In class nine, I heard Simon and Garfunkel for the first time. The song I heard was called Homeward Bound. “Every day’s an endless dream of cigarettes and magazines. Each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories, and every stranger’s face I see reminds me that I long to be homeward bound.”
How can you long to be homeward bound when you are in your room, a room that is out of range of the rest of your residence, and you are alone and free? I figure that I want to relate to the song. Maybe that is why I manufacture a make-believe feeling of homelessness that helps me blend with the song, close my eyes, and become the song.
“Home, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me.”
…silently for me.
A little throb, and a drop of melody that falls on you softly, tentatively. Then the crowd breaks into a cheer, and I stop being a song.
My room has a personality of its own; it never really listens to me. Entangled earphones appear on the bed where I never kept them. Books jump to the floor when they no longer like the table. Clothes slide down (and up) the clothes’ line. The mirror is unwashed, a bottle lies empty and yellow on the floor, and the coffee mug on the window sill has a curious pair of ants on its rim, looking down into the dark abyss formed by the dregs of yester-nights drink. Perhaps they are debating on who should go down first.
My room is wet, stale and sad. A bit like me, I suppose.
The only wall of the room that is unblemished by switchboards has a painting hung on it. In the room of my dreams, there is a fireplace, a hearthrug and a piano, and paintings of the same kind; not that I would leave this sad, stale room for the dream one. The girl in Ravi Verma’s painting stares wearily and calmly ahead. Her dress is shabby, she has a broomstick in her hand, she could very well be a maid, but she looks so alone that I can’t imagine there being anyone else in the house, whom she might work for. Tachhara, she is smoking a pipe and languishing on a seat with her feet on tigerskin.
Who can she be?
On days like this, I am a bit of what she is. I have work but I still languish, I am calm and don’t care much whether I am happy or sad. Too lazy to create, too tame to destroy, I stare fixedly at that one drop of rain on the tip of a dry supuri leaf, waiting for it to fall. Why can’t I turn into the crow of a crow? Or a dove? I’d jump from wet branch to dry branch to wet branch and jump and jump and be lonely. And call and call till I got an answer from the faraway talgaachh, then fly to the talgaach and find him gone.
Sitting on the black wire, I find it wet and slippery. I get the feeling that I’ll fall but don’t, rocking to and fro instead. It sends a nice giggly shiver through my bones. I fly back in time and land on the lamppost beside a coffee house, many years ago, watching a tram drag along, a bus trailing off a curvy ball of smoke, fearing for my life. Then I stop being a bird.
I fear for my life. Often, when I’m by myself in my room I think of how it would be to live alone when I’m thirty, a rich woman with an equally big room, a careless woman with an equally untidy room, a woman with a room and no home. When I come out of the bath and stand beside the window, a sudden gush of wind breathes through me, I live one moment of inspiration, of wanting to make a difference, doing something new.
The moment ripples away like a soft blow on the face of water. I take out my law books, my highlighter, my backlog list, and start falling asleep.
