Tag Archives: new beginnings

My Melody

The melody of your voice, has always been a little too dear to me. I held onto it like Scrat from the Ice Age held onto his acron, at times a bit too possessively and at other times, obsessively. I feared that if I didn’t hold it tight in my grip, I might lose it forever. So much that it did not occur to me to relish it in the present, just as Scrat. I kept on pursuing it, holding it close, but doing nothing else to ensure its safety.

Until there came a time when I started living life afresh, experiencing new things, things I never imagined I would ever be able to do, like moving seven oceans across, to a completely new land. I actively grew more engaged in changing how I would deal with certain emotions. Before I knew it, I had stopped thinking about you altogether. The new environment had a lot to contribute for it.

The other day, while rummaging through an old, dusty pile of e-mails, I accidently stumbled upon your voice recordings. That crisp, croaky sound gave me company for a good full day. While I was nearly going back to forgetting your voice, the following week, I came across a couple more of these recordings. These ones, probably the last of the lot that I still possess, took me back half a decade down the memory lane.

Its funny how such minute long vocals of vibrations confined in your recording devices can affect your mood, your emotions. How subtly can they give you goose bumps before you even realize it. How they can cause these tiny little droplets of salty water traverse the path down your lower eyelids, through your round, bumpy cheeks, then steeply down your jaws, and then jump down on your clothes making them moist.

It makes me wonder if you too ever find such broken pieces of our memories and if you take some time out to dwell on them a little, and try to fit those pieces together along with the salty water doubling up as glue. If you too cherish the times, while listening to the same old songs that we both loved listening to. If you too would want to go back to those moments and live in the melody of our love, if only for a few more minutes?

– Suri

To New Beginnings

I was once travelling in a car, I do not recollect what day it was or month, but the scenes I see so clearly. The house, our house, my friends’ houses, our playground, our school, our market, our grocery shop still flashes across, like a happy memory, yet distant, someplace I’ll never set foot again, at least not for long at a time.

There was a time when everything was different, and there soon will be a time when everything will be different, again. As I leave, I try to imprint as much as I can in my head, the blossoming of the gulmohars and the ripening of the mangoes in summer, the harsh and wet rains, the sole fabric of extra layering required in the winters. I think I’ll miss our neighbourhood crows, parrots and pigeons too, for they kept me going when times were dull. I hope to fix up these happy memories in my eyes so as to remember and revisit the place forever and ever, without having to come back. The sad ones can be wiped out, or if possible be burned up, to never be restored again.

A sparrow sitting on the branch of a Gulmohar tree, adjacent to our apartment
(which unfortunately fell during the rains this year)

— Suri