For the Sonorous

War and the Arrival of Spring

I.

Entire narrow passage lanes of the town were dotted with only silhouettes of houses in brown and musk coloured outlines. Electricity had betrayed them since four hours now and in the humidity of a summer night and in the warmth of an oil lamp; children were lulled into a slumber. Every once awhile, they realised the class distinctions society formed.

Poverty met them in the eye as hours cascaded. In the flame of the lamp, they often traced with their eyes; patterns, of lines on their palms, thinking of its meaning. The black snow of winter encompassed the wide, long, elongated train tracks and in spring, a forlorn vacancy loomed large on its expanse emptiness.

It was quite possible that when the children would grow up, even autumn and spring would be remembered as summer, with incessant darkness. While the night shone with a full moon, not too far in the distance, a graveyard courted moonlight semblances. Its calm shadows and the reflections atop grave epitaphs consoled those lost to war.

The cemetery was where the dead remained; it is where many of them would be after a life of working in the mill. Four streets and six lanes from the town, the machine equipments stood in silent mourning. The entire town was submerged in a wide wisp of smoke which fell in unequal portion; emancipating from the factory chimneys. This summer night seemed the longest.

Tomorrow, there would be a meeting during the lunch hour about the electricity disparity and in the gathering they would find a voice: for themselves, their families and children.

II.

Radicals gathered in a corner of the underground station passage and all that was visible remained some deliverances of the sky through the left of steps leading below. The newspaper wrote woes of those from the margins; unknown, the literature of tomorrow. Decadence outpoured through a blaring radio which seemed an embodiment of those who swam in today’s current of tide in political ideology. Embedded in those were their lives of normalcy; facades rather, worn on stiff collars. They did not belong there and their engaged eyes only watched the black radio listening attentively in between its dwindling wavelength.

A swift waft of smells of fresh bread permeated the air as they walked out of the hallway that was below. The bakery was adjacent to the town hall and central station; purportedly so office goers purchase buns and cake while on the way home. Amalgamated butter, as it would melt on a warm piece of bread; the sights of war would encompass past my eyes. Memories, roads and smells hold strange outpouring through the mountains that stretch beyond. Everyone saw themselves as an outcast and each of them were a war ravaged colony.

III.

Quiet, dark and unending: this humid night seemed to be in tune with I. Literary scholars seated in a circular, momentous exude in this cafe discussed politics and current affairs met by sonorous agreements and disagreements. As always, I was a fringed existence of my own, there; yet not there. My eyes gazed at the bounty of leaves and flowers; outside, this Spring. I belonged in-between.

My thoughts pranced from the outside and when it seemed distant, the lantern and the wooden table below it were enough to belong. I thought of identity and belongingness; of how much importance it held. I was like a ghetto of my own being, unwritten to the world. Our primary sense of identity; formed with family, begins to unlearn itself as we begin to grow; and often, it is an internal battle of knowing ourselves in binary oppositions to the world.

The leaves spoke to me in soliloquies; in woven silences no one else heard, as it were.

In those, he was. He had journals of pages all in his handwriting. He never used a typewriter even; in an age of technology. When he wrote, he poured his soul. I walked with him inside the graveyard, once again, in my mind.

The most beautiful aspect of not belonging to the world is to be in love and oblivious to its tragedy for awhile. Until, of course, bitter coffee granules nudge the throat. And yet, as I burn my parched senses of taste and feeling with a hot cup of coffee, his thoughts reiterate; and mine, he writes on pages.

IV.

On a Spring day, when most people stayed indoors on sunlight poured afternoons; the radicals were at unrest. On the backdrop of scattered hue of flowers were tall buildings and blanketed smoke from chimneys that enveloped over skies. The Sunday seemed slow in its unravelling and an impending sense of a major upheaval permeated the mind. On the surface, silence covered the afternoon; though in subterfuge overtones, its summer drenched humidity was weaving an unwritten recital.

They studied the newspaper carefully and increasing protests gathering momentum was on its front page. On the broad balcony parapet, the city seemed to be reeling under rapid industrialization. The mill workers would sometimes belong to meetings of the radicals, of which I was a part.

They would often sip on black tea and baked biscuit in the midst of discussing their lives. Most of them lived outside the city limits and travelled to work by local train. Edges of their fingers seemed chipped with its sides wearing out. Their faces enunciated life and the intricate ideology of months passing into years, distilled. Everyday was the same in hours but through escapades of night’s darkness and the laughter of their daughters and embrace of their sons; living found meaning.

When the utensil filled with rice and sometimes lentil cooked on a makeshift gas burner of bricks and hay, used as insulator; they felt like spring finally arrived. As their fingers felt warm food, the anvil of tomorrow; and to be no more the have not’s brewed a storm inside their mind. Spring brought a thick thoughtfulness.