An Empty Land

I walk into the familiar coffee shop, where the table by the window had belonged to me and my friends, each weekend, long ago. I order the same, for old times' sake, and we sit in silence, my coffee and I.

I look around, unseeing, as the years melt and fall away. I'm that effervescent girl once more and my friends are here with me, squeezing in around the table, engaged in noisy banter. We talk, we dream, we build castles in the air...

And in that fleeting moment, nothing has changed.

I blink, and the magic is gone. The coffee shop looks a little worse for wear now, the music that emanates from the speakers is not the same and the view from the window looks jaded. My friends are long gone, scattered across the miles, separated by distances and priorities, and the castles we built in the air are now lives rooted in routine and responsibility...

Everything has changed.

I pay for the coffee, swing my bag over my shoulder and get up to leave.

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Cake Encounter

My Gran and I used to walk every evening. It was something I had looked forward to, every day. Armed with a shopping bag, awaiting the stories that she'd tell me about her life in foreign lands, I'd set out with her down the tree-lined avenue, and trace the same route we'd taken every day since this routine began. We'd stop at the vegetable vendor first, take our pick and then head for the shop selling old books and magazines. The last stop would be the bakery, where she would buy me the sponge cake I fancied, before buying something savoury for my grandfather and for herself, to have alongside evening tea.

There was nothing special about that sponge cake - in appearance at least. It looked plain and unassuming, very much like a loaf of bread, albeit of softer colour and finer crumb. The shopkeeper would slide it out from the glass display, place it on the counter, and slice it deftly, the way he sliced the bread. But it tasted phenomenal. Mildly sweet, with the subtle flavour of vanilla, and soft as a cloud. Quite simply, it was the taste of joy.

The sponge cake became a prominent feature of my stay with my grandparents, until the bakery shut down and was replaced by an uninteresting pharmacy. I had to leave the city soon after too, but those evenings with my grandmother remained unforgettable.

It's been over a decade now, and I haven't found a cake shop that makes sponge cake quite like that one - until yesterday! It was a small bakery, and it bore the identical, typically South-Indian name too! Coincidence? I don't know. But I do know that it had the same, familiar hunk of sponge cake that has been on my mind for years, neatly stacked and showcased between fruit cake and gaudy cream cakes.

So I brought home some, carefully wrapped in plastic, its sweet, subtle aroma awakening a montage of old remembrances. Like the distinct smells of the old bakery, the delicate vanilla flavour of the sponge cake, and the long, happy walks with my Gran, much before the days she was ill and confined to a hospital bed.

It takes me back to a different time, a different life, to the special person who made it so wonderful. And it makes me grateful for the gifts my grandmother left me...memories of long conversations, of genuine caring, of steaming cups of tea on balmy evenings, and neatly cut slices of delicious sponge cake.

Tonight, We Are Young

I’ve been feeling a little crowded lately, and my claustrophobia-driven instincts scream ‘run!’ pretty much most of the time. Of course, I don’t quite have the luxury of acting on them, although, in my head, I’m already far, far away.

I go about my day, running on autopilot, tending to each task monotonously, religiously, but every once in a while, in my mind, I shrug responsibility off my shoulders, like the leaden cloak it has suddenly become, and seek refuge in a time when I have felt completely unfettered...

Tonight, I am young. I am without the responsibilities that every new role, every new relationship, inevitably forges. I lounge easily with friends in a speeding car in the black of night, enjoying the wind in my hair, feeling freer than I ever will, again. There is laughter, there is careless banter, there is friendship. We drive through an unending, unlit, desolate road...white headlights racing before us, the radio spinning out ‘The Living Daylights’ at insane decibels. We are high on youth...unafraid of tomorrow, unmindful of consequences, and blissfully content in the moment.

The moment passes; I am back to now, making mental notes as I stir the tea on the stove. I need to pick up eggs for breakfast tomorrow, write out Maths practice sheets for the kid, get the laundry done, complete an article the client had demanded yesterday, and oh, wait, no sugar to be added to this tea, for the diabetic elders. My cellphone rings then, and I smile when I see the familiar name. I pick up the phone, knowing he will be the first to speak, as always...

I hear the familiar voice of an old friend, and draw strength from the friendship, and from the million remembrances of youthful, unencumbered days that his phone call evokes. And just like that, my heart feels lighter, and responsibilities don't seem that daunting anymore. I become, once more, the person I used to be...the girl in that car, who had not a care in the world, and the world at her feet, talking animatedly to the boy steering the car that night, so many eons ago.

Tonight, we are 19, again. And life is still brimming, with possibilities.

