Steps
Steps
that take her up and bring her down and on certain days manage to leave her at
intersections and crossovers where she bumps into a former lover. They share a
friendly hug. It gets awkward at first and the awkwardness slowly melts with
time when they started talking about Toby and Mathias their friends from the
library.
Toby
had once let out his plump faced hamster from the bag causing a stir in the
library. The hamster kept hopping from table to table, and finally when he
landed on the librarian's desk, they both had an eye to eye moment causing the
stern faced librarian to topple from her seat and let out a loud shriek.
"Where
did he vanish? said a baffled Toby.
They
all had then searched for him high and low, underneath lined bookshelves,
spaces between antique looking cupboards and peeped into wastepaper baskets. But
they couldn't locate him and had finally resigned to the fact thinking that
maybe the poor fellow had gotten around making a nice home for himself in the
midst of books that carried the faint scent of war stories and stories of
unrequited love locked within.
She
wondered about him then and she still wonders at times whether he had shown
some refined manners by not going around tearing pages and on second thoughts
if he did, whether he had made a nice makeshift bed from those very pile of
pages. He would have then sunk deeper into the mound seeking warmth on
rainy days when it kept pouring really hard outside.
Steps
A
day she remembers climbing nearly a hundred steps, that went winding all the
way up with tufts of green grass growing in patches at the sides. Once on top
the view from the hillock was magnificent. The depth of the city with
terracotta tiles as roofs over houses displayed a brown hush everywhere. In the
background the sky kept changing its colours from a livid orange to a tempered
brown and by evening the daylight had shifted to a purple haze knocking off the
sun behind. But the evening mostly carried with it the fragrance of jasmine
buds growing in clumps beneath her feet.
Couples
sat in various corners, their bodies fitting snugly in stone-walled arches,
arms and legs colliding with one another. She simply sat on a battered ledge
drinking in the view. Occasionally, she watched those couples from the corner
of her eye with a growing agitation fuelling inside her; waiting for the boy
whom she loved then and who she knew was not going to turn up.
But
with the shift in time, she felt subdued and a sense of calm settled over her
agitated nerves. The boy, the lecture that she had missed to come here all the
way, her evening coffee, friends from college all felt hazy in the background
and what took centre-stage then was the horizon, the melee of houses below, the
rocky valley and the sounds of exotic birds that filled up the warm afternoon
air.
In
her own company she realised that sometimes it is the ordinary things in life
that can bring you sheer bliss.
Lovers
can always wait.
