Homecoming?

I was standing on my balcony late in the night looking down at the vacant plot where my dearest car had stood for the past few years. I felt that slight nip in the cool breeze. It might have just been my imagination but I wanted badly to feel that welcome nip in the air. The afternoons already had mellowed feel to it, with a definite promise of the coming winter.

I love this season….autumn in Delhi. For me it defines my faith in life. Bright yet melancholic, happiness without a reason, anticipation of greater times, heart-soaring music, happy flowers, sparkling snow-peaks, ever lasting friendships, long coffee meetings, deep forever love.

I went around town looking for all these things or rather its impressions in the city’s many nooks and crannies. A sparkling laughter in a bylane, an eternal wait on the steps of a shop, lies to home from a phone booth, a secret lunch break from office, the hurried walk from the parking lot to get to the party, the long dreamy drives back home, ice-creams on a rainy day, crying under a neem tree. I never realises that so many memories lay all over the city for me to pick up again and remember.

I felt the city tug at my heart. I had tears…..yes, I was yet another of them who used the city and never called it my own.

And yes, I am going to miss badly the Autumn in the city.

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Lately any kind of closed space makes me claustrophobic. That is, apart from my office and home. Pubs, coffee houses, other friend’s home….I feel as if the walls are closing in on me and then my heart starts to beat faster urging me to run. Good old music infact adds onto it. It reminds me of a past….the good and the bad, the expectations, the story in those eyes, the micro world that I had created for myself and lived in for so many years. I want to run away…I have been running away for so long….way away into the mountains to pitch all my unanswered questions again and again. Maybe that’s why I am here….the sea stops me….no more running away….the vast world is just out there. All mine and yet different. I can blow away all my questions….out in the sea….to be answered at its own unhurried pace.