If life so
desires, I may even lay down my entire future along the streets of IC colony.
Those undulating ways meandering through the island city of Mumbai are as wide as many a market square.
Their dignity remains intact even after constant assault by the height of
pretentious luxury and dubious taste from all around.
My house ‘Kinny’s
Corner’ situated on ‘Holy Cross’ road looks out to a big statue of a ‘cross’
under a green moorish patch. A number of bakeries, eateries, liquor and meat
shops dot the landscape, which takes a sharp turn around the great flinty,
staid church for the catholic crowd where Jesus keeps their sanity. Up the road
lay a boulevard leading to ‘Karuna’ hospital with quaint, arcane houses on one
side, remote gypsy fruit-sellers on the pavement, on another side a hillock
full of wild foliage peer down into a dry moat, down the sheer wet walls.
The faint,
agreeable smell of freshly baked bread, sea-fish, coal-dust waft through the
area, and all around you can see those laid-back, despondent faces, which give
me fair amount of pleasure: unmarked faces like the innkeepers of sea-shacks,
with distant look in their eyes, living their modest dreams.
It all started
sometime back when the lease of my earlier house expired: the drawers emptied,
furniture packed, the removal van waiting like a hearse in the lane took me to
a less expensive area. Then there set reluctantly on my personal map the cross,
part rosy church, part hideous real estate agents- where raw emotions
intermingled.
Everything that
I want to become seems to be here, for better or for worse. My destiny might
have been written somewhere along those roads, houses or even in the hedgerows.
IC colony may shape the first level of consciousness, which would eventually become
the basis of all kinds of connections with beings. This could even be the scene
of happiness, misery, real love, first heartbreak, the attempt to write,
through the unconscious sources of action, through folly or wisdom. It could
well be all of these, who knows………
ENDS
Meghna Maiti
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