The beaches beckon to me with open stretches of sand and cool blue waters and kingfisher premium, widely known as the king of good times. The open road calls to the traveller inside of me and it is with great regret that I turn away saying maybe another day. There is a great need welling up inside me to look for escape. The world is soo soo beautiful, you want to touch every tree, pick up fish swimming in the meandering rivers and toss them back in with a laugh, ride madly through the fields of wheat and feel the stalks brushing your face...
I feel like a strong hurricane that rushes through its brief life with amazing fury, lifting things up, examining them, feeling them and then throwing them away. I wonder if my life will be brief... I'm not afraid of many things but of death I am terrified. I used to talk to a girl once who told me she didn't care if she lived or died,but I could never relate to that. For me my life is everything I am. Not being blessed by a mind that believes in the unseen, I have nothing to look forward to after death, 'only oblivion' as my father once quoted from James Thurber. As long as one is alive the sun can reflect off his eyes, he can see it rise and set, and he can feel its rays upon his skin, the life giving warmth that invigours the planet. But my dear reader, once he is dead 'he' will no longer be... only a mouldering corpse on which someday new life may grow but for the time being is but a sad remnant of what once ran, played, laughed and sang.
We are born, for sometime we are unaware of death, and aren't those the happiest years of our life? Ignorance is truly bliss when we are toddlers just learning to reach out to the huge world which we're told is round but looks flat as far as the eye can see. Just walking with a friend could make us laugh then, and the other end of the world was no further than the end of the street. Making robots, from electricity meters, robots that could catch the little red men that came out of the manholes at night, climbed the electricity pole and blinking, flew into the starry night.
Making up stories is the forte of little children. If only we could retain that ablity as young adults...there would be some fine new books in the stores. I remember when I got the glimse of the adjoining mountain covered with mists, while on my way back from school in Ranikhet I thought about the wisps that might be hiding within, with lanterns to lure travellers away. I thought about the bear that must be very warm under his fur, sitting cosily near a bush. Thought about the women collecting wood to burn at night, thought about the sky and how white it looked with black rolling down from behind the mountain, and for many moments I was lost because I felt as if I had seen it all before, or was it just because the mountanis evoke nostalgia in everyone? But I was very sure I had, and carefully I rearranged my thought, and up came the image of a brass statue. A female, with braided hair, standing on a pedestal, dressed in the manner of the old days holding a spade shaped tray. We had that statue at home and I went back and stared and stared but now the images were leaving me, receding back into the foggy, unknown depths of the unconcious and I never saw them again till today...
As I said this is a good summer for fun. A good summer for phantom thoughts. A good summer for remembering what we were like before. A good summer to get in touch with
"Good friends we have now,
good friends we've lost...
along the way..."
because you know folks we may come and go, but the sun will shine forever, and the stardust that we are made of will be used again and again for all eternity and hence we shall always be there, if not quite alive then at least part of the splendour of this world.
"I will live again...if only as a butterfly"
A bad translation of the hindi saying "Aadmi mar sakta hai par aatma amar hai"
but there is comfort in that thought....and even if I die, I will live again...if only as a wolf...Girls can come back as butterflies.
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