"Jahaan main jaati hoon wahi chale aate ho
Chori chori mere dil mein samaate ho
Ye toh batao ki tum
Mere kaun ho"
Ever had that feeling when a song reminds you of something else but you have no idea of the specifics? The reminiscence is incredibly strong, fully with goosebumps et al. And things like the sound of rain outside at half past midnight somehow manage to attenuate all of that. The feeling was so strong, the pull was so compelling, I just had to put it down. No amount of thinking is going to get me any closer to knowing what the context is. Maybe it’ll hit me some day when I’m walking about Panjim on a lazy Sunday afternoon, or when I’m riding to the SP college ground early morning for football.
As the darkness closed down upon him, the much talked about vivid flashes of memory started making their customary attack. The sunset on the half-made housing society, Brahmani kites riding the thermals and putting up quite a show for anyone who cared enough, the barges making their daily dough, people celebrating yet another goal in their daily futsal routine.
He wanted to end it all, to give up. He could see no reason, no rational thought behind continuing life as he knew it. He burnt quite a few gray cells in trying to figure out where it all went wrong, and then burnt a few more in realizing that nothing of much avail was to happen through that particular process. Sounds of a sisterly concern rang through his mind, but he was positive the world wouldn’t stop turning. He vaguely remembered childhood tales advocating perseverance, and discerned how trivially he’d let them go. Somehow, the distant memory of walking under a flyover, on his way back home, and clenching his fist in determination and vehicles screamed past him played over and over again. He thought of the many who’d take great pleasure at the consequences, those who’d day would be made. The cellphone in his pocket was a dead weight, pulling him further down.
It would be so marvelous letting go. Something new, the change he’d been waiting for. In difficult times too, there is change. And in change, there is a challenge. Completely oblivious to the rat-race in progress, about a hundred meters behind him, Daniel believed it was time to let go. Fate, although, had other plans. For that was when his cellphone buzzed with the delivery of a text message. The one liner caught him by the scruff of his neck, inches away from the abyss and dumped him back onto the cold hard floor of reality.
“Free Coffee?” the message had said.
He felt the warmth seeping in. The overwhelming darkness felt lighter, and the bad taste in his mouth seemed like it would go anytime soon. He saw beauty around him.
He was soon to realize that in times like those, he was a dent in the happy lives of those who are perfect. If underachiever was not that clichéd a word, he would have thought it. Cold as metal, with all the performing capability of a dodo on tranquilizers. A dampener of spirits. But at that moment, he was happy. There were a few things that could act like global anesthesia, even for a few moments. And free coffee was one of them.
There’s something about heights. It just takes the idea of being on a “higher plane than the rest of the world” to a completely new level! And when she was on her terrace with the diamond-like stars looking at her with that benevolent gaze, there was nowhere else she wished to be. The stars had always been special to her. She was called the lady with eyes as beautiful as stars. That evening on the terrace, she could let her thoughts run completely astray, with nothing to bring them back to life. Her thoughts could reach out to all the infinite spaces she could see above her, her thoughts could fly!
She spanned her vision across the sky and saw every star that twinkled up above. Each one of them had its own staggering beauty. She had never imagined why the sky was so remarkable to her, but it was. The moon stood righteously in its place, ceaselessly moving towards the horizon. The same journey every day, the same purpose forever, that unending strife. She wondered about the journeys of life.
Why was the human race, she mused, so fascinated with the sky? So fascinated with that dark mist studded with gemstones of unspeakable beauty? Why so many before her times had spent their lifetimes looking at the sky, trying to find meaning out of it? Something she’d heard about the human tendency of being inquisitive. Some conversation she’d had in the past. Something about wanting to know more than what we do already, all the time. The thoughts swirled through her head, and the very idea of that fog gave her immense happiness. If this is what being high felt like, then she wanted to look at the sky forever. She saw one of the stars winking down upon her and she looked away, with a slender grin.
Looking into the depths of space, she knew she wasn’t the first one to look into its profundities and be in awe of its beauties. She knew how much it meant to her ancestors. It was those very stars that had not just stood as the immortal markers of direction to the ones lost at sea, but as a sign of hope to many a writer who lost his source of inspiration. She pictured the generations before her staring into that very sky, those very massive bodies giving out that very light, imagining how it all came to be, imagining how much of the universe there is to understand, imagining how much beauty there is in the world.
“There’s just WAY too much beauty to be unhappy!”, she wondered aloud. She realized how the advents in physics had come to change the opinion of the world about the sky. How, for some, the sky was an object of study to implement mathematical equations. For most, the sky was just a hundred and eighty degrees of a blind spot. For few in every generation, however, the sky was obdurate beauty. An ideology which beings of the earth could never reach, but always strived to. She felt the happiness inside her on so many thoughts of beauty revolving around her together.
She wanted the happiness to linger. She wanted to be happy. Forever!
