Hey You !

This seems to be a season of goodbyes - of finales and adieus. I always feel a heaviness in my heart as I watch the hearse leaving  with the departed. But then , life goes on and maybe as the Regression Therapy states there is life beyond and you transcend this life and many more to be with those who matter over the eternity ..... And time touches everything to transform them for better or for worse - depends on how you look at it.  Last week we were in Digha , by the sea ,brought back throwback memories which belonged to another time and the same place. People  gave me strange looks when I said I was in Digha , because it is synonymous with crowds, seediness and all things that almost everyone looks down upon. But Digha to me means Baba and driving down the beach ( It is an impossibility now) with the gulls flying out of the way- stretches of sand and shells and shell fish and  crabs running against the tide. Digha also means happy time, walks down the beach, and...

I was wondering  if little children pull the  rath still.... But I noticed my Facebook  timeline having quite a few pictures of smiling faces with their bedecked little chariots, much to my delight. In this digital chaos , somewhere these simple customs are lost , like a friend lamented this morning. Our parents bought us this crude do-tala rath and we decked it up with ghuri r kagoj and made The Trio sit in the prime position as we pulled the contraption from one room to the other offering the papad, math mishti and batasha ......The contraption rested for a week when the ritual was repeated on the ulto-rath day. And then there was also the Rath-er Mela , with it's stalls full of trinkets and baubles and bhepu banshi. Strangely, we also had a film magazine which was called "Ulto -Rath" and which was out of bounds for us as kids, thus building up on the curiosity quotient. The magazine honestly, wasn't much really, a few stories, gossips and black and white...

And the rains came....after days of heat, sweat and grime, suddenly everything looked washed clean , like freshly soaped linen ! The droplets hung on the leaves and the single rose in the bush, and the car got badly sprayed with mud....but who cares ? The sound of rain is the best music I heard in a long long time. And I could finally spot the elusive squirrel that was making a racket all these days and I just hoped the cat doesn't kill the squirrel....  It is a dog eat dog world...both the kittens died, one killed by the dog and the other run over. Only last Monday I was watching them frolic as I sipped my tea. Terrorism and unmindful killings do not have a boundary, from my garden to the world outside , no one is safe anymore. Just the other day I was thinking , these kittens are safe within the four walls of the garden and good that they have learnt to climb trees....but I did not foresee that they too would venture out. And my Tarot prediction on Facebook was ...