A Different Winter

ChA Different Winter…. It begins with you..

The city of joy has a different plan for winter this year. At around 5 pm I  am in the balcony sipping tea. Just the perfect amount of lukewarm ,watching the birds fly home and the sunset paint the sky in its colour along with my chai. The wind gushes through my hair, the wind chimes makes a sound. Soothing. Beautiful. Peaceful. But at the same time not making sense.Here’s to the ones who are staying away from their family, the coffee you kept on your table for the last fifteen minutes is cold now. The songs that you hear on a loop is nothing but your heart missing your home.

Cooking your meal is like tasting memories in one go. You wonder how things are at home, and if your neighbour has stopped complaining or the dog you once loved is still alive? Is ma again doing the same household chores? Is baba helping her this time? You miss them, but you don’t tell them.

You check our gallery with old pictures of them and smile at our stupidity. Calling our family back home feels like a script laced with advice and assurances with a discussion on food.  We disconnect the call without telling them how much we miss them and putting a date on when we would again meet them.

We sit in our apartment and hear our silences which goes quieter than ever, and we wonder how our office looks on Thursday afternoon and whether the cigarette shop has stopped keeping your brand. We read books on poetry and wonder if our dreams slept beside our pillows? We thank our loved ones and quietly pray for our family – we don’t tell them we miss them.

We thank the stars and the moons for existing. We hear the songs on love and think of the times when we would meet our loved ones.

We have learned to befriend long loneliness time back- we are prepared for this. The reason we keep sinking in love.

I once wrote about sand-castles, high tides, setting sun, violet skies and changing dialects in my diary and sometimes, I wondered if stories are people’s escape or the other way round. We spend so much time pleasing people who we don’t even like. We spend our time filling excel sheets and those silly codes which do not even make sense. So, when we turn some 80, we are full of regrets about the things we have not done and the books we have not read.

3 months ago, I returned to my hometown thinking that my world has come to end. In fact, when I was unpacking my suitcase I took with me some box of memories that I had bought from Delhi. I don’t know where to start and what to write! I am sure there has been plenty of blogs on this already.My initial days were to cope with the crowd. ” To go with the flow”. To not get lost in the race. I did feel like ‘ Alice in wonderland’ but trust me we all have one mad Hatter to give us reality check. I had one too. So, an year ago I took two risks in life. One was to leave my home and the second was to leave my job in a new city and go with a bunch of crazy heads who at that time wanted to set up their own business.

Being crazy is one but being idiot is like a diwali bonus. Anyway the point is I was both, and so I started going with the flow. I realised one thing that we keep chasing happiness in things that are not even real like fancy apartments, or the latest phone. The happiness of falling in love, the happiness of making friends, the happiness of sharing homemade food. The happiness of cribbing about your phone, extra bills and then finding a solution to it at the end. The happiness of talking about stupid things and smiling over it. The belief that I can be happy again and start over is a different kind of feeling. Somewhere between singing weird songs and arguing about silly things I guess love happened. Hearts are stubborn. They don’t understand the reasoning of the hearts or the understanding of the brain. They want you to understand the fluttering butterfly and want you to walk on the dew dropped grass. They want you to jump on the sea without taking life jackets and they want you to leap on the mud. Regardless of what the world thinks. I have slowly started restoring belief in my old self.

Written by Poonam Chatterjee

Week 48 December 2021