And the car swooped down, hiccups on a bump but that didn't stop our laughter.
The taxi uncle and me were on the most funny part of the story. Now, that's how things work in India, you find a relation with pretty much everybody around and very rarely call someone by just their names. So, the man selling yumms snack becomes bhaiya(brother) and the taxi driver your chacha(uncle).
As we sped up and passed the silent haunted line of constructions, he narrated the story of how he fell in love with a girl, maybe some 40 odd years back.
"Goon fights, exodus from the villages around, skyscrapers, Kolkata was just steering towards the modern day Kolkata. And tired and jaded would I come back to my stay in the evening and these two sisters in the neighbourhood would come and chat with us. The chats led to going to movies and movies begat a wedding!",he said with a sigh of what seemed like a half satisfied expression.
"I think I didn't wanna marry her though but now that I am married to her all these years, I think, चलो इतनी खराब भी नहीं है, ठीक ठाक ही है (meaning, she's not that bad, she's just about alright). And we both chuckled, he in relief and myself at the nasty me. 'Twas me who had requested for an adventurous story and when I had said रोमांच (pronounced 'romanch' meaning adventure), he had heard 'romance'.
He mused, "Once I hadn't seen my family for 15 years, I had almost forgotten their faces. And you never quite understand who is actually closer to you. For when you go home, you'd forget the city and when you return to the city, you'd forget the silly faces in the village. Such is life!"
One of the pros of returning to your memories, in my case today, to scribbles from a decade back, is finding stuff that you almost discover as if it was someone else's life. There's a good thing about creation though, it's applicability each time is new! Like water, you put it in a container and it takes the shape of the container. I don't have an iota of a memory of why I wrote this but it does feel pretty recent and it's good to trade a house of bricks for a house of words, at least for a few minutes in a day, even if the words were borrowed from the past :)
Am ditching English monoglot readers next since the Hindi/Urdu words are written in Devanagari script for its own reason and as much as I'd like to translate this, I haven't had the time or the apt words yet. Maybe soon though!
मन के मनके
मन की कौन सुने
जो मन शिकायत करता है
दो चम्मच बातों से बोझल
मन की ही आयत से डरता है
गलियों में दीवारें हैं
ऊंची सी और नीची सी भी
और तानो बानो में जड़कर
मन, मन ही में मरता है
कोई सुराग हो , कोई हो छेद
रौशनी की एक किरण भी मिले
कोई चिराग हो बुझता हुआ सा
दूर हों सारे शिक़वे गीले
हाथ फैलाकर कभी
न माँगा है आसमान , न ज़मीन
के हाथों के लकीरों से खैंचकर
कहाँ तोड़े जाते हैं कीले
बारी बारी से न भुलाये सोच
मुठ्ठी में समेटे जाते नहीं
चंद ज़ख्मों की कहानी भी भला
भुलाये भूल पाते हैं कहीं?
बस धूल पर पढ़े रहते हैं झूठ
और सादे आँखों में दिखता है
के, मन का सच है मन ही में
मन ही में यहीं
