by ARTOHUS
I hear the frantic calls
Of phantom memories
From a faraway world:
A world I called my home.
Where the sun peeped
Through the coconut tree leaves
Welcoming me to a new day;
While the mornings were spent
Watering the flowers in the garden with mother
As the blissful days of my childhood
Grazed leisurely in the peaceful pastures
Of my home.
The afternoons came with a strange solitariness
As a lull settled in the house,
Save for the occasional snores from grandma
Enjoying her afternoon siesta;
I reigned over my desolate kingdom
Riding the soaring steeds of imagination:
My mind drifting through the diverse worlds
Of Rusty1, Swami2 and Apu3.
And it was time for the monsoons
The looming clouds always filled me with melancholy
Of unfulfilled desires, of insurmountable distances,
That could only be satiated with the rains;
And when they came, the exhilarating drops
Purged me of my loneliness
Filling me with the rich ecstasy of rebirth
As I lay spent in the addictive arms of adolescence.
The slow burning of the incense
Brought with it the descending shadows of dusk
The dramatic decibels of daily soaps
Wrapped the evenings in anchols4 of domesticity;
While from faraway came flashes of tunes
Of Rabindrasangeet5 in some eerily seductive voice
The burning embers of which
Haunted me with fleeting memories of home.
- Rusty is a character from the novel, Rusty: A Boy From The Hills, written by Ruskin Bond.
- Swami is a character from the novel, Malgudi Days, written by R.K. Narayan.
- Apu is a character from the novel, Pather Panchali, written by the Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay.
- Anchol is a Bengali word for the part of the saree that rests on the shoulders and hangs at the back.
- Rabindrasangeet is a form of music from Bengal, sung as songs, written by Rabindranath Tagore.
