Dear D,
For a long time, I couldn't open your pages, lest I fill them with unpleasant memories. I want your pages to be filled with hope and love. So that when I open you in my awaiting days, days when my feet feel like dragging in discomfort, you appear as pleasant memories, reminding me of days passed in joy and not just in hopelessness.
While I was a child I always aspired to have a house of my own since we lived in a rented one. Alongside this dream, I also nurtured a fancy of having my own garden too. I would observe my landlady plucking flowers as an offering during her prayers. The curve and swiftness of her dainty fingers while she collected them, accorded an aura to the entire activity. She would carry a small netted cane basket hanging from her left hand while plucking flowers from the other. I would sit near the barred windows lost in my own wonderland.
Years later when I was reading Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas, I was in my own beautiful house, happy with the thought that I need not go through the same trials for long. Speaking of the garden, I make do with my own small one. Cocooned in the small area of my balcony, the garden feels quite a happy place to be in.
When planting a new sapling or adding manure, the soiled hands have a surreal earthy experience that can only be lived, not explained. This tactile experience makes your senses alive to the small, delicate workings of nature. I particularly love the climbers, holding onto but still rising, lending a vintage look to the balcony. The blushed flowers of bougainvillea dangling from a branch remind me of days that can't be revisited again. They seem cheerful in the morning and gloomy in the afternoon sun.
Nature has its own way of healing your shortcomings and gaping bruises. It seems to own your silence, words that never took flight from your mouth, understand meanings which you never meant, a mirror to your true self-- whole and enough...
Jasmines were never more persuasive than the last night when the windy rain showered its long camouflaged love on them. In fulfillment, they danced the night away...
It's still raining outside, nature in its creative bloom. I want to pause this moment and get lost in this process. Meet you in a while...
"the arid land in my recess
drenched in the water of love
sing the melody of the piper
from the town of Hamelin afar"
By Nandin Sengupta
@metaphors_of_life
Another heartfelt entry in the diary. Yes, the diary was put away for a while, as we readers have observed during the last few days, not because there weren't things to pen down , but because of the narrator's decision to fill it with memories of a better time, something to look back on later in life. The description of the landlady and the narrator's dream to have her own house and a garden, a dream which later comes true of course, felt very personal, making us feel like we were a part of the narrator's life and have witnessed her journey through thick and thing.
The insightful words on nature and its healing prowess as one loses oneself in…