Skip to main content

My Jogging Days


As a child, it was the emptiness that I was fanatically obsessed with, and my jogging strip gave me just that. Far away from the city’s traffic, my jogging took me into the woods. Near the entrance we are greeted with a serene pond to one side that admittedly must have covered the strip itself when it was full. Sauntering around this lake are seen the local herdsmen; seated on a yellow rock, they watch by as their cattle walk in and out of the pond.

Far away from the entrance are the coconut and palm trees. The track snuggles its way through dried twigs and green shrubs; rocky crests and sandy troughs; narrow hesitation to a wide relapse towards the tall trees. With lungs heaving for oxygen, heart pounding, panting and with flesh wrapped around our skeletons that we wished to get rid of, we enter the zone of tall trees. A longing for the trees; too deep a feeling to comprehend.

As we leave behind us the tall trees and the mango fields to the left, the track now takes us into the village. Dense undergrowth to the right and yellow thatched roof huts to the left of the track. Before the huts are hens running helter-skelter; kids playing with marbles; dogs sleeping nonchalantly eyeing ever more curiously the new intruders. Patches of cow dung with palm imprints of the hands that slapped them against the walls; an old man with a wrinkled forehead and a bag of dry grass on his back; women working in the fields; the village atmosphere takes our mind off the heaving and panting, and we gradually relax.

We take rest at the end of the track. To one side is a Temple where the villagers come to worship, and to the other side are the trees that are reminiscent of thick forests. The farmlands beside the thick forest extend a long way into the horizon giving way to salt lakes and towards the end, city roads. It’s absolutely calm and soothing, but we return before the nocturnal beings step out of their homes.

As we jog back to the hostel, there is a sense of fulfilment and accomplishment. Our track takes us back into the woods. With the village behind us, we run into the woods. Although the perimeters of the woods have thick undergrowth, the insides are clear with little or no shrubs. Only the tall trees stand by lonely, all by themselves as we leave them behind until the next day evening. With sun lazing down and the swords of light after a day long of reckoning, tired and red, stroke our faces; cool evening breeze dries us up; the sand beneath our shoes rattles and the paddy fields sway in the breeze.

The woods are lovely, they make us feel at once lonely; but before the melancholic tendrils grip us, the woods bury us under sheets of delight and we return amazed at the wonderful life that surrounds us.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

White Man's Diary

I have utter contempt for a man who is not passionate about the work he does; I am at loss for words to decipher the enigma of this world and its subtle nuances. Its really intriguing at the same time quite disturbing to know that there are people who consider the world a mundane place. It’s inconceivable to think that people are ingenuously assuming the shred of indifference. Permit me to feel flattered for being bestowed upon me the onus of enlightening the kind of people that were ostracized for centuries by the society of the enlightened, the kind that were never kind to themselves, the kind that wished to liberate themselves from all the desires that besieged them perpetually. History tells us that the people who managed to think beyond the obvious were invariably rewarded for having put up the act of thinking. People who lived on this planet earth 2000 years prior to now, had enough food for thought. An incredible amount of friction existed at every step they took in the evolutio...
1 comment
Read more

Keyboard

In this land of square edges, people wear black square helmets with lines in contrasting colour drawn right at the top. With tapering stiff cloaks fattening at the bottom, we rest on this flat piece of charcoal Black Island. We stand tall, our bodies solid and inflexible, but the knees are lithe and give away. However, we are genetically designed to spring back up, stand tall and take the incessant knocking on our helmeted heads. Our life time varies; we hear news of islands, our contemporaries, wearing out with the frontline soldiers’ knees worn out of perpetual thrashing to their feet only to spring back and be knocked again. With a population of close to a hundred people, our island boasts a frontline soldier squad of 26. This squad is relentlessly battered; under a roar of stuttering knocks on the head, they are the ones who find their knees buckle before the rest of the population’s. More often than not, it is the ones who are guarding the left front, ones with ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘e’, or...
1 comment
Read more

Pressure Cooker

Daubing the top of wicks, one by one, with drops of kerosene, J proceeded to rest her newly bought Hawkins pressure cooker on the stove. “Now, you wait for the whistle” said the wealthy neighbouring lady who assisted J that morning with the cooker. With an assumed indifference, J waited for the whistle to lift its bottom over the lid and dance in merry. The kerosene stove, she was told won’t do justice to the cooker; she needed a proper gas stove with sleek finish and hollowed eyes that spewed blue flames with the turn of a switch. The kerosene stove with its twelve tongues brocaded over the epithelial layer of its throat, strung into a circle, served her family since the time of marriage. Her son squatted beside her, giggled and found it amusing as J rubbed his cheeks with her hands warmed before the many tongued stove. In the forlorn house under the wooden roof that leaked, between the pale brown walls that flaked, over the grey rugged tiles that cracked, mother and son lent their t...
Post a Comment
Read more