The Lake House

Not the one in that film called The Lake House. Last Sunday I was standing at the gallery of one real lake house.. The chimes they had tied atop the trees made the trees even more beautiful. Imagine feeling the wind and listening to the music it creates..Then your eyes look up trying to see what these chimes look like. Are these ones like the ones you saw in the Lake House or the ones you heard near that tall tree you passed few steps behind or do these ones look different from the ones you have seen? I wondered many times through the day as I walked past the lakes and the bushes and the cottages.

The guy had asked us what we thought this place was.. A resort, a hotel, a what? It was a farm. It was like visiting my village.. the one I never had. Agro-Tourism as a concept is new in India. The guy had said.. I believed him. Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken so many years for me to be able to stay a night at a full-fledged farm.

Water-lilies are water-lilies. Water-lilies are not lotuses; I realized. Fish farming is more than the blur diagram in school textbooks. It wasn’t my first rendezvous with nature. Yet, it was one of those experiences I would want to talk about and write about. Night at a farm house feels like a night. It’s not a night of neon signs.

It was a starless night. The sky looked like those human sketches I used to draw as a kid. My human figures never had any ears. My mother always made those poor beings feel complete by either drawing the ears herself or making me draw them for the sake of that entire family of ear less people I loved to draw. I wished my mother could make the night complete too somehow. Star in that tree! Glow worm…

Together we sat looking at the stars in that tree. Then when we thought it was time for us to come inside we walked back to our cottage. My mother switched all the lights off... just as we all stepped in... The house was more wooden than my house in Mumbai. The house was as small as our one room in the city. The house ensured that we spend all the time together as a family. As we tried to look around ..just look around for nothing in particular, in that darkness under the wooden bamboo table, a star came alive..

I missed seeing that smile on my family’s face. But, I didn’t miss feeling it.

-Dedicated to Saguna Baug

I live there.

What you called the end of the world is the beginning of my world. That is not just a tunnel locked forever with the darkness gagged in its mouth. I walk there inside. There is that whole world in there. I live there.

Come with a candle in your hand. It’s not like that inn full of candles everywhere. It just needs one light to feel the world in here. It doesn’t take ten voices to hear me speak. Your one word will echo and will be heard more keenly than the trampling hoofs of the horses carrying those men through my world. Too many voices blur out the thought. Too many candles mess the world ...like a painting with all the colors pushed inside it.

Have you ever imagined what the color of peace is like? Do you think it has a color at all?

The party down that lane doesn't fancy me the way the horizon I see somewhere too far for me to reach does.

Will you love me till my end?

I am the shoot of your unborn seed. Will you love me till my end? Underneath the brown skin, these grains of time, my heart beats. Will your palm feel the earth above me sometimes. Underneath your palm I will come alive..I will find my way to the first rain drop. Tender as your blessing..the rain drop will touch my leaf; it will feel like the first feather on the new born wing.