installment child

Posted on | August 22, 2008 | Comments Off

i have been sad,earlier too,
sitting in front of my computer in the ambiguous gloom of the morning
i have allowed myself to sink into darkness as the world lifted itself into light,
alone,struggling against my thoughts
i have lived in dreams,earlier too.

mourning a childhood,lost living out of cramped trunks,
and wardrobes with sliding doors in unknown,but familiar,rooms,
shared by three people and surrounded by books,lost in the lives and loves of other people,
i have rued a forgotten deprivation,earlier too.

i have been loved by mother,and sometimes my father,
and sometimes i have loved them back,
staring on grainy black and white photographs in faded albums,
running my fingers over two dimensional eyes that showered love on me,
for two weeks every year,twice every day,before and after office,
the mornings when i would not be awake and the night when i would have gone to sleep…
two weeks of unfettered childhood,
playing in the dust and dirt of my village in the back of nowhere,
able to shout and scream and punch and kick and laugh and cry,
i have been a child in installments…

and sometimes,i have had friends,
other half-children,stunted,bowed under rules and regulations,
entrusted with making history,without really understanding the word,
alone,away from all we loved,half-children,
sent to rule the world,living like the inmates of an asylum…

i remember long walks on Thursday*
running across fields,climbing rocks and trees,balancing on pipelines carrying god-knows-what,
young boys,be ran,such fools-
the wind blowing the smiles we sometimes wore,
trying to explore some unknown unknown,
freezing moments in time,and expanding them,
shortlived joys of the sometimes children…

i have met those adults too,
and tried to find those lost children,who have preferred to remain lost,perhaps,
unsure of this world,as time has moved on,
and definitions have blurred,
and cynicism is as much part of life as the blood flowing the veins,
sometimes still,i have heard those children complaining…

late in the nights,their tongues loosened by a million shots of vodka,
those children sometimes still laugh and mostly cry,
asking for their promised land where they were destined to be kings,
and sometimes i have searched for them,in me,
imagining,perhaps,that i too wanted to smile,
to run and let the wind slap my face,and the rain wash the grime away,
sometimes i have wished again for those installments of joy,
revisited in fragments of childhood,but-
it was lost,perhaps somewhere in the dust of the road i have travelled,
and languishing in the harsh noon of twenty five years,
perhaps, that childhood is dead too taking away with it,
the smiles,the shouts,the screams the tears,
and the joys of climbing the rocks and balancing on pipelines…

*P.S. Thursdays used to be halfdays in my first boarding school.classes from 8am to 10 am and no evening tutorials or sport classes.you had to be present for lunch but after that you had four hours of brilliant freedom for running across fields or climbing rocks or trying to walk pipelines or finding out old abandoned buildings and exploring them in that huge campus.or you could climb a tree where no one would find you,and quietly spend the afternoon reading enid blyton or noddie.i guess it was not such bad place,but for a eight year old,perhaps there is no place like home,even if home is kansas.oh,and though the rooms used to be shared by three people,there were no wardrobes with sliding doors.

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