Legacy

Legacy. Our own personal inheritance from our predecessors. Isn`t it wonderful to have your own personal gift to avail when you enter this world? 

Imagine a proud father looking at his son showing traits of his own profession. Imagine a proud painter looking at his son dabbling with paint. Imagine a journalist looking at her daughter reading Communist Manifesto.

The gray haired, middle aged man sits on the pavement of the parking lot, looking, with weary eyes, at the other end of it, as still cars stand in rectangular patterns all around, where a kid is playing. 

Imagine a mother teaching her son for the first time to make chai. Imagine your father when he taught you how to ride a bike. Imagine, say, those moments, moments you may find in the hazy recollections of your memory, when your mother saw you draw the first letter of English language legibly. 

The look on his face was neither happy nor sad, it sort of transcended these basic emotions. He just was, looking at the kid play with a broom. The only thing palpable from his face, actually his eyes, was an acute sense of tiredness. 

Now imagine this, a sweeper seeing his kid, the light of his life, the apple of his eye, play with his broom. 

Hilltop stories 2

If I say eyecool, thousands of people around the world would inevitably imagine a long cylindrical orange white bottle with a bright white cap. It’s a normal thing for them. And if I say eye cool, they would also know what it is used for.
Psycho boy was sitting on the hill as usual.. Deep somewhere in his own mind, somewhere in the guts of his subconscious, when he habitually picked up the orange white bottle and undid the white cap. It was all very everyday for him. He knew these rituals like the back of his hand.
Or at least that's what psycho boy thought, squirming somewhere in the tunnels of his own mind.
The lighter was one of those kinds which gave a straight constant high temperature jet flame not the kind which give a lanky candle like flame.
So psycho boy picked up the orange white eyecool bottle and undid the bright white cap, or at least he thought he did.
The flame of the lighter was like an  orange arrow, going straight, piercing everything.
And if I say eye cool, then thousands of marijuana smokers around the world would also inevitably know that it’s an eye drop.

Dying dreams

"At night, I woke up shivering,
quivering, quirky dreams 
dreaming.
Salty sweat covered my body,
as i lay, lay dreaming of you,
and your death. 

The funeral procession,
an orthodox obsession,
was marked by your dead body
lying on a scarlet stretcher.
fetcher of which were four strong men. 

Your mother, wearing a dead pan expression,
the old broken lady as she is, was heard muttering,
'First my husband, now not my daughter! ' while those who came,
hogged with no bother. 

I remember clearly,
as if I wasn't dreaming, but only,
witnessing your scarlet death bed,
with you, like a pale wilted lotus,
warm and soft, wrapped in your,
white shroud. 

In the midst of all this I found, myself,
bitterly shedding tears and
filled with an acute sense of loss. 
And all hope had gone,
as I trudged through the funeral hall. 

Once outside, I lit a fag,
which from my lips sagged,
as I overheard an old couple say,
that you have gone to a better place.
Heaven, they said, is where you have gone,
but how could that be when,
your heaven and hell were beside me all along. 

As I drew a mournful drag,
from the fag, which still sagged,
a wave passed me through and though,
and I thought, what really could have become of you? 
'We break into a flock of pigeons upon our death '
I remember I had once said,
when we were sitting in that crack,
of that gigantic wall, of Cannaught Place. 
So could it be that you are a flock of pigeons now? Or maybe a colony of ants? A pride of lions, somewhere in japan?

But as the fag finished and I came back,
it made me feel hollow,
that you were dead. 
I could have dreamed more,
maybe to the point of
your coming back,
but I couldn't dream anymore,
the sense of loss was much to bear."
So, he woke up in cold sweat, and wrote,
what came to his head? 

A tree

Eulogizing a brook, Tennyson wrote, 'For men may come, and men may go, but I go on forever '. Same can be said of a tree, though the sense of motion is absent in this analogy.

Like that tree outside my grandmother's house, a tree sees the passing of generations, father to son, son to grandson and so on, even ages, like in the case of those long standing river-bank Banyan trees of Vrindawan where once a naughty Krishna made out with the fair bodied gopis. Yet a tree remains standing still, un -pompous, inconspicuous, fixed to its place, constantly pumping oxygen into the atmosphere.

I don’t clearly remember which tree it was, but what I remember is that it was tall and broad, climbable with big broad thick leaves which bled a white syrup on being broken. I remember it was right next to the main gate of the house and though its foliage wasn't very dense, it gave a pretty good shade.

The tree looked like a straw hat wearing china man and it was fun climbing it. It had a light grey trunk and branches and leaves of different shades of yellow and green. It was very easy to climb, in fact it seemed like the tree was ready to gather one in its lap.

Every time I went to my grandmother's house, it was a ritual for me to spend almost half of the waking hours somewhere in it. I read, dreamed, wrote, even tried to sleep on it, all because there was a sense of security and calm once you climbed the tree. Sitting six feet above the ground I felt safe and secure. It was like after so many years I was being pampered by someone again, by letting me climb in their lap. In that moment the tree was like my father as I saw him in my childhood, huge, strong, serious and invincible. Someone I could run to and find a safe refuge in, in troubled times, someone who would always be there, whether rain or snow, thunder or storm, no one, nothing could stop him from being there, cradling me, protecting me.

Also not absent was the fact that mamma gravity was not working so much on me. I felt free in a certain way, like I was ready to take flight or something. It was sitting on that tree at my grandmother's place, that I first saw life from above the normal vision level, sitting on it, I had a generalizing vision, a vision, a perspective like that of a hawk, say, flying so many miles above the ground, seeing everything small, petty, compartmentalized, like, say, even god, sitting somewhere in the sky, above our heads, spying and eavesdropping, to find the sinners and punish them.

And then one winter, when my grandparents were renovating the house, they cut the tree down. A light grey walkway leads to the house now, with no tree there, and on certain strange days I think I can sometimes spot a big broad yellow leaf in the garden next to the gate somewhere..

http://www.writerbabu.com/post/4226/a_tree/