Monday, April 28, 2008

Blot and Smudge

Some days, the sea hums. It gently hums, bringing your mind very patiently from its feverish meanderings to listen to the steady hum. It also pauses for very tiny moments, when it feels like you have found the stillness of your soul.

On some other days, the sea roars. Like today. It hurls its waves towards you and roars incessantly, making it difficult for you to hear anything but its sudden and inexplicable ferocity, as if setting the pitch for something dark and nasty.

Dark clouds hang so low that it feels like I could stretch my hands up and pull them down. It is one of those moments when nature’s stern forebodings give you strange feelings of participation in something dramatic.

Drops of drizzle land on my notebook and smudge the ink here and there, as if telling me that memory and what I record here will have to go down with these smudges. This feeling is strengthened as I turn the pages and see that the drizzle has already seeped into them. Pages and pages of writing blotted by ink smudges.

As it dries, each smudge forms a small design of its own. Beginnings and middles and ends of words and sentences spreading into random ink designs. Meaning and meaninglessness thus happily coexist on my cheap-paper notebook, in spite of my mind’s vain persistence at subsuming all this into some total meaning, some coherence. Just as I start fretting over the rest of the page lying innocent in its blankness, the clouds descend without my help, and I run towards the nearest shelter, my vision rendered smudged by the rain on my glasses. I could have stayed in the rain, had I not brought my notebook along.

2 comments:

test said...

if it was not for this, i would ve done that.. the present, rooted in the past, making an impact on the future.. vow.. am coming across one who finds meaning in small things..

Anonymous said...

how are you like this?
Bachpan se hi aise ho?