Behold, Jhumpi

Behold, Jhumpi

Behold, Jhumpi.
The old banyan tree is older now.
The world says that the more the number of years,
the more the memories.
But our banyan tree seems to be laughing at this,
because the last time it got to make a memory was when you dreamt under its shade.
And wasn't that years ago?

Remember the day you dreamt of climbing it up?
You wanted to sing your favourite rhyme from its highest branch.
But then, you walked away, Jhumpi,
and never came back.

Maybe the world asked you to dream bigger,
like it always does.
But then, had the world really known
anything about memories and dreams,
just a tick and a tock of the clock
couldn't have broken
one person
down to several people
while breaking one minute
down to sixty seconds.

Your fingerprints on the tree's stem
are invisible.
So are your footprints on its shade.
And aren't so the reminiscences of that dream on your mind?

But if invisibility could make one forget things,
you wouldn't still be thinking about
your old sleeping partner -
the tiny cotton doll
that was stitched by your mother with cloth cut out from your grandmother's worn out saree -
each night.
It has been invisible
ever since you hid it inside a box,
to keep it away
from the layered world
you were stepping into,
hasn't it?

Behold, Jhumpi.
Do not hate the waves of the sea
for erasing the marks
you wanted to leave on the shore.
For 'shore' and 'marks' cannot go together,
unless the marks are invisible,
like the ones left by the wind.

And maybe,
out there on the shore
are enough of those invisible marks,
for it to be able to keep
a few visible ones.

Is it because you fear oblivion,
that you crave so much for visibility?
But then, Jhumpi, if visibility could cut oblivion,
wouldn't one have known
things like
the reason behind the existence
of the moles on the skin?

So love the waves,
because the tiny paper boat you threw away
into the sea
is still sailing.
And the waves are bringing it
back to the shore,
back to you.

You lie to yourself
that you no longer love
the feel of sand grains
on your feet.
But the sea and its waves
know that after you leave,
you would stare at the
uneven layers of sand
covering up your soles
and wouldn't want
to wipe them off
for a long while.

Jhumpi,
long before your tiny fingers
could get good at the
tricky business of
tying knots,
your even tinier fingers
had learnt how to
untie them.

So untie the blindfold,
and behold, Jhumpi.
You will get to know
that so many such boats
are often returned.
For like the sea and its waves,
so many bygone joys
are trying to find
their way back to you.