MIRRORED WATERS



Through an open window, the mossy monsoon winds of a lazy evening visit my room after playing with the curtains for a while. They waft over the tiny ears and delicate fur of Tao, my four-year-old cat, who sits quietly on her perch, her ocean-coloured eyes drowsy yet watchful, gazing at the backyard where wild taro leaves have grown freely and rebelliously spread all around. The air brushes against my face like a cool sea breeze my heart had been seeking for a long, long time.

Life slows down with subtle tenderness when the body, mind, or heart needs rest. Incessant and limitless desires line up, yearning for all the time and attention they deserved but didn’t get. I feed them with poems, stories, music, cinema, culinary art, and many fond memories of the past. On some days, I stay in a forest bungalow, go on evening walks with Gaibi and Nag listening to their witty repartee, and watch the large orange sun gradually drown into the Dumartarai River, sitting on a tortoise-back rock close to the Bailadila range; while on others, I sit in a train that runs through the lush pastures of Blackmore Vale, passing over a meandering river named Nadder.

We often tend to drift away from reality in the pursuit of aesthetic escapism, but what it does is it makes us dwell in the moment and brings us back to the reality called ‘life’. At the times when I called myself a devoted reader, I would mostly read fiction novels, and these works would leave me with pictures of vivid reality. These works would help me understand what newspapers failed to explain to a twelve-year-old. I would read about Jugget Singh and Nooran and their love that blossomed under the starlit sky, shriveled by the horrific reality of partition. I read stories of people's lives in Afghanistan, the busy streets that once smelled of bread and cardamom, the skies filled with fluttering kites, left all silent and forlorn. The love for the environment and concern for drying rivers and filled-up lowlands, the seed of it all, was sown into me through fiction.

As I sat by the window, the cool breeze drifting through my thoughts gradually thickened into a haze—much like Delhi’s smog. Sensing the shift in my energy, Tao turned her gaze away from the taro leaves and set them on me.

“You have been thinking too much,” Tao said.

I smiled faintly and said, “Yes. I was pondering over how slow everything has become for me in the last month, since my leg was injured. How the stairs at the metro stations will feel longer now, how crossing the road might take me twice the time.”

“But wasn’t it you who longed to come home? You missed the slow life, the lush green trees bathed in the monsoon rain, and the simplicity of our little village. And now that you are here, though not in the way you imagined, why not take this pause as a gift?” Tao replied softly, her eyes steady on mine.

“Yes, I do cherish this homecoming. How dearly I have loved and missed this serenity, this monsoon-drenched greenness! But who can bear staying within four walls for so long? You know how my heart longs to step outside, to wade through the crystalline stream that flows past the monastery, or to run across the pineapple fields as the rain patters on my umbrella. Erik would call me every time I returned home. We would take small rides to the hills, eat steamed momo from roadside stalls, and sit by the edge of a winding road, watching the narrow, curving river below. From up there, the city stretched out beneath us, like the satellite images I use when making maps. We watched it the way birds might watch tiny humans from the top of a tree. But this time, I only think of it all and of all the things I had planned to do during this break. I will have to wait another year for it now. Time has its ways of teaching us to be patient and makes us wait while it moves without a pause. How selfish! ”

Tao stretched lazily, as if neither time nor worry could ever touch her. “It is not about time,” she said.

“It is about freedom and its many cages. Sometimes the rulers cage the people. Sometimes it is the body. And more often, it is the mind that builds the bars. The first two: ‘external power’ and ‘physical limitation’, can be challenged with unshakable inner will. People have sparked revolutions and created beauty even in confinement. But the mind that convinces the body and makes it feel trapped, that is the hardest to undo. You read an article the other day by Anurag Minus Verma, didn’t you? On Iranian cinema, the silencing of films due to censorship and the author’s conclusion—“the “absence of freedom is unfortunate, but the absence of thought is fatal.” I don’t mean to glorify constraint, but here is a lesson you must learn: to truly resist, we must first understand reality for what it is, no matter how cruel or difficult to accept it might be. Once we see it, we either adapt or rebel, but we do not remain unchanged. Tell me, haven’t you done both before? The human mind, when it realizes a crisis, is capable of finding a way out.”

After thinking for a while, I replied, “You know about my bittersweet relationship with the city. I have let its chaos and fast-paced life consume my energy some days, but I have also surrendered to the quiet love it held for me. I have accepted that with my once broken heart, later sewn with threads of love.”

