home and about

I loved how your monsoons silently wept under solemn streetlights, unintrusive and beautiful. I loved how your winters gladdened the eye with their green coolness. And I loved the stark yellow beauty of your summers too, how a hundred palash flowers shamelessly bloomed like miniature flames under the sun’s scalding wrath. I loved your streets, lighting up the sun-dried land with a thousand liquid mirages. I loved your open skies, under which we wandered as happy children, uninterrupted and free. To me, you were my world, the only one I’d ever known.
But soon, I grew up and your narrow gullies could no longer contain the size of my dreams. In search of greener pastures, I traded your land-locked comfort for the open-ended allure of the Sea-City. In this bustling Capital, the sea churns like a monster unheeded and humbled by the high-rise aspirations and dreams of a million people. They don’t know where you exist. You are a non-descript speck, a faceless name in the oblivion that lies beyond this City. Here, where the sky is smothered by the silhouettes of skyscrapers, they don’t know your clear, moonlit nights. Here, where the smell of human perspiration fills the air, they don’t know your khus-scented summers. In this City, where the rains lash on furiously, they don’t know the gentle romance of your monsoons. You, to them, are a dusty ‘small town’ from where hundreds like me come here in search of better opportunities. I’m just another migrant churned out from your factory.
Yet, I look them in the eye and defend you. I stretch myself to outgrow their prejudice and they slowly acknowledge my existence as a person whose destiny isn’t sealed by the boundaries of a small hometown. I find my feet in this Metropolis, but they take me back to you. I return after years to find you changed. You were young and green when I left you. Now you’re graying. I wander around, lost in the maze of ‘under construction’ flyovers and malls. I search for traces of familiar intimacy, but you elude me with a vengeance, punishing me for leaving you behind. But finally, it rains - the same, soft, whispering downpour that brings me into your fold. I sit under a stranded Neem tree and watch the rain fall through bottle green leaves. You’re the only home I had. The home I left behind. The home I will never have again.