Kumaon nostalgia - day 2

And then, I am home. There’s the pear tree and the water tank, unchanging as their setting. I wander through each room. In my mind’s eye I see the children’s toys as they once lay, as well as a glued- together vase, the duck shaped candle, a card from a long-ago Bianca – each a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is my life; sometimes forgotten but never dispensable.

It’s easy to lose track of time. What one does here absorbs one completely – be it a Namita Gokhale book or a mammoth jigsaw puzzle or a game of Scrabble. These things occupy one completely as if there’s nothing else. I wake at dawn and it's hard to believe anything else exists or matters beyond the gray sky, the green hills and the pointless pattering of the whistling thrush on the roof above my bed. My escape is total and I need fear no intrusion, even into my subconscious. Even the tiredness after a walk is different: the physical exhaustion of aching muscles and beating heart, but one’s mind is energized and renewed.

 

Perhaps only these hills are eternal, while all other aspects of my life are transient. Here it is always calm and level, untouched by choppy waves in turbulent seas. This is the truly pure and selfless aspect of my life. Here I am prepared to give, expecting nothing in return. Here, I do not measure everything in doses of equality or struggle for a sense of balance.