Home bound and beyond

The light breeze ruffles the orange creped taffeta curtains as the curling steam from the hot cup of tea follows the trail of the breeze. It was an unusual Saturday, the kind which carries the essence of a lazy Sunday. The never ending flow of tea, the feeling of lethargy emanating even from inanimate objects and the general afternoon siesta that is alluring. Nothing that can surprise anyone today. Life is placid yet content. But time and the excess of it sends us off to a spiraling emotional retrospective temperament.

Just a week back the journey to home or rather the place I call home. Home seems to be a disparaging reality now. Where is home anyway? The place I was born in, grew up in seems so far removed to the place I’ve come back to. The rose tinted sunny memories seem to me to be figment of my optimistic imagination. Or maybe I’ve become inalienably cynical. Maybe it was always like this and I staunchly refused to see it. My perception was always a matter of my conditional will anyway. The warm fuzzy feeling that home induces is replaced by the inexplicable sadness of facing a reality that doesn’t leave a sweet taste of reminiscence behind.

The train rattled homeward bound. The excitement palpable as familiarity crept in. I couldn’t sit still as soon as I saw the old battered yellow board announcing the station of Srirampur (Assam) in thick black letters. The station passed in a whiz as the exclusive Rajdhani deigns to stop at a few stations. Suddenly the exclusivity doesn’t seem so comforting. The safety ascribed to such exclusivity seemed stifling and unnecessary. All those exhilarating train journeys that I grew up reading felt unreal. I always wanted to see it, taste it, feel it and write a firsthand account of it. But I’m left with fragments of thoughts of how things would be rather than how things are because the thick glass shields and the strong iron doors are built for the comfort and security of yours truly. Because you can look out but they can’t look in.

The past twenty four hours in the jostling train was spent either in stretching in my supremely comfortable lower berth gazing away into nothingness or trying to accommodate my sister and her never-ending chatter. Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” lies on my lap but even the tautness of emotions during war cannot evince my interest away from the vast green fields dotted sparsely with cattle and a few workmen toiling in the evening sun. Not one of them turn their heads to the approaching train. For them it’s routine but for me it was a childlike fascination. Hemingway lost to reality.

The concrete structures and their sudden appearance tells the tale of the city I belong to. The sad part is it is not a happy story. The euphoria about last night’s Supermoon in the dark abyss outside the little yellow circle of light from the reading light that the railways had so thoughtfully provided and the soulful voice that broke the quietness of daybreak in some interior village of Bihar as they welcomed the new day by the morning prayers of health and prosperity cut through your skin and pierced some unknown recess of my emotions where it cradled and warmed my otherwise indifferent heart. But the euphoria is replaced with a sense of un-belongingness. The slums as we enter the city is like a minuscule insect that pierces my skin and starts a random journey underneath it.

My sister sees my look of disbelief and unable to curb her maternal-elder-sister tendencies, puts a soothing arm on my shoulder and gently chides me to look away. The swamped houses that have six-seven members living together, the odd child playing in the blackened mud with a trail of flies buzzing irritably around him as he tries to nonchalantly adjust to their continual interference, the husband pouring cold water in one swift movement all over him from the red bucket with the broken handle in an attempt to what we call a bath but the surrounding flies and garbage rolled in colourful plastic bags of where the multitude of variety is discernible left me with the distinct feeling that the bathing the man undertakes will always remain incomplete.

I tried to shrug off the intense disappointment I felt as the train drew to a halt. Consciously replacing each distasteful picture in my memory with those of home, my bookshelf which I would invariably find dusty, my childhood bed where Ma would pile up clothes to be given for ironing, the scent of incense sticks wafting from the Temple, the smell of Jac Olivol that is intrinsically linked to Deta and childhood memories of bygone winters, I alighted from the train.

After one week, the rain swept away the pretenses of normalcy that fell like a house of cards. All I’m left with is my cup of tea which has turned cold and the sound of pen scratching on the surface of paper and of course the disillusionment with Hemingway.