Join me!

How do you describe a place that is at the cusp of beauty and battle. It exudes oodles of charm and yet occassional booms scare the daylights out of you. Fish still swim in its tranquil waters. It brags the purest of airs. Yet a storm is always ready to form. Luckily, I live in a more affluent part of the paradise. We have occassional parakeets as guests, chirping at the top of their voices on pleasant spring mornings. Butterflies in a myriad hues waltz in my small garden. The roses cling tightly to our three-storey home, where only two people live. A lot of sparrows, a few white rabbits and old pictures also live in my home.

I am away from Kashmir, both in distance and time. I miss the sound of rain on my pane, the snow flakes, the radiant sun-downs, the cricketing days with old pals. I work, read, write, reflect and play cross-words these days. When I was a kid, mom would ask me to do sums, read poems aloud, eat my breakfast with a chartreuse-top table-spoon -- often to my great annoyance -- before I could go out and make my own snow-man. How time flies? Mom. I see her in childhood-type dreams and she still asks me to eat and read aloud. Ofcourse I don't obey her now. I don't eat much and instead of reading aloud, I prefer writing poems. For a dream of another kind. I've an electronic juicer in my kitchenette to make my breakfast, which I hardly care to touch. The green-headed tablespoon is still locked away in a tiny corner -- in my bedroom -- in Kashmir.

It used to be so much fun to go to the city suburbs. See the villagers take their flock to graze. Driving past the stunning lakes. I guess evenings in the Dal lake still rock. No amount of mall-lights in our big cities or the plunging necklines in the parties we go to can compare to the balmy evening breeze. The morning sparkle stretching acoss the Pungam lake or the old-world lighting by Srinagar Boulevard. Barbeque in the canoe. Ducks gliding by. A tender sky watching you over.
What are you thinking about? Camp-fires, hi-altitude fishing, heaven! Join me for the Kashmir vacation, will you?

Samy