Looking Glass

                                  

“Thoughts come and disappear like waves in the ocean; one eager to take over the previous one. In this never-ending race of thoughts, the mind remains in a jumble of incomplete emotions and cognition.”

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I saw her peeping from the corner of the wall. She was a little girl with brown, curly hair and big, curious eyes. She must have heard the sound of my car and came running to check the latest arrival.

It was a warm breezy afternoon in a small, dusty town with a green cover around it. As it generally happens on warm afternoons, the town people were all inside their homes for their siesta after a rather elaborate lunch. I had to wait for them to finish their siesta to buy their famous blankets for my mother on her 70^th birthday.

I had to drive 150 kilometres to reach this place on a Sunday. I work 6 days a week and though the huge pay check more than makes up for it, I am always tired and sleep deprived. I have no social or personal life. Sunday is usually spent catching up some sleep or a few Sundays in a year, I visit my parents in the neighbouring town. I would have visited them more often but my mother’s cheerfulness and optimism irritated me. She was always in a deep sense of calm. She wasn’t always this way. She was a hustler. A fiercely competitive woman with eyes keenly set on her goals. She worked very hard and instilled competitiveness and hard work in her children too. She was very busy with her work but it wasn’t like she was a bad mother. In fact, she tried to over compensate her time away from us. She stretched herself far too much. She was always busy doing something when at home - either cooking something special for us, or growing new vegetables in the garden, or cleaning the house. She was like the busy river water. Being calm was not her thing.

This new carefree, joyous avatar of hers was beyond my comprehension. Not that I did not like it but it triggered me because that was how I wanted to be deep inside but was unable to be. May be she just made me feel incompetent in ways I have otherwise never felt in my so called successful life. If there is a skill that I am not good at, I work hard until I master it. But I wasn’t able to feel the joy and bliss that my mother seemed to be in and I just wanted to push my inability to do so in the dungeons of my mind. Hence, visits to them became increasingly infrequent.

I was reluctant to drive all this way for a blanket. I tried enticing her with all the other fancy things that I could buy for her birthday. But she was relentless. She wanted these blankets, which are not sold anywhere else but in this godforsaken town. She had once visited this place several years back to buy a blanket for her aunt who had wished for the same from her. Since then, she couldn’t stop talking of how wonderful the journey to getting these blankets was. But if they are so good, why don’t they sell their blankets elsewhere too. “You are not listening to me, my dear,” was her reply.

I sat on a stone bench in front of a small blue shop which had orange bougenvilla growing around the entrance. A jasmine tree grew next to it, spreading its sweet fragrance which the breeze was all too happy to carry around with it. The place was a living colourful dream with the houses painted in various strange yet beautiful patterns. Flowers of all different hues grew around these houses. For someone who came from a far off place of greys and browns, it took me a while to adjust to the barrage of colours I was suddenly exposed to. This, coupled with the heady fragrance of flowers and the warm afternoon breeze, was making me a little dizzy.

That’s when the little face appeared at the corner of the wall. We played peekaboo for a while before she finally trusted me to come from her place of hiding and chat with me. She threw a volley of questions at me. I could see that she liked to talk. From my name, age, address, my marital status to whether I have ever travelled to the moon and whether I knew that the trees have a secret language to talk to each other, she wanted to know it all.

Very soon we were talking about memories that I had long forgotten. About the first time I held my mother’s hand and walked to the school skipping with joy. About that one time when I saw the Milky Way for the first time when the power in the town went off. When I would hold the little red velvety insects on rainy afternoons on my way to the sports club. When I saw my first pet dog for the first time curled up inside a small carton.

The memories flowed incessantly. I felt like a bird on a tree branch chirping away to glory. If I am ever asked in my life whether I have experienced pure happiness, I know it would be this.

I am a workaholic. I have done nothing much in my life off late than work and get a fat pay check. I never even get to enjoy the money that I make. Of course, I live in a fancy apartment and drive a fancy car, eat good food and have someone to manage my house. But I don’t even enjoy these things anymore. The initial adrenaline rush I got from buying my house or driving my car has long gone. All days in my life look similar. It is difficult to tell one day from the other. It is work, eat, exercise and sleep in a never-ending cycle.

But sitting there with that child took me deep down to experience the joys that I had forgotten existed. Those corners which were untouched since decades were now being unraveled one by one and, for once, the control freak in me was happy to be led. I was in the middle of the ocean being caressed by soft waves. The cool water slowly seeping inside me and I became the ocean and the ocean became me. I could experience my existence in its entirety. The boundaries between me and the rest of the world were being dissolved.

That’s when I saw something remarkable happen. Patterns of all colours started to emerge and fly away from my heart. I saw closely and I saw grey sadness, red anger, green jealousy, purple pride drifting away from me towards the houses and getting stuck on them as patterns on their roofs and walls. This explained all their fantastic colourful motifs. 

Painting by Anirudh Sravan Pulipaka

I looked at her in disbelief but she smiled a knowing smile. This was clearly not her first time seeing this. Was it all a beautiful dream? Perhaps it was. Or maybe I am finally awake. Who knows? I think life is lived right where reality and dreams merge.

The little girl got down from my lap and ran away towards these floating patterns laughing gleefully. I looked at her with unbridled joy until she disappeared. I don’t know for how long I sat there and I might have fallen asleep too when I heard the sound of the shop door opening. Inside was a man who smiled at me and showed me the blankets. They looked nothing different from the ordinary blankets that can be bought from anywhere. I smiled and got one for my mother.

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“The mind sits still, like a deep ocean on a velvety night. The moon shines bright on the water, illuminating the calm waters which glow from deep inside. The gentle movement of the surface an indication of life and all the wonders it carries.”