It was a late afternoon when I said to myself, “Nothing has changed much !” I made my way to a special place almost after 5 years. The apparent long gap seemed to have been slipped away very fast chasing things and moving on with the inscrutable con
cept called life.
The road was rough,dusty and crowded with pedestrians. Some branches of the large old trees had been cut down but their withered trunks were still standing the test of time. Old stalls had been shut down and small but new shops had taken their place. I came across very few known faces among the whole lot of strangers. They didn’t know me personally but still smiled when our eyes met, may be that’s something we human beings feel through intuition to have known each other at some point of time.
I walked through a narrow lane finding my way towards the last house in the row. The one which had been shut down long time back.It was not a surprise then to see people pause with curiosity and wonder what i was doing there. No sooner did I enter the front door than struck the nostalgia. The place belonged to my grandparents & I had spent many vacations there in the childhood. It was the place where i had learnt so many things for the first time, made so many friends and had loads of fun with the cousins. The house would always be filled with relatives and the people from neighbourhood chitchatting, playing around with kids and having a wonderful time in the late afternoon once done with the day’s work and the lunch. It was a perfect place for everyone to find happiness. But over a period of time all the people who had not only built the place but put a soul into it were gone. The elders transitioning from one life to another while youngsters busy coping up with the existing one.
Everything had changed except the bare walls showing signs of being weary. The moisture had made them frail. But they still supported life in different forms like spider-nets and small plants growing up from the gap between bricks. I sat down for some time thinking how things change over the time realizing value of people, mortality of life and how aspirations of future overtakes the past to make us forget it or at least take us far far away from it. Thinking all this was like trying to capture the essence of past through the reservoir of mixed feelings, but all I could manage to get was the slightly wet palms reflecting these fond memories which nevertheless were priceless.
(Feb 2011)
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