I sat by the Mississippi river, my eyes feasting on the changing hues of autumn and my senses enraptured by the cold autumn wind. Out-of-nowhere came a wave of melancholic memories and washed me back to half-a-decade ago when I used to sit alone at the traffic crossing of Rabindra Sadan bleeding doggerels on my little notebook. I remember how the lights of the oncoming traffic on one of the central roadways of Calcutta blinded me. I remember the stares, the smirks cast upon me by judgmental pedestrians. But most of all, I remember how deafeningly silent, unfathomably hollow and terribly lonely it felt even amidst the jostling cacophony of the city. It awes me how loneliness never left me. Loneliness clawed at me then just as it gnaws at me today. Only, perhaps the blow has dampened over time. It awes me how I travelled thousands of miles to a whole different country to experience loneliness all over again-layered and intense. My heart always restless with the feeling of losing eve...
I am always stuck in a limbo. Yearning for a far fetched world while my feet are tangled into the veneers of reality. As a child, yearning to grow up and be an adult; as an adult, yearning to achieve one shiny object after the other. I wonder why the human mind is designed to traverse from one achievement to another, one place to another, one little possession to another bigger and better. Who indoctrinated us to be materialistic mongers? I have yearned for so many things in life and achieved them or negotiated peace and moved on. What I have yearned the most in life is love. I have never settled with the love I already had for a moment, satiated, content and fulfilled. I remember, as a child looking at my friends' fathers warmly snuggling, holding and even kissing their children at the bus stop to school, while I felt empty. My mother never had the time to smother me with kisses, or hug me for nothing at all. In fact, as much as I remember the chastising, surprisingly I don't...