Sand and cement were in abundance. Only if they knew how to seek a little space, and how to take the shape of four walls, there might have been a home.
Alas they didn’t.
Instead, layered over soft earth to create two avenues, along which, these two souls, went on travelling forever. Two avenues therefore.
Spending lives past each other, carving each other out, finding ways through each other, letting go of each other often… to be lost in unfamiliar parts of the city. Meeting again at sunset horizons. To be lost into each other like two blending colours of dusk.
Thus met the two of them as well. Not when thirsting, not when forgetting, but only when their paths chanced to become one for a little while along the journey.
Every few years, the avenues would freeze and so would their tired feet. At that frozen moment, one, or perhaps both of them, would pause to think of the home that never was. It could have been… why did it never. They would look at their own trails in bewilderment as if throwing the very question at two indifferent Möbius avenues –
Why did it never?
They gazed hard and long at the road as if to force a foundation and make a magical home emerge right there from nowhere.
And implausible as it may sound, that makeshift home would then appear from someone’s impossible dream. And the two of them would sit and smile and talk and go about their day as if they have been living in that home forever.
More to read
Ai Mohabbat Tere Anjaam Pe: A Ballad of Failed Love
पेंन्टिंग! by Gulzar: A Translation and Transcreation
Bipade More Rakkha Karo: The Prayer to Be Fearless (Translation of Tagore Song)
I am not aware if Amrita Pritam had penned her autobiography. But if there is one, then Ye Kahani Nahin has to be part of that necessarily. It characterizes her relationship with Sahir whom she refers as SA and herself as AA. This characterization is tethered to a rendezvous spanning three days – and is therefore objective even as it is full of symbolism.
As I grasped this literary piece on YouTube, I could easily discern that a pregnant silence connected the two, that an innate dignity informed their relationship, and that Sahir’s mother was in the picture wistfully looked at them, to their connect. AA did allude to the difficulties inherent in their relational consummation – that they were of different religions, that she was under the burden of an existing formal relationship. Yet they enjoyed a relational openness, did not keep this fact to only themselves.
Jumelia’s adaptation is beautifully word, is quasi abstract, compels one to visit the piece as originally penned. Jumelia’s prose is a threshold poetry. Will look forward to her further creative effort.
I walk in the dusk knowing I’m lost
still I walk in hope, to find my destination someday
I know not what destination is
but I walk in hope, to find what I’m looking for
I know not what I’m looking for
but I walk in hope, that I’ll find you one day
I know not where are thou
yet I walk in hope
that you’ll find your path to reach me, hold me and never fade away
The path you are in was once waiting for you
I walk in the dusk knowing I’m lost
still I walk in hope, to find my destination someday
I know not what destination is
but I walk in hope, to find what I’m looking for
I know not what I’m looking for
but I walk in hope, that I’ll find you one day
I know not where are thou
yet I walk in hope
that you’ll find your path to reach me, hold me and never fade away
The path you are in was once waiting for you