Fitting tribute
Very few of us know that Sitara Devi had a very close connection with Bengal. She was born and brought…
I am a bench in the park in your city, which has recently been touched by autumn.
My immediate neighbour, sitting stoically beside the next bush, had hushed to me once about the colours of autumn in foreign lands. In his younger days, he narrates, he used to be a bright emerald green in colour, sitting on a cobbled pathway near a lamp post in some European country where every autumn, the tree behind shed its multitudes of dead, yellow leaves upon it’s iron seat.
He says that the leaves felt cold, restless and dry and he continues to rant, at all lonely hours of the day, how love showed itself in forms big and small as the sun journeyed across the sky. But I have always been here, in this city, where life barely stops to rest. I tell him, when he is eager to listen, that here in the heart of Bengal, autumn does not show itself in plush colours or crumbling leaves. Infact, autumn here is a beautiful lady, highly introvert, who barely lets loose the reins of her windy hair and heart. But here, autumn is in the wind and in the sunshine that begins to soften its harshness as days cross themselves out on the calendar. He tells me that he barely understands the difference between summer and autumn. It is all sunshine, wind and loneliness to him.
But I tell him autumn is different. Autumn is in the wind that caresses the leaves at five in the morning as gently as a mother. It blows through the deserted streets and cuddles along with the puppies, which sleep beside the empty garbage dump of the locality. Autumn is in the laziness that preoccupies the mortals and instead of the usual fifty, it’s only a handful who take the pain of slipping into their running shoes and jog around the park. Autumn is how the sun smiles with grace everytime you try to look at it without your sunglasses.
Autumn is beautiful but even more beautiful, is the mortal emotions that play around this place during autumn. I have been sitting here like the great grandfather through four cycles of season and I have come to realise that human beings relate to no other season as closely as they relate to autumn.
May be, they find semblance in the beauty and colours that mark the season’s arrival as well as in the harrowing hollowness of the wind’s lonely walks. Once, I had a man sitting on my seat nearly for hours each day, for ten days. He had a sad, unshaven face and always wore one t-shirt.
After he left each day, the ground below would be littered with crumbled little notes all speaking of love’s abandonment and winter’s wait. Then came a young woman. She would come and sit near one end of the bench during the sundown and cry so long as the lamp posts did not come to life. Another time, there was a group of friends who came and sat down and discussed life’s trail, full of personal excerpts, sarcasm and jokes. So long, I had been accustomed to seeing people weep and vent out their feelings in autumn, only when I saw a very old man and his lovely golden pet talk and play with each other before me, that I realised autumn is not only about melancholia.
It somewhere is a concoction of emotions, a mirror image of humanity in nature – living, lived, dead and dying – all framed together in branches rising artistically into the sky. Autumn, is a lot like you, with a smile on your sun-kissed face and twinkle in your eyes. Autumn is a lot like me, feigning in colour and rusting its strength, braving the quickly approaching winter’s chimes.
ex-coordinator, ex-Bishop Morrow School, Krishnagar
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