Roads are built and rebuilt each day in my city. The
drilling. The dust. The frozen traffic. The clusters of brown glistening bodies
moving about over eroded pieces of land. There is an incessant mechanical drone
and a drab grey mist that envelopes your entire being. So much so, that it
never really leaves your system. The noise,
the dirt, the sweat seem to seep right into your skin and stay with you,
making each of us look a little more tired, a little older than what we ought
to.
It was a day like all others. My rickety auto rickshaw along
with numerous other vehicles on the street were stalled by such a road repair
feat. As I waited impatiently for the traffic to start moving again, I noticed beside
me, the endless concrete grids that formed the skeleton of the new road to
come.
This was a fairly familiar sight. The uniformly constructed,
vacant, concrete squares. Drying to form harder, coarser insides to sustain all
the weight and pressure of the city. But these grids had something unusual about
them.
Unlike most other streets in Mumbai, this one has the sweet
fortune of being lined by tall flower-ridden trees. Moreover, the city had just
dipped itself into the early showers of June. The breeze too was rather
generous these days. It must have been at some invisible hour of the previous
night when the wind had brushed the trees off their delicate yellow flowers and
strewn them all over that lifeless spine of the street.
I sat, transfixed for quite some time, gazing at all those
hitherto colorless and empty squares now filled with a fine layer of yellow
flowers. Luckily, nobody was trying to remove them. The glistening bodies
carried on their work as usual. And the flowers kept settling deeper and
deeper.
Now, every day as I pass by that street, I smile to myself
thinking of all those millions of flowers forming an invisible but fundamental
layer of the ground beneath our feet. In between layers of hardened concrete,
the memory of those soft and fragrant flowers gives me a renewed strength for
another day in the city.
I like you first person writing. The piece leaves you feeling afresh. So wonderful na to realise each morning that one is walking on a flower bedded street. That somewhere it is the tenderness of these flowers supporting our renewed zeal and aspirations.
ReplyDeleteExactly! It is a lovely little secret between me and the city that makes each day a bit easier to go through. ;)
DeleteHi Arundhati, I read all of your writings available here and I must say I have never come across a blog like yours. There is an embedded beauty in your writing, a poetry, a realisable poetry I must say. A detached description but yet complete in its own self. I like your writings. Although it would have been better if I had more to read here. Write more often. :))
ReplyDeleteI am really glad you liked my jottings. Thank you so much for your kind words. :)
DeleteI shall certainly write more often.