By Debarati Dutta
I was seventeen and a day old when the unrest became devouring,
At the next dawn, I came to your courtyard and bade you farewell. Unspoken. I wished you to be in my arms. For the last time. I wish!!
Then I became so many things together. Some called me an immigrant. Few mocked me as a refugee.
'Gypsy' too was acclaimed by some.
But I was a traveller.
The unrest borders. History shed blood.
The war cries re-wrote geographies.
The pain was inevitable. Loving it was grace.
Lost lives, trembled livelihoods, shuddering memories, terrified eyes told 'stories' to be covered by writers, poets, and media of then and now.
The peninsular region reared me up, weathering through the darkest days, I steeled. The high and low ranges, amidst the tides of the tempest I searched for you. Sweat-dripping hours, days, months, and years went passed by.
Fortune looked up reluctantly. I owned a house but didn't earn a home. I managed a family but didn't move their hearts.
From the reefs, shores, mountains, plateaus, and plains to temples, mosques, or churches I searched for you.
I searched you in every morsel I ever had, in every alms, I did give away, in every eye I ever looked into, or in every breath, I breathed away.
I was grateful, yearning, sorrowful, and tired after every sunset.
Sunrises were hopes. They were bright and bleak.
The flakes of snow turned to the fragrant conquest of the spring. My search went on. My courtyard now was leaped in frivolous wars by little feet who played with my greying hair and kissed my weak cheeks.
Inevitability smiled harshly. I knew I had less time.
With only some sinew left I embarked on the last journey as a traveller. Memory lane directed me to your home.
The ancestral root of yours. Of mine too.
The courtyard where we played in adolescence.
The abandoned, dilapidated leftovers of our happiest custodian didn't dishearten me. I was breathing your presence everywhere.
At night time, jasmine flowers bloom and decorate the earth.
I adorned you with them in the yesteryears.
Then draped in a soft warm shade of life you smiled at me from afar.
The weak hands were wrinkled not with age but with the un-abandoned search. The final touch took away the weary years in moments. I found a home. I found my memoir.
My memory palace. You.
By Debarati Dutta
Comentarios