Over the cartography of life’s map leaned I
Dangling from the whirling ceiling of time
Eyes jellied tracing an engilded child’s footprint
The child, to whom the life yielded its worth
Under the majestic elanji tree, which shaded the large front-yard
On a spacious sand mound, she was there playing alone
She built her first house there, with a huge compound wall around it
And with a well, adjacent to the kitchen just like her parent’s house
She imagined that within the house, her grandma sat with her legs stretched forward
A playroom with lots of wooden toys, bangles and bead boxes
She loved to make “muthumala”s , with the colourful beads she collected from her old broken “mala”s which, every year, during the temple festival days her mother brought for her
She made new designs, breaking and twining, again breaking and twining …
She climbed up into the dark attic, searching through the antique mysteries her father stored
At times, bringing small tables and boxes down to collect her beads and secret things
The muvandan mango tree just in front of the entrance, which gave abundance of mangoes that could be plucked from the veranda itself
The swings on the fatty jack fruit trees
The swinging with her friends, taking turns to push and swing
The cashew-nut fruits and many a kind of mangoes, sharing with friends
The river, the flowing serenity of the village life
There was the cake, made with wet sand and coconut shell
The rice of gravels and curries of leaf-bits and flowers
Crowns of jack-fruit-tree leaves, stitched with eerkil (palm-leaf-stick)
The long rope-train, the very first one she and her friends had a ride
The round-leaf tickets, paper boats, the multi-coloured umbrella- her father’s gift
The orange coloured frilled silk frock which she hated for its itching her skin
The watering the plants, acting a grown-up girl, with the mother
The waiting by the riverbank for her mother to finish the bathing
The scintillating sunset over the palm tree heads
The rainy seasons never were boring for her chirping self
The nights, far away across the river, when it was flooded, they cooed for the ferry, the return cooing, the twinkling lights of palm-leaf torches moving towards darkness, one after another, every now and then
The running with calves and kittens, the sleeping kittens in the nook of the hands
The smell of enlanji flowers, the garland of them to put on Krishna’s photo, every evening
Then there the gold was getting reduced to very tiny spots, sparingly here and there
There are the patches of swirling lines of gales on the map
Some dead volcanoes and frozen lava trails
Some dark valleys and crossed steep hills
Some empty spaces, which are yet to be worked on
The gold is always an asset, whether to be showcased or to wear around one’s neck
None can, but, wear a heavy-dark-rusty-iron chain as a fashion
They are useful only to lock the gates, to curb the intrusion of disasters
*Muthumala – bead-chain
*Mala – chain
*Eerkil – the stick of palm leaf
*Muvandan – a type of mango
Elanji/bakul – a tree which grows so wide and fat with fragrant star-like flowers
sarala
Nostalgic. Lovely.
Thanks Vineetha 🙂
Remembrance of Things Past.
Thank you Sir 🙂