Skip to main content

Xewali

I smell Xewali as I silently sneak in the misty evening.
October it is, the dusk settling in through timid flakes.
The dotted white and saffron streaks brighten the night sky.
The smell of xewali pierces the evening gloom
And take me in a roller coaster ride.
I see a girl with a missing tooth carefully bending to the ground
She picks xewalis each morning to adorn her grandma's hair
How happy, how carefree her life seems
A blackening cloud drip drops out of a weeping sky.
I get jolted back.
Back to the ground,
Back to this October gloom,
But, the smell of xewalis linger as I move back.

Comments

  1. Memories are a means of time travel. That's the only thing that defies all the physics to give us a ride to our past. And it doesn't carry any butterfly effect which makes our return journey to the present a safe one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very true. So, it's like being etched to life through memories. Time flies but memories remain.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading between the lines

"Read between the lines",  I heard our professor say. We were in midst of a Victorian text. I looked at her point blank. She had spoken about something which I had no clue about. "Ma'am,  would you please elaborate? ",  I tried framing this sentence in my mind but my introverted  self overpowered my inquisitive soul like everytime. I hopelessly waited for an explanation. Ma'am started explaining about how beyond the surface meaning of any written text, there lay a wide plethora of meaning which wasn't explicitly stated. She talked about finding a void between the written words and our imagination, that void which shapes our interpretation. That explanation opened doors to my perception of reading a text. It wasn't that I had never considered about the possibilities of meanings that lay coated in words until then, but, what perhaps I lacked was to look for that void where I questioned the layers of meaning, where I put myself in those layers of wo...

What do you want to be?

While I was in my 10th standard, almost everyone I met wanted to know what I wanted to be. This question always perplexed me. From the lens of a fifteen year kid who was not yet sure of the changes which awaited in the near future, this question gave me nightmares. I would constantly sit by the mirror and ask myself, what actually would be my answer. My friends always had fancy answers at their disposal. They would confidently chirp whenever any one asked about it. What amused me most was, my friend who had no inkling to study Biology wanted to be a doctor and another friend who detested the idea of even cooking noodles, wanted to be a chef! But whenever they spoke about their wishes, they would always sound confident. And there I was, fumbling for words which refused to escape my lips. It was not until I entered Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya to do my plus two, I found my voice. The teachers there have a different way of viewing life. For the first time, I no longer felt the classroom...

Life on wheels

The one thing that I always had dreamt of as a kid was to have a caravan that could take me to places.I always wanted a gypsy styled life. The idea itself mesmerized me to the extent that I kept dreaming of it the whole time not even realising how it was time which kept on rolling but I stood exactly at the same place, my dreams could never concretize. What was laughed at as a childish game was so important to me that I keep doodling it in my memory till now. I see a meadow, lush green with those small daffodils growing by, perhaps Wordsworth's daffodils! Then I see a girl, her wild unkept hair sailing in the gentle breeze. She has a smile which speaks of solitude, and her heart , well that's swelling with happiness as he looks at her caravan, after all she finally has a life on wheels. What more could she wish for, what more  can anyone wish for? It's not always that we get to live a life we conceived as a kid, life keeps on deciding our track. From what we liked doing...