About A Dream.

Dream. ©Lala Rukh

There is this beautiful garden fenced in by tall trees. Some flowers along the sides, a bench in the corner facing the setting sun. The kind of bench in tales. Where you dream to sit with the one you love, staring at the peace lingering in the air. Where leaves are somehow greener than usual and where flowers smell better than most expensive scents of this world. Where birds chirp to compose melodies so soothing that you wish time to stop there for a while. Where grass dances with the wind and tickles your feet. And where we, us together, sit and stare at the sun trying to hide away in the clouds, being brighter that ever. Diffusing warmth inside our hearts. And where our hands touch,meet, as if they were made to be in each others embrace forever.

Perfection find it’s meaning here. May be it’s heaven.

May be it’s a dream.

But then. Something, may be reality, yanks you to life. Or may be it was life itself.

You discern. You realize.

This place. This beautiful place. That felt almost enchanted to you, it’s not special. It’s ordinary. Nothing is perfect here.

You realize, perfection lies only in dreams. And you remember, your dreams were always meant to shatter.

The air, that you imagined holding peace, suffocates you. The leaves are not so green either, they turn black, they wither and fall right in front of your eyes. Birds here don’t sing. They mourn. Flowers smell of burning desires, grass doesn’t dance either. It moans with it’s head down.

The beautiful garden, is not beautiful anymore. Not so perfect. It’s ugly.

The sun, it’s burning everything alive. It always burns. You were wrong to expect warmth from it. You were wrong to expect at all. Expectations are meant to be failed.

Your hands, sitting comfortably in each others embrace, shiver, are pulled apart.

And then you realize, you were all alone there. Always alone. Forever alone. The person you love was never meant to be a part of your dreams.

Your dreams, huh, your dreams. Dreams which were shattered once, so hard and so painfully, that your eyes would quiver with fear before thinking of watching them again. Dreams that once injured your heart and your soul so bad, that blisters there would ooze blood every time you took a breath. Dreams, that you promised yourself never to watch again.

How dare you break that promise? How dare you see a beautiful dream again.

It was meant to be shaken up, broken and shattered. It was meant to hurt you once again.

You realize, doing the forbidden never brings Love. Just tears. And tears are words that need to be written, after all.

 

My Childhood Home

Alone beneath the shadows © Lalarukh

 

With her back leaning against the wall, she sits down on the ground. It feels cold to her palms. Despite the fact that it is really hot out there, with sun at its peak in the noon, and with almost forty five degrees temperature, there is a row of trees behind this wall that keeps the passage way where she sits a bit cool with their shadows. And she has her history with deep shadows and darkness.

It’s ironic. Right in front of her, with the opposite wall she used to make a home with long sheets and pillows in her childhood. She’d make a kitchen with small plastic utensils and some snacks and then invite her little brothers to have tea. And she had this pink box with small clippings of extra cloth drops and pieces of laces and threads and a needle and she’d sew these things together to make random designs and what not. And she’d sit there all day busy in her little chores. It felt amazing.

The pink box is gone along with her childhood. Her brothers are grown up and living far away places. Those tiny plastic utensils, her mother safely placed at the shelf in her room along side other useless items she used to play with. Her mother dusts these daily but never ever thinks of throwing or giving away. Mothers. They have their own ways.

A bird chirps from the trees above. Their is a mud pot placed right beside her, filled with water for the birds to drink. It is really hot out there. This house, it used to be filled with laughter and shouting and excitement where a strange kind of silence and sadness resides now. Her mother and father, they have grown old. They look tired when they smile.

Tear, a tear rolls down her cheek and falls on the ground, cold enough in the presence of summer’s bright sun. May be its the tree’s. It’s their way of grieving. Over beautiful lost memories and a cheerless future. Or may be it’s the coldness from inside of her heart. It’s dead, after putting up with so much pain and faking happiness for so long, it’s finally dead. She is scared, this home with all it’s memories and charm, what if it wakes up her heart again? But then dead can’t be woken up, can they?

She thinks of her room. It feels haunted to her. She remembers when she was little, she had an art wall in her room. She would make drawings,paintings,scribbles and art and then stick those to the wall. Her drawings and art work improved as she grew up and it was all there at the wall which she was proud of. And then once while the house had to get painted, she had to remove her art from the wall with her own hands. She was sad. She was a teenager at that time. A long cupboard with lots of shelves was then placed alongside her wall. That cupboard now contains fragments of her childhood and they get dusted daily by her mother.

Those albums with her baby photos, school functions and their family day outs, that car which saw her and her siblings grow up from children to teenagers and then adults, that same TV they used to watch cartoons on, the fans the ceilings the walls, nothing’s changed, everything haunts her. The memories are beautiful. It’s the fact that nothing like this can happen in future that wrings the heart and wrinkles the soul.

She weeps. Head in her lap, hands wrapped around the knees she weeps. Her shadowed self, this mud pot, all these trees and those countless memories that crowded in her mind and flowed through her veins while sitting here, this scene, it would freeze in her eyes and would be a valuable treasure for the rest of her life to come, away from her home.

That day, she buried herself right there, in the passage way, beneath the shadows and under the weight of good old childhood memories to live inside them forever.

 

 

 

Of The Being….

The unbearable lightness of being (1998)

Seeds were sown, in the infertile lands

an immortal being was born

pain do it yield, tears make it torn

as it, eats up self of its own

Story be told today

Of the bouquet of

yellow faded leaves that this being is

Of the sore cramps all over it’s soul that

blisters gather up to tingle

Water in the blisters be like

in the inquisitive

eyes of a sad Mother

whose children sob in the nights and

sleep beaten arms can’t comfort them

Their pain, they don’t tell

sympathies don’t make them well

Of the stinking fragrance of it

fragrance like of the flowers in the eyes

of a beautiful damsel

flowers that bloom on the plants of

abandoned gardens and die there

Of the angelic body

as of the body of a married lady

which is, tired of embellishing

loveless deceitful fancy beds

Story of the being that bathes

in the moonlit nights under

flaring silver skies of it’s darkest desires

that burn in their own sweat

Story of the being that, with all it’s imperfections

is dunk in the divine sanction of Him

as it suffuses beyond time and space.

Dedicated to all the readers.