Here I am

The silver dawn and the sound of birds, the cold floors and the creaking doors, the cool breeze and the smell of flowers, the dew covered grass and the wet soil. The moss faced walls, the cobwebs, the old huge trees, the dry and brittle tree barks, and the dry leaf smothered earth, the centipedes, the grasshoppers, the ladybugs, the touch- me- not plants.

There is more…

Silent, un tarred roads and the trees that lean into it, the narrow flowing streams and the tiny fishes, curled up snakes and sprinting mongoose, the fierce stray dogs and cats, the wells and the frogs, smiles and tears, games and laughter, genuine bonds and a lot of time.

I am tired, tired of trying to speak of things that I have hardly savored. I have got a glimpse of all that, sometime back, a quick little taste of it, before I was forced to retreat or rather, before I joined the others in forcing it to retreat. I never realized that I would grow up to miss all of those so much, so much that their absence would define me. I never thought that they would go extinct.

That was a dream. In reality, I live in chaos; wake up to the sound of vehicles honking, too busy with technology to take note of anything that doesn’t include technology. Live in the seventh storey of a seventeen storied building, away from the ground, away from life. From the balcony I see similar tall concrete buildings, busy roads, and somewhere in between a lone tree.

Some days I decide to go for a walk and so I step out of this place that I call home, go down and down to touch the ground, walk on the broken and unevenly cemented footpaths of busy roads, inhaling in a lot of vehicle smoke, avoiding the hungry gaze of starving stray dogs and greedy palms of beggars. I walk plugging in music to my ears and trying hard to ignore the honks of vehicles that intrude the music.

The other days I become one among those in the honking vehicles, battling for dear life in the crazy world of automobiles.

I see no grass, no trees, no grasshoppers, no dew, no un tarred roads, no birds, no streams, no wells, no frogs, no touch- me- not plants, no snakes, no mongoose and no smiles and games. I live somewhere else, where nobody knows why they exist, where technology is the supreme power, where life is a mere charade. I live in a country that is developing and here people make homes on top of other’s homes, here we cut down trees to make room for people, here we dig down deep into the earth to get some water to bathe in, here we have time for nothing, here we live and die worshipping technology.

I live in a country that has lost its grip, being beaten and bounced around by others, helplessly going further away from it, plunging into a state of insanity, struggling to find the lost track or finding a new deformed self.

Here I am losing myself in my lost country.