Last night, as I walked through the canopy of dry grass, a strange illusion came over me; the night was cold and the breeze penetrating, sort of trickling through the most sensual neurons of my body. The lady with a heap of clothes on her back went past me, with mincing steps, eyeing me for a fleeting second. I paused and so did the world around me, shut my senses off and apprehended the beauty of the moment; the lady walking heavily heaving and thrusting her right foot into the pile of mud before her, holding her sari by the folds with her naked palms, all the time indifferent to the beauty she possessed. She was not lascivious by the modernistic standards, but was effortlessly exuberant, intoxicating in the way she undid the heap off her back.
Presently, she bent over and was reaching out for the folds of the heap, to unite. As she sat down, I noticed that something was bothering her. Her eyes, it was perhaps a straw of dust that found its object of beauty. From where I stood, I could not tell if she had blue eyes, but her eyes certainly would have put an antelope to shame. The wind was gaining momentum, night spread its fangs all over the place, it stealthily slipped through a dark corner here, and a roof top there; it swallowed the entire horizon around me, all that remained was the woman and her clothes heap. Night appeared ominous, it was gobbling up pellets of stones, mounds of wood and mud, tall but lazy trees that stopped swaying; the infectious force was beginning to change the atmosphere. Dogs took to barking somewhere outside the perimeters of the campus, hissing noise of some creature close by, rattling noise of the leaves that unfurled with the wind raising them above the earth’s carpet, just as the waves on the beach scoop out sand from the ocean’s bed.
In the midst of all this chaos, the lady went about her work. Her indifference lifted her high above an invisible platform where she frolicked in joy with every undulating wave that pushed her up or pulled her down. The space-time continuum itself was laid bare before her as she went about piling her stakes of indifference. Then something happened, she withdrew her presence from the surroundings, and for the first time became aware of my watching her. Now, the beauty of the surroundings dissipated as the wave that hits the shore recedes; the array of bubbling and throbbing beauty that the lass ignited now subsided as she adjusted her composure. Just as the giant wave leaves the shore with a strange stillness as it recedes, the whole atmosphere sort of subdued and dropped to a dead zone. But, with every giant sea horse that smoothens the shore as it froths violently in one giant leap –the wave breaks- and recedes, there are a million tiny sea horses somewhere hidden in the dark recesses of the ocean that are about to join, together they make let yet another giant sea horse spit out its froth jubilantly on the shore –another wave breaks- but there is always the momentary stillness.
Perhaps this was the momentary stillness, eerie, uncomfortable, un-endearing and wasteful. As I left the place behind me, I was plagued with an overwhelming desire to re live in it, that moment with hideous beauty. If only I could, I would not stand so close to the object of beauty as to disturb the space-time continuum she was situated in. the disturbance the lass created in the continuum flew in ripples and I balanced my conscience over it as a cork would over ripples in a pond. I would not stand way too far, for that would put me at an awkward position of a formidable predator eyeing its prey- an antelope perhaps- from a distance too long that the predator lunges forward in a giant leap with the fear of losing its prey.
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