joie de l'écriture

Confessions about life

The cane chair suspended from a hook in the flaky ceiling perfectly adjusted its swings between cold brass railings on one side and a flawless white wall on the other. Its creak faced a silent death in time and was reduced to a mild squeak before the chair stood motionless almost as if captured in a frame. The euphony of the wind chimes that swayed to the tunes of the breezy interludes to a standstill silent evening added dramatic overtones. The moon scattered its silver rays liberally through puffs of cotton clouds that drifted lazily in the sky. The jingle of the last soap on the television playing in the background was subdued not so much by the distance of the balcony from the television set as much as it was by the aloofness that she could so easily let herself into. Her feet dangled from the chair like those of a little girl on a swing. She rubbed her palms and then embraced herself in their warmth. Her charcoal black eyes glistened like solitaires. Her loosely tied hair, the colour of cappuccino whipped her on her flawless wheatish skin. Her vibrant face was illuminated by the glow of the halogen on the street and by the exuberance of the new day that awaited her an hour from now. Fireflies orchestrated with the stars that twinkled and shimmered like the trail of a magic wand. It was a night filled with perfection. It was a night filled with the subtle undefined joy of being in harmony with oneself. It was a night of finding answers to thoughts that were never crystallized into questions and therefore could never be posed. Her tryst with destiny that had shown her the glitz and the glamour of the city of dreams was to end with the last swing of the pendulum which swayed with the same monotony that had greeted her when she first arrived after leaving the cosy comfort of her hamlet nested in the hinterlands of the Himalayans.

This city gave her the unbounded joy of living on the cusp of dreams and reality. From the sanguine bricked houses to a plush apartment in the heart of the city was a long journey of 700 days interspersed with a potpourri of human emotions that chiselled her very disposition; a disposition she had to leave back as excess baggage before returning home as it bore nothing more than a niggling relevance in a life she was about to embark upon; a life characterized by simplicity and genuineness. She had refused to admit to herself how she had let her life revolve around green bucks what was traditionally considered one of the seven vices in her village. How often had she been struck by the irony of chasing ducats when the folklore she grew up listening to spoke of the malignancy that creeps in on chasing materialistic pleasures! She had started living a life of contradictions and although she didn’t feel particularly dismayed by her decisions, the guilt of failing to see the relevance of her childhood teaching in the rat race slowly caught up on her. Had she outgrown those days and their sweet memories or was it that she was seeking justice in her actions too afraid to be proven wrong? She found herself alone as she stared at the loftiness of the mountains, the depth of the ocean, the vastness of the sky and the completeness in the rainbow stretched across it. Tomorrow she was to fit that last missing piece in the puzzle and complete the jigsaw of her life. It’s funny what you search for sometimes only lies within you!