MIDNIGHT MALADIES

Once in a while when the nights are exceptionally quiet, I find it impossible to sleep. Tonight, happens to be one such. I am tossing and turning under the covers trying my best to enter that intangible but-oh-so-desirable world of perfect stories; but sleep remains beyond reach. The phone beeps. Ah! A friend to the rescue. I find a link to a blog on my message and without further ado I decide to seek solace in his world of hills, rains, people, snow and stories.

Ramshackle huts, gurgling rivers, the rain drenched earth and some memories will keep me awake tonight. His story has roused some very old and some very random pictures in the mind. And I am suddenly transported some 10 years back, to Calcutta, to this lane leading upto my school. It has started drizzling and I am walking on the streets with friends, singing a very cheap Bollywood item number, oblivious to all the disapproving looks being thrown in our direction.

I am lost in the beauty that this moment was, when all of a sudden, I find myself in Rishikesh, at the foothills of the great Himalayas. I am sitting around a campfire on a chilly September night with a bunch of my people, making merry and we have just discovered that we have been robbed. But that day, nobody seemed agitated; after the initial ruckus, all of us seemed resigned to the situation and were still sitting around the dying embers, quiet and sombre, every once in a while breaking out in song which eventually died on your lips.

And then I see myself in the future, somewhere in the mountains where it’s all under snow and there’s a full moon, or maybe near the sea, with the waves gently rolling out onto the sand. I could be in a dense forest or sitting around in a desert. I could be anywhere but nowhere do I see another soul in sight. Maybe they are there, behind a veil. But it is a long night and I wish they would come out, sit beside me and sing melodies into the night.