Shifting Patterns

Raindrops create intricate, shifting patterns on my window...delicate silver streaks that twist and meander, joining other silver lines for the briefest moment, before finding their own gleaming, downward path again. I watch, mesmerized, wondering if this is how lives intersect in the canvas that is life. And then, those memories return...

Maybe someday, when you look at the random patterns the rain paints on your window, you'll remember too...

The endless, agonized waiting, before a brave smile merged the course of two lives...the love that wove itself slowly through unending conversations and interlocked fingers during stolen hours...the fragile hope that grew stronger and more impatient with each passing day...that blind faith in forever.

Someday perhaps, you'll wonder too, about that exact moment when happiness had begun to fray...When the boundless possibilities dwindled to a handful of tokens, waiting to be discarded or destroyed in hurt and helpless fury...

The diamond raindrops continue to beat down on the glass...noisily, relentlessly, mercilessly. But the rain will end and the sun will stream its brilliant, golden rays through the same glass, washed clean of yesterday's dust and regret. Maybe then, we'll understand, that our dreams were meant to intertwine, but briefly, and acknowledge, that with its continuous, forward momentum, life goes on...

Except on some moist, grey days, like today, when the rain paints patterns of the past on the window.

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And a piece by Alexandre Desplat, The Meadow. 

Missing

You can’t always keep the people you love, in your life. But there’s always this – you can keep them, forever, in your heart. 

Eric Clapton, with Autumn Leaves.

A Page from Yesterday

I rummage through my overstuffed bookshelf, and stumble upon a long-forgotten book of poems a friend has given me, ever so long back...another age, another distant planet. I smile in recollection as the memories tumble out from between its slightly yellowed pages. 

He used to write poetry then; poems on life, on hope, on love. I don’t recall those lines anymore, but I remember they had been eloquent, honest, and heartfelt. I remember the deep affection and tenderness I had felt, for the person who had loved me in silence...

We’ve come so far now, and so much has changed, but I like the friendship that has emerged unscathed from the embers of a doomed love...the sentiment that has managed to survive, even transcend, that all-encompassing emotion. I like where we stand now, in this present moment.

I don’t love him now; not in that way at least. But I love the feeling this anthology evokes. I still love that time, when two people had held this book and read it together. And I know, with profound clarity, that I will always love those sunshine days, when he had been a poet, and I, his muse. 

Striking a Chord

I hear an old Tom Jones song in a movie, and for a moment, the movie is forgotten as the tune takes me back to a time when things had been simpler, and the world, less complicated. It leads me to my childhood home, where I can picture my mother singing the same happy song while making dinner in the kitchen, my dad applying a screwdriver to an old radio he’s been repairing, and my brother and I playing with our dinky toys on the carpet. 

But that was then, and now, I’m the one singing, making dinner, as the music ties my yesterdays with today. 

Sometimes, I watch my little boy stand in front of the computer (yes, that’s where my music plays from) and listen intently to the songs running through my playlist. He asks me to play one or two of his favourites again and this time, without me singing aloud, please. And it strikes me that these songs will find a place in his memories…memories that he will look back upon some day in the distant future, when he’s in a different place maybe, when he chances upon Gary Moore or Pink Floyd playing on the radio, or an old jazz composition that his dad had loved listening to. 

And this music will take him to those carefree days, when he used to enjoy a game of Scrabble with his mom on rainy evenings, or when he read a story book, sitting with his parents on the couch, while they enjoyed a cup of tea together. He will remember the familiar tunes that had flooded the corners of his home then, and it will connect him to the child he used to be…who had been secure in the knowledge that he was loved, and that his world was alright.

And he will feel the same, again. 

The way I feel now, through every note in the music that my parents used to listen to, long ago, and in every melody that my son will recall, long after. 

Remember a Rainy Day

It’s been raining incessantly for the past week now. It’s been raining memories too; memories of another time, another place, and rain…always, the rain. 

I like the rain when it falls softly, gently…

It reminds me of my first kiss, from a boy I had secretly held in my heart, hoping, yet never expecting to be loved in return. But it rains magic sometimes, and some of that must have touched us and kept us together, if only for a while. I remember that kiss now, in that magical, misty rain, and the wonders of first love.

I like the rain when it beats down relentlessly…

It takes me back to the day my bike had refused to start – thanks to the rains – and I had had to push it all the way home, from college. What had made me ignore the near-pneumonia the weather had almost given me, was the company of the boy who had walked me home that day; who had pushed my bike for the better part of the journey and had made the hour seem to rush by in a few i-wish-they-never-ended minutes. I remember the wishful beginning of my last love.

I like the rain for the remembrances. And I like the rain for all those feelings they brings back. But lately, call it growing up or growing old…

I like the rain, mostly, when it stops. 

I give you Smokie, with 'Have you ever seen the rain'.