Threads of Memories from a distant past

A blanket of stars as a shroud over the dark, night sky - it was as if the lifeless, dark, smoggy scene that I had witnessed forever, had just been a mask hiding some ethereal beauty. It is a scene embedded deep in the recesses of my mind - one that I retrieve in moments of solitude and general unease. And unfailingly, it has eerily becalmed me. In its own unique way, I sense that it somehow makes a man feel a stirring proximity to nature ; a yearning for one's primeval roots. A oneness with nature, a feeling that life is much more than a senseless pursuit of material urges which drives us on relentlessly, day in and day out.

Samastipur is a small town in Bihar and it was there that I looked up at the blanket overhead and felt this stirring. Small towns have that effect on those who have had fleeting romances with such places, but are essentially city-breds. They have that elusive lure - the promise of a laidback, fulfilling life, the one that we willingly left behind to catch our dreams and yet, one, that paradoxically keeps popping up in our minds as some sort of an elixir to the ills that are a part of the city life package.

I was born in Bhagalpur and memories of my early childhood there are ones that I often turn to, when I feel this urge to run away from the life, I am used to, in the cities. Carefree walks down rustic roads, oblivious of the lesser forms of traffic that haunt such places; the ritual of saying a 'hello' to every 2nd person that you meet on the road, because you know them through 'so and so' and having the luxury of exchanging more than the usual, mundane pleasantries with them; the feeling that dusk actually harks the beginning of another phase in one's daily routine and is not just a mere lack of natural light that you can easily shrug off under the glare of a thousand city lights; waking up to see the sunlight pouring in through windows that offer a view of the sky rather than the concrete jungle all around; listening to the familiar sounds of the neighbourhood milkman or newspaper boy, going around on his usual rounds; being used to one's near and dear ones coming back from work when the sun has set, rather than in unearthly hours ; simple pleasures derived from a 'mela' in some part of the town that can easily outdo the gaudy frolic that the slickest of city malls can provide; playing with a cackle of boys in some forgotten by-lane amidst quaint houses that could easily afford to have vast gardens, the types even the super-rich in the cities can only wish for .. a whole list of images flash by.

Perhaps, in a world where success is achieved only through an abject thraldom to Mammon, the urge seems to be a refuge of the broken and disenchanted. But for those, who have had a taste of that life, it is difficult not to think of it with fond memories, every now and then.