undone

A few sun burnt years back, there was a Wall. It contained within itself blue, yellow and white concrete, orange mud, beautiful green and brown windows, the tussle of cotton sarees, street cricket, summer afternoons, evening tea, empty bylanes, vermillion streaks, promiscuous strains of melody, crows that knew magic, and, me.

This city was born a memory and hid within itself my frayed world of family, friends, whispers, secrets, loves, words and play. The city that nursed me into and out of adolescence, taught me to walk, to sing and to speak. To gather and distribute dreams, to form my arguments and construct my truths. With generous arms the wall collected the debris of the land and shaped its thieves and whores, dreamers and bathers, fighters and musicians. It powdered the faces of youth, and granted them their sins and their ignorance, their naiveté and their prayers. It pounded on heaps of sand and clay and baked our confused minds.

The wall knew its children. It knew we were weak and temperamental, with broken bones and hearts. It knew we had hardly anything to call our own and therefore, didn’t need much to be happy. It knew how much we abhorred and yet loved ourselves. Most of all, the wall knew how very ordinary and insignificant we are. How lost we would be were we not umbillically connected to it.

So my wall grieved. Knowing that when time arranged our departure, we would be excited and ungrateful. We would throw away everything we had gathered at its foot and sail off lighthearted amidst a sea of masks and hands, assuming there would be many other walls, with their generous arms and drooping chins waiting to gather us within their concrete veils.

So while we buried our small fears inside its crevices all the while ignorant of how frightened our wall was for us, it tensely awaited the day the chord would snap and we would be flung way out of its reach.

Disguised as the love-child of another time and place.