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The Soliloquy The Beginning My Lord, there was no light in the beginning. The universe was blind. Then it happened one night in the middle of a dark, cold December. Officially though, I am supposed to have existed for two years even before my birth! Credit for this supernatural life is due in part to a wicked Principal but mostly to My Dear Father. And then Mom struck with a name that still makes me flinch and with that, my fate was sealed for the eternity.
Jaunpur Can't
place it on the map, right? Well, one crazy chap called Sher Shah Suri
had his headquarters firmly rooted this side of the earth.
Unfortunately, he passed away a few centuries back and with that, the
saga was relegated to the obscurest crannies of memory. I, on my part, wasted here a couple of years or so. Its my old man's hometown, supposed to be mine too, but I can't understand why. Yet, those mango trees, summer storms and thousand of miles pedaled away on a red bicycle remain frozen in time.
Varanasi That eternal city at the banks of Ganges was witness to my early childhood. No wonder, my earliest memories are shaped like narrow alleys, temples, gongs, apes, cows (and cow dung). Also, there are a lot of dead on rout to their fiery ends. The folks, with their best intentions, put me in and out of a few schools which miserably failed to put anything of significance between the two ears. Maybe, the creator didn't mean it to be that way.... Lucknow As 'Luck' would have it, I hit Lucknow in 1983 and took to it like a fish to water. The University of Lucknow was to be a home for nearly Seven years where I Graduated, Post-Graduated (in English Literature), almost had a Ph.D., dabbled in Law, Russian, French, and tormented many with a Spanish guitar. I stayed further on, almost till the end of 1994, when certain ugly questions of livelihood forced me to abruptly leave it for weird places dictated by my employer, one S B of B & J. Carrying the heart had become an impossibility as it was smashed up and strewn all over the city by then. So I had to leave it behind, whatever was left of it, on that fateful night of a September, when I boarded a train for Agra.
Jaipur Hey, what kind of time warp was that? Marriage, Kids, S B of B & J ?! Mumbai The filth, the stench, the barbaric stampede for a toehold in the local trains, and a boss who could put the Nazis to shame! And all that I could think when I crash-landed here in the sweltering heat of 2002 was to get the hell out of this hellhole fast! I kept telling myself (and everyone else) just that for the next two years that would come. But as the year 2004 started to unroll itself gradually, an old pain started revisiting me off and on, as it nearly established itself in the hollow where the heart used to be.... Sometimes though, I stand against the beating waves of the soiled Arabian Sea and wonder how life has just passed me by. "Glory days, they will pass you by, glory days; in the wink of a young girl's eyes, glory days...." - thus spake Bruce Springsteen.
Time What was once a dull, perennial swishing of feathers has turned into a deafening flutter of wings as the days topple over each other in their race to oblivion. I pause and ponder now and then but fail to muster heart enough to add more to this. Do come back, though. You never know when in a sudden burst of outpouring the rest of the soliloquy will have been completed.
The rest is silence.
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