I have always dreaded this moment ever since I first left home to work and then when I was supposedly married away. Let me admit this, I am by nature extremely possessive about my things - be it my clothes, books, souvenirs or gifts collected over a long time, greeting cards, my relationships, my dreams etc etc. Over a period of time and in the interest of world peace, I have trained myself to endure the pain of parting with some of them at certain critical junctures in life.
'My old room' was a touchy topic anyways so I started in a grumpy mood to clear the ‘mess’. What I had not prepared for was the unexpected delight that the next few hours would give me when little little things from the past started to tumble out of my shelves and bed-side tables and from even under my mattress - well, don't get any ideas now; I had this habit of storing posters of my teenage icons under the mattress as I wasn't permitted to put them on the wall for reasons known to my parents then, some of which I appreciate now!
I felt like an archeologist unearthing precious forgotten history from an excavation site. One by one, the buried treasures resurfaced.
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| With Amma - sweet memories |
The cache included old photographs, letters & cards from ex-friends, a verse penned by my grandmother herself and gifted to me during her last years, childhood diaries, scribbles and poems, the one and only card that M ever gave me during our betrothed phase, the white kurta which I bought from Bangalore for him and we thought is lost forever, photographs from my school and college days and of my initial days in Chennai, Gibran’s love letters, Vivekananda’s speeches, Tagore’s plays and poems, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury….I can go on and on about each one of these relics and what it meant to me. In the interest of brevity and how utterly non relevant it can be for anyone else, let me just be content to bask in them and save it up for later.
My intensely passionate tryst with rain started many years ago. Here’s sharing with the world, my modest first attempt at poetry when I was ten or eleven, which I recovered from the old diary I mentioned at the start, from amongst the reclaimed relics. So here goes…
Like a Child in the Rain
This hasn't happened for a long time,
Me sitting awake in bed
With the bed lights on, at midnight
Something deep inside me, wanting freedom,
The freedom of being an innocent little girl once again
I can hear the rain showering heavily outside
They make me yearn;
To feel the cool droplets stream down me
But, they say I'm grown up now
Not a little child anymore, to play in the rain.
That small girl in me is still there
That burning desire too is still in me
But I am grown up now.
And a thousand faces around me, I look
When that little girl alone stares at me from inside
And then she hopes hopelessly
"Better not to have grown, shedding my childish desires".
