Prose

I am about to write what I am feeling right now, what I see, what I
hear, what I experience right now. I am sitting on a stool in a
south-facing room in a house where I stay, perhaps it can also be called
home. I can see the shadow of the grills of the window in front of
which I am sitting – alternate squares of bright sunlight and shadow
making a design on this very page of the diary that I am writing on.
Every time the nib of my pen moves to a sunlit square I see its shadow
and the shadow of my curled fingers. The mouth of the nib kisses its
shadow and I see words being formed on this page. As I move on to a dark
shadowed square I loose the shadows of the nib and my fingers. Are they
still there? It so, why can’t I see them? Can only a physicist explain
it through the dry scientific terms – umbra and penumbra? Or is it that I
can still see them but cant distinguish? Are we all shadows then,
distinguishable and indistinguishable at once? Does God see and wish to
see each one of us in light when we do something good; and when we do
something bad do we push ourselves in such shadowed squares where He
wishes to find us but we hide and keep ourselves away from Him?
Do these alternate squares of sunlight and shadow resemble the
alternate phases of happiness and sorrow in our Life? Is it in happiness
that we find the self, we get to believe that we live, that we exist?
Do we loose the self when we are sad and thus remain able no more to
distinguish it?
The sun is going down slowly in the south-western sky. Its winter but
not cold anymore. I find droplets of sweat on my forehead as the
sunrays bathe me in the warm light. As I see the sun shift in the sky I
find the squares getting tilted, they don’t look like squares anymore,
they have become in a mathematician’s jargon – rectangles and rhombuses.
Does it matter anyhow? It’s the same sunlight and the same shadow, its
just that the angle has changed. Things change, so do shadows and
lights, at every moment everything changes its configuration. Even the
most know, most familiar, most unchangeable things change. I change, you
change, we all do. Nothing is constant, nothing is eternal.
I feel a cold breeze from outside. It’s so pleasant. I feel my
forehead cooler than the rest of my skin; the breeze is making the pages
of my diary turn up and down. Every time the pages twist I see the
shapes of the squares change. Where I was expecting light I find
darkness and cant see the shadows of my fingers and the nib, and where I
was expecting a shadow, I find light. It’s just a breeze. Sometimes
some storms come in our life and change all our expectations, just like
this breeze. Isn’t it?
I look outside through the grills of the window. I see the small
garden. Beyond it is the boundary-wall which separates this house from
the rest of the world. I see green, I see brown, I see yellow, white and
all. In the sunlight the plants and shrubs look spectacular. So often
do I see these, have been for so long. I know, I have seen millions of
times how green plants look in sunlight. It’s nothing new. Still I love
to see it. The same breeze makes them sway. I can smell them, the odour
of the leaves, the dry stems, the grass, the sun-baked soil carried by
the breeze. How often have I seen the various shads of green and yellow,
green and brown in the leaves and stems, in the branches, on the soil –
from light to lighter to lightest, from deep to deeper to deepest! Yet I
see them again and I feel so good. Every light green shade makes me
think of a baby, and indeed those leaves are new-young-fresh, every
brown leaf resembles an old retired man whose has served enough, not on
the wane just like the sun above, and every dark green shade resembles
an old man, not retired yet but soon would be bade farewell. It’s not
that just these three shades are visible. There are thousands of shades
in the spectrum but no language is adequate enough to reflect that. Its
only the human mind which can recognize the subtle differences.
I even see little white moths and yellow butterflies flying around.
The taller plants cast their shadows on the smaller herbs, on the grass,
on the soil. Patches, not perfect squares, of sunlight and shadow find a
place in their daily lives too.
What I see, what I have written right now is nothing new, nothing
special, nothing morbid, nothing inspirational, it’s just a feeling, a
reflection of things around me in my mind.
Sometimes I guess, we should fall back on things we know, for in a
race to know the unknown, to discover and share something new, we often
leave unnoticed the old ones, the usual known familiar faces.
It all perhaps sounds silly and childish. W have advanced from
writing with pointed stones or metallic tools on cave-walls, from
writing on leaves, from writing on a paper with quill or various kinds
of pen to writing on screens using keypads or keyboards. Perhaps I would
also type this article as a blog or post in some website where one or a
few idiots like me would glance at once or even read this whole crap
and think again. I can also take a few anaps of the scenario just
described above. But how can I type the feeling which I had while
writing this piece? How can I shoot in the camera the warmth of the
Sunrays on this very page that I am writing upon. How can I show others
the breeze which cools my forehead, which makes the plants dance and
giggle, how can I capture in a frame the love and serenity of Nature
getting echoed in my heart?











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