I see the clouds picking up our notes to feel our youth
in our freshly discovered voices in dark open evenings.
All the boys/ friends that made my late teens, as we sang for the
fifties and sixties and seventies, in the nineteen eighties
I thought our picnics were a laughter riot, when the beaches
of suburban Mumbai were still sort of beaches. We squandered
discourse, mostly thinking we knew everything! I came home to
the serendipity of Mum, Dad and sisters, full of the aloneness
from being with friends, and keen to surround myself in a more authentic
solitude and love. Mother was strong and so, was she ever-so energetic in her
dedication. Dad was so solid and resourceful. Sisters, themselves, were marking
themselves to be the sturdy Viragoes they were potent to be! I, myself, was stumbling
into the remarkable blind insight that was meant for me! Yes, life was challenged in
discoveries and the pain that it could be very difficult, and the continual incidence
of brother’s delinquency giving all of us so much grief. I knew not the steps I
took or the vagaries of life like an innocent knocking at various doors
not knowing which door I wanted to knock on, when most of my
friends seemed all so certain of direction! Mum and Dad always exemplified to
us the idea that aspiration never supersedes necessity, but true
aspiration need not be a crucifix of over-ambition, even in their simple wise
innocence. Me and my siblings found a secluded but non-blazing pathway in our youths.
I couldn’t think of success, or fame, or fortune as my adulthood became
much too gravitas in the semblance of a silent, secret, imposing, overwhelming
duty that was becoming apparent, though not all too obvious. I was always a
warrior-child even when a new country beckoned and those around me thought
I had lost my bearings like Don Quixote and his hallucinatory windmills. And I
held my ground and convictions, in the wilderness of enveloping rejection, hate, retribution
and impoverishment. Was I angry but restrained, reckless but patient, daring but
humble, both, somehow self-preserving and selfless. I think of walking on the shores of time
where realisations come like beautiful fairies and hobgoblins, telling me, I was always right
though sometimes precariously self-doubting. And I tell the ambience of the spirits that
reassure me even as I feel like a valiant soliloquy in a museum that Mum and Dad kept
with much care and their priceless objets d’arts that I have learnt to reflect all my ideals in. I ask Mum,
did I step outside the line all too often? And she says, son, there are no aberrations in the
virtue of selfless duty. And Dad waves out to me concomitantly from the arc of the rainbow,
as if to tell me to take pride in all that I worked so hard for and, for which, I gave my utter all!!!
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