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.
2 comments:
Transformation into birds is almost a recurring theme in your life! It's cool how your world seems to be governed as much by calm and clarity as by chaos and vagueness. The room seems almost exotic at first, but the sense of foreigness is, as usual, replaced by a feeling of recogonition by the time you transform into a bird. Quit worrying about the future so much or else you won't have much to do when you actually get there.And jeez, you not only find inspiration in loneliness but also the reverse.
Quaint
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