I paused for a moment and continued, “Tao, I have never truly been swept away by the rush of the city. Even amidst its speed, I have lived a slow, measured life. You know it, right? The core of me has always remained unhurried, and somehow, Delhi accepted that version of me. I think that was one way of acceptance and also resistance, to not give in completely to its urban lifestyle and choose my way of living, to walk my own path while acknowledging its cultural contradictions and diversity.”

                                                             

Tao blinked softly, listening.

“I would walk at my own pace on the silent footpaths, while the cars sped past. I would cross the dusty, crowded lanes to reach that old fort, where I would sit and watch the sun melt quietly into the horizon. I would sit by myself in the library on a rainy winter day, reading and occasionally watching the pearl-like raindrops glide down the vast glass panes. But lately, I’ve been feeling… restless. I can’t spend all my days here reading, thinking, and talking to you. I have a lot of work to do back in the city. Delhi might not force me to compete, but I had set a rhythm of my own, and now I have shifted from it.”

Tao, ever calm and never surprised by my flickering thoughts, murmured gently, “Use this time to gather strength to restart. Don’t waste it in worry. Let this pause prepare you, quietly, for what is to come. While the city ran, you walked. That’s your rhythm. And even now, you are not, not trying. You are observing, gathering, becoming.”

I turned my gaze to the window. It started pouring. Somewhere far away, rivers were rising, flooding homes in the northeast. And yet, here I am, wrapped in the comfort of my room, healing, resting, and thinking a lot.

“I feel helpless,” I whispered. “The world, despite its beauty is unraveling in so many ways. We sit here watching the news: people losing homes, people grieving, people standing for one another, and people working through it all with whatever strength they have. And look at me, I haven’t even begun my work since I have come home.

Tao leapt softly from her perch and curled into my lap. “This is part of the process,” she said. “And you, right now, are becoming.”

“Becoming?”

“Yes,” she nodded. “When you talk to me about the books you love, when you marvel at how a friend of yours writes thoughtful articles, when you face your weaknesses and choose yourself over everything else, when you push yourself to walk that extra round even through the pain, when you read an extra page of that difficult article. When you feed me with all of these thoughts, you’re slowly returning to life. Don’t you see it? And as for your work, you can start anytime. Now that you have realized this, why not make use of this moment? The walk down streets or the stairs of the metro isn’t what you need to do right now. For now, you can strengthen yourself, work on the things you have longed to, and live with all that you have now.”

I nodded and we stayed quiet for a while. Then, I stood slowly and limped toward the kitchen.

“Dinner?” Tao asked.

Yes, I smiled, opening the cupboard. “But not just for now. I am keeping something ready for the days to come.”

Back in school, I used to strive hard to write good essays; though ideas came easily, I would often fall short of expressive words. I would chase sentences, flip through pages of the Oxford Pocket Dictionary, and filled the margins of the few novels I owned with pencil marks. I tried very hard to write like those I read. I wanted to capture the images flickering in my mind like bioscope reels and paint them onto the page for myself to see and for others to read. One day, my cousin gifted me a book wrapped in a thick, glossy paper that made a rustling sound each time I unfolded it or peeled the tape from its edge. That wrapper had quotes printed across it, lines from novels or on the joy of reading. At one corner of it, there was a quotation—“The “exception proves the rule”. I didn’t understand it at first, but something about its contradiction felt liberating to my younger self. The confusion in my head gradually settled as I realized the need to deconstruct binaries. Perhaps that is the nature of all things: we escape to return, we pause to build momentum, and all the contrasts we live through: calm and chaos, stillness and motion, magic and realism, are distinct but held together in the mosaic art of life. I realized that to write a good essay, I had to learn to listen, to slow down, to observe, to read deeply, and accept both chaos and calm as part of the same. Similarly, to live a good life, one must embrace all the feelings and experiences, happy-sad, exciting-monotonous, that comes to us. We must look for the littlest that remains in us, and let it spark joy, as Tao keeps reminding me.

I fill my plate with warm rice and dal, place a golden omelette beside it, and carry it back to the window, the rain tapping softly against the glass. As I sit down, I notice that Tao has quietly disappeared into some corner of the house. I smile to myself, take a bite of the warm food, and turn to my notebook.

Tao would return in a while to remind me — “You can not fly now, but you can sit on the soft green grass and gaze into the mirrored waters. There, you will see the reflection of the infinite blue sky, with cotton clouds floating like ships full of hope.”


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