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.
White Shadows 