You, Yellowed Leaf and...

Sometimes you do things on impulse. Like buying the shirt from the roadside in Sarojini Nagar market, the one that you now find to be weirdly ridiculous; or stopping at a roadside Dhaba in Punjab on to have an Aloo ka Paratha with Lassi, even when you have had a full meal. Like saying things without meaning them at all; and at other times not saying what you mean the most. At times you may buy a book on impulse; one of those second hand copies that are strewn on bare ground, making a carpet of varying textures and designs. And then maybe someday long after, when you are cleaning your overstuffed shelf, you come across that book again. And then to take a rest from all the exertion from cleaning, you pat the dust off its covers and yellowed pages and sit down with it, on the edge of the table..

At its first page you find someone else's name, the one who owned the book for a while, and then disposed it. On these pages, some other fingers must have run before. Who knows through how many hands would this book have passed, before it chose to come to you.? So, as one is wont to when one picks up a book after a long time, you ruffle through its pages. Holding its spine in your left hand and turning the pages with your right thumb (actually it will depend on whether you are right handed or otherwise), you come across a dried leaf, filemot after ages of lying within the pages of a neglected story. You look at it and think about a different time at a different place.

You stand below the Old Peepal tree, the one which had an old rusty red letter-box, hanging by strands of iron wire, from a nail that had been swallowed by the tree trunk. You stand there every morning for your schoolbus. The blue and white Bus Number 5, that will take you few more kilometers down the road, where the prettiest girl of your class lives, before it turns back to take you to the school, where in a few minutes, the old brass bell will ring and you will stand in a line for the morning assembly. Sometimes when you are late you may take the bus when its coming back from the pretty girl's house; but you would generally want to spend some time sitting with her in the seat you gallantly saved, and so you would always come early. Your hair would still be wet after your hurried bath, and the lunch-box in your bag would feel warm on your back. You would come and bow at the tiny shrine at the base of the tree, touch your fingers at the base of stone that found Godhood and then touch your forehead. Then you would stand along with a few other children, under the Peepal tree, with its drying leaves, creating a rustle everytime you shift on your legs. At the beginning of the year, you would choose a perfectly shaped leaf, to put between the pages of your acetone smelling new books, with their milk white pages, some of which will be stuck and would have to be cut open by your school ruler. Or sometimes when you don't have the ruler, your fingers will be used to separate the pages, though they will leave a jagged edge, something that will distract you everytime you'll pick that book.

At the end of the year, when the exams loom above your head, and when you re-open your books and flip through every page; the yellowed leaf will reveal itself again, and you will think of the day that you picked it up, or plucked it as the case maybe, and then put it inside your book. Time has a habit of flying, even while it seems to be made of vapid days and banal nights. And while we are busy in our daily struggles, unknown to us, the memories are made. Someday they they suddenly raise their face, up from the dust that has accumulated over the years, and you stare back into your past, as verdant as the yellow leaf once was.

When you live in a city which does not have an identity of its own, but is rather a substitute of some other place, the derived identity of the self is further diluted. So you want to return to a place where the roads are familiar, and so are the shops with the dents in their shutters that you made while playing streetcricket. A place, where you can see the hills rise from its edges and then give way to the alpine meadows; while knowing that your alma mater resides just 200 meters from where the earth starts a steep climb to become a mountain. Where you stood in the assembly lines, having traveled 10 kilometers in the Blue School Bus, which you took after that wait at the bus stop under the old Peepal tree with the red letter-box and a tiny shrine.

After a long time, one day you return to that place. You marvel at the broad roads that have been built, at the fresh new concrete divider that creates order in the once pandemonic traffic. And while the rickshaw takes you home, you look at the freshly cut mango trees, that line the road sporadically. Somewhere in your heart you feel that the Peepal Tree would still be there, that somehow the presence of a letter-box, would evade its axing; or maybe the divine would save it from the municipal wrath. But as you come nearer to your home, you see the vacant space that has been created in mid air, at a shining red letter-box that proudly stands on the edge of the wider road, while your rickshaw bumps over a stone smeared with vermilion, and sticky oil that came from the lamp that someone lit everynight at the little shrine that used to be. You reach home, you ring the bell, and hug your parents. You smile, yet there is something that is missing, something that now lives only within the pages of your school books. Those that have been sold to the Raddiwaala. Who knows which hands found them?

You hear the rustle again, it comes from the yellow leaf in the book you hold. In a flash the times change, and you are where you are. While somewhere you are still standing under that Peepal tree, waiting for your bus. With the yellow leaves...

Note to myself: Perhaps someday I WILL write a "short" story.