A Matter of Perspective
I’m floating above the world in an open basket. The sun is staring back, bright eyed, and a chunky layer of fog guides us along the way.
Around us other balloons float up and down, weaving a unique colour-coordinated symphony in the bright blue sky. It’s the whoosh of burning propane and the crackling radio (traffic control) that keeps me grounded, reminds me that this is real, keeps me from floating away on an escapist fantasy.
Quietly, steadily, we climb up, up, up. I stand on my tip toes and look down; squares of fields, zigzagging crop lines, crooked rooftops, fairy chimneys, open nests, they all grow smaller, and strangely more magnificent. Looking down, shadows grow lighter and crevasses open up. I see shapes, layers and personalities that were invisible before, hidden in the mundane and routine. I see beauty where I saw boredom before. I see what the birds see.
I should be scared of the drop, instead I feel a soothing calm take over. I feel a wave of inspiration, hope. Everything, even thought the same, is so very different. It’s a matter of perspective, I guess.
Twilight Hour by the Loch Ness
Standing by the edge of the lake, I watch the light.
It dances with the clouds, twirling them around in quick but graceful movements, creating spools of airy, white cotton candy in the sky. It dives like a dolphin, between the water and the sky, setting the horizon ablaze. It flirts with the wind, whispering soft nothings to it, and the wind answers back in haunting winter song. It transforms driftwood and plain plying boats into mythical monsters. It makes bright, fiery colours out of grey and frost.
Winter time by the Loch Ness is one long, continuous twilight hour.
The Classroom in Czechoslovakia
It’s a classroom, almost.
Three wooden school benches stand one behind the other, empty but holding the weight of their own history. The desks, old and tired, and yet free of adolescent engravings, hold open textbooks with lessons I don’t understand. The pages are yellowing, the print on the cover is relatively fresh, a blue base with yellow writing.
I am fascinated. These are the pages from cold war thrillers from my teens. These spaces have existed in my mind as narratives and fast paced prose – spies, jumping from pages in novels to blockbuster film scripts, Bourne style. And now, here they stands in front of me, real, raw.
I follow the invisible chalk trail from the blackboard to the ground, but the dust has been swept out. Charts are tacked on to the wall with bits of tape. But what catches my attention is a little above eye level, next to a propaganda poster: A grime coloured gas mask; hollow eyes and an alien snout. It looks down with a sinister expression, flushing the room with something cold and terrifying, these Dementors of the Iron Curtain.
“I remember the gas drills,” she says. Her curls are as steady as her voice, both anomalies. “We had to wear the masks and run out to the open ground. The mask was so heavy. It was really hard to run.”
Something shifts. It becomes real. Not a novel anymore, but harsh and difficult. We keep standing there, behind the exhibit ropes, lost in versions of that time.
Old Family Photos
Back when, the entire family used to gather at my uncle’s place on Sundays. Over a cup of tea, we’d chat, laugh and pick on each other. We’d boo at cricket scores (those were dark days) and hiss at the politics. We’d dig out old stories and laugh even louder. The old stories were never new. We knew exactly what came next, but it didn’t matter, they were always just as funny as the first time, possibly even more, enhanced as they were with every telling. I don’t know when those Sunday visits died out. It happened gradually, and it happened for a number of reasons: college, work, relocations, squabbles, new priorities, stuff. I didn’t realize when and how those Sundays dropped out of my routine; I didn’t realize how much I missed them, not till my last visit home.
*
One of my cousin’s, back home after years, was clearing out the loft space above the kitchen when he rediscovered some old family photos – photos of us as kids, in pigtails, braces and terrible clothes; photos of our parents, slimmer, younger, elegant and chic; photos of uncles and aunts when they were just kids, eyes sparkling with excitement for things to come; photos of all our histories – the conversations practically come wafting out; photos that are real, that tell the whole truth, untouched as they are by the alternative world of post processing and airbrushing. He decided to put together an album, a family project in time for Diwali.
*
The whole family is here – well almost. Whoever is in town, and back home from work, is here. In Mumbai, that’s more than you can ask for on a week day. My aunt is in the kitchen, stirring a ladle in a large aluminium pot, declining any help because ‘everything is done’. Tumblers of hot ginger tea are passed around. The rain hits against the living room windows, and inside the laugher fills up around the album. The album’s heavy cover feels as light as a feather as we go back to those days in the old apartments, reliving them over and over again. One memory leads to another and that leads us to what happened yesterday, which takes us back thirty odd years, which reminds someone of what happen much before that, which brings us back to my cousin’s living room, laughing and arguing and laughing even harder. It feels like the old days again.
