The burnt smell of jaggery over coconut savoury,
The hearth sending forth the aroma of pithas,
The sweet sour odour of masor tenga.
Jetuka dyed fair wrists of gabhorus
Dancing to the beats of dhuls and pepas.
The frail crisp sound of muga mekhelas swirling
Each time they bring home guests.
The sight of kopous in tamul gos.
Of brighter days and lesser gloom
The onset of Assamese new year.
Of feasts and blessings and endless laughter
Welcome home, it's bihu in my part of the world .
"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...
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