of colors; heart wrenching and becalming at the same time. I
pine for your familiar touch …and I close my eyes for a moment, I am there.
As I wander past those cobbled runic
paths, your thoughts unfold from the deepest recesses. In a sightless anguish,
in that pitch black; I feel my way to you. From one melting memory to another, from
one breathless impression to another; I resurrect a heaven from embers. It’s in
the even darker night of your embrace I fall asleep in.
All this time, you are like the
night sky, so near but just out of reach. Are things in life so transient, so
meaningless? The pitiable forever hopeful, hopeless in me refuses to accept …I
don’t know…Maybe I was too proud. Maybe you were too prejudiced…or was it the
other way round? I don’t think it matters anymore… perhaps yes we are two
parallel universes, but I am not impossible to touch. Just so you know.
