(This piece is a serious article. Which basically means it was written after i was high)
I am faced with a problem. It is a problem confronting many of my generation and most of the people my age group. I don’t know what I want to do. It is this restless phase in life where I’m thinking of changing the world but simultaneously a voice in the back of my mind has slowly started turning cynical. And there are very few things more dangerous than ur own mind being cynical about you.
So, I weigh my options. I could be an i-banker, I seem to have the necessary qualifications for that. I could pursue music, I seem to have the passion for that. I could even be a writer, I have the stationery (looking at the quality of writers nowadays I am convinced that all that is required to be a writer is the proper stationery, in my case, MS Word). But, then again the voice at the back of my mind speaks out. It has its reservations on all of the above. You can’t be an i-banker it says, you don’t have ur fundas in order. You cant be a musician coz you’ll never be that good. You cant be a writer coz well, being a writer is nothing nowadays. In the midst of all this I try to concentrate. I lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking about the place I want to be and the things I want to do. Suddenly, a vision comes to my mind. Of someone, or rather something I fell in love with.
I have never been a particular fan of Kerala as I’ve always considered Ahmedabad as my adopted city. Considering that I spent 10 months of every year there, frankly I dint have much options. I used to actually dread going ‘home’, as my mom would call it, because I felt terribly out of place there. Nothing seemed to match. I didn’t like all this greenery, I missed the concrete. Most of all I missed the ice-cream parlours, the cricket-matches, the restaurants, the movie theaters that so dotted the Ahmedabad skyline and which were so obviously absent from kerala’s. I have always wondered how I would’ve turned out had my dad never left kerala and I’ve never liked the idea. It had become a part of my life’s plan to continue to hate kerala for as long as possible.
But this summer was something different for me. The minute my flight landed in the Cochin International airport I had a feeling that something was different. And sure enough, it was. Kerala had grown. From being this irritating girl that u try hard to avoid during childhood to a woman so beautiful that u wonder if this was the same stupid girl that used to bug u during childhood, the place had grown. Or maybe it was that my perspective, my vision had changed. Which again can be explained by the fact that, even I had grown. Grown tired of the concrete jungles, grown sad at the hustle of city life, grown disgusted at the selfish attitude of people. The coconut trees and the greenery didn’t seem as stupid as before.
In a few hours, I was home. The dream house that my father had built and which apparently I had shown no interest in (because I never wanted my parents to leave my adopted city ahmedabad) welcomed me. For someone who’s got somewhat used to living in a hostel, the thought of having a house about the size of the entire hostel is a surprisingly refreshing. Then began the routine of meeting relatives. Carriages of memories come rushing back drawn by the old familiar faces. The usual questions ‘How is studies, how are ur friends, are you eating well’ and the unusual ones ‘when are you planning to stop studying, did you find a (new) girlfriend, do they have gramophone records in delhi?’. I juggle through all of them. Suddenly my eyes dart past the eager, questioning faces to the scenery outside. How could I have missed all this beauty the entire time. I rush outside to my verandah and stand there with a sheepish grin on my face, waiting to be introduced to my once so-irritating-I-tried-to-avoid friend. Yes, god’s own country it is I guess.
I finally had some idea what Ms. Arundhati Roy saw in the country side while she was writing ‘The god of small things’. Kerala is melancholy. Like all beautiful things, it is mystifying. It seems to be hiding something within its painfully smiling visage. Or maybe it was me. But I totally fell in love with the sight. Specially during dusk and dawn. I could listen to the stories that it told me all day long. Stories of working mothers and drunken fathers, of brilliant children and performance pressures, of old spinsters and even older witch-fables,of buried treasures,of houses illuminated by oil lanterns in the evenings, domes of temples, of boats threatening the calm of still rivers, of all-night performances of kathakali. There are more but this suffices at this point and is enough to get me to cross over to the other side.
But what totally takes my breath away is the rains. I’ve never been one who admires rains unconditionally. I’ve realized this one thing about the monsoons as with other things. Whether you like them or hate them totally depends on the ambience that ur in. Just like what is atmosphere in a night-club is suffocating in a local train. Obviously, u would not like the rains when its flooded your house and your car and drowned your precious clothes. But the countryside is an altogether different affair. The rains stimulate the greens. It flirts with the plants and brushes against them coyly. The trees move in response to the gentle breeze. They wave. They complain. They love. Compare this to the concrete jungle, where all you can here is the consistent pitter-patter of the raindrops on rock-solid foundations. But here, the sights are different. And the sounds, absolutely so.
