Raining Thoughts

Afterlife options could hardly ever be considered a sane lunch-time topic. But it so happened one day that our office lunch group conversation rose up in spins & swirls of mystical musings that came to rest finally upon the turn-yourself-into-a-tree-after-you-die topic. Beautiful and degradable earthen urns that encased the seeds of trees where your ashes would go into, so that once it’s planted in the soil you eternally become a part of the tree as it sprouts and grows. The beauty of the idea struck my soul so hard that I could almost envision my tree-self, rooted beside a white thicket fence blooming fragrantly in green profusion, with perhaps a few cows mooing in the back drop to enhance the pastoral effect. And what did I visualise myself as? A little allspice tree… One of the first plants that I’d ever fallen in love with. I have fond memories of the allspice plant that stood sturdy and fragrant on the gravelly laterite on our front porch at home years ago.  It

It is impossible to go back to the same old places. Places change. Transform. So do people. They change, transform, grow out of their old selves and populate newer and stranger inner dimensions which might not have been known even to themselves before. Everything flows. It’s normal to long for the lost places of a bygone time. It’s human to pine and crave sometimes, for a return to those dreamscapes of the past. Irrational, though it may seem at times. You can go back to a house in the hope of rediscovering your home. But it’s foolish to hope to rediscover that very home where once stood a table laden with all your favourite books and your cat stretched wide on top of your open world history text book, pawing at your pencil, as you tried to make sense of the Cuban Missile crisis or the Code of Hammurabi. It’s foolish to hope to return to that very sunny evening on the beach when you had allowed the unruly waves to demolish that sand castle you had built for the sheer joy of build

From in-between the clank clank of vessels in the kitchen, I could make out heavily accented telemarketing commercial voices emanating from the main hall where the TV had previously been spewing out Doraemonish Chotta Bheemish voices. Sensing that it was time for my kiddo to hit bed, I called out to her, “Bedtime…now go brush your teeth like a good girl..”  After continuing with my kitchen scouring for a few more minutes I  realized  that the telemarketing show was still on with the mock American accented Hindi speaking female voice continuing to wax eloquent on the 199 benefits of some bogus gym contraption that guaranteed all the right things in all the right places. What my brat was doing there listening to it puzzled me. ‘She might have slept off on the divan', I thought. Even if that was not the case, Silence had never been a healthy sign when it came to my baby angel. I moved to the hall to see what was happening. A mind-boggling sight greeted my eyes.. Our yoga mat