Now I am...

...on the periphery. Looking in. Watching all that was. I have been ejected from the spiralling staircases of Benaras. The wind found a way to get me out. Now I can only remember what it was like to look through a kaleidoscope the shape of Chet Singh Ghat. I remember those walls, those cracks, age finding a way to mark all that is grey with a texture the colour of the earth. Abstract Kollisions everywhere, the ground looked six-thousand years old. That tree, those birds, that oasis. I remember being with Brownie looking at him with him. His tail fading to black. I remember that pigeon hovering about near a mirror thinking he found his mate. I remember Tomya, the way he played with Brownie. I am now sitting on a corporate chair listening to those stories played on repeat inside my head.

I remember that wonderful terrace where I played Marwa for hours at sunset, hoping the sun would stay. Any sign of the sun and I would return to Sa, the root note, that primordial sound from where the whole world emerged. The red sky bringing on the night, the night sky bringing on the black and the wonderful entry of Malkauns. How a raga can be coloured black but still sound so optimistic. I heard the Sarod's mirrorsound in my heart. The way the end of the day signalled a temporary movement to the dominant Madhyam and time bringing a crystalline shaped Rishabh into its vessel, a rose-shaped vessel holding all my thoughts from the day and its different descendants...

I am struggling to find a chorus to join, or a voice to sing in unison with. Its all come down to one. That one is me. There is no one near me, physically there are many but I have been singled out to pay my dues to life's unexpected taxman, he came knocking on my door that day in January when I became Dara Okat, the one who lost his hundred hands in the battle against time. But, time has to pass...