If Life were a Caravansarai
It was only when I started to adult is when I realised that a thousand things have to go wrong before life starts to make sense.
In a manner of speaking, it gets really tiring
moving in and out of love,
always swinging-
Searching in people and faces meanings we only sometimes found.
Making sense.
Dreams were the one of the first things that helped:
Every time we close our eyes here, we open them some place else. It’s almost like living the life of a dolphin- jumping out of the sea to breathe for a few seconds before diving back in -waking up- until we sleep, and breathe again.
Things that touched us once and never left, coming to life every time we dream, settling around the corner of our eyes,- transforming into dead eye residual in mornings. It was in one of those dreams when i realised-
If life were a Caravansarai, we’d all be its happy backpacking travellers.
Travelling, eternally, moving in, and out of rooms that light up every morning with a sun freshly bathed in the seas of east.
If we all lived in one sarai, and had a room of our own, we’d rush in to furnish them with stories, our stories.
If life were a Sarai,
I’d paint my walls White, and then Black. Never Red.
Red is the colour of love they say,
and I wonder how, when you’re either in love, or not.
Either white, a most beautiful spectrum of all the shades of colours that there are
or a complete vacuum that absorbs everything and reflects nothing.
In my room, I’ll hang little cocoons around the edges of my multiple windows. Every cocoon a bundle of thoughts
I never said out loud,
wrapping themselves around me one thread at a time,
one untold confession at a time.
and when it’ll sometimes rain outside,
i’ll push the windows wide open
and let the cocoons dance to the music of a singing wind,
so it breaths, and it’ll all come undone.
In the room of my own i’d draw on my walls intricate mandals.
Every mandal, a blueprint of thought patterns in my head.
Painting and repainting, a chaotic palimpsest
of ever growing motifs,
growing with colors with every life lesson learnt.
Every poem I won’t write will be a music instrument hung off the walls.
And when on stormy nights, the wind will hiss in through the cracks in my window i keep forgetting to get fixed?
They’ll start leaking with music I have known.
I’d get up, immediately, and write.
But most of all,
If life were a Sarai, I will let strangers knock on my door, and come in.
I’ll make them tea, and they can stay in as long as they want.
And when they will want to shift because they like the view in the other room better? I will help them shift, and tell them that they can come by anytime.
I never lock my room anyway.
But my windows will never have fairy lights and only candles- keeps hallucinations of permanence away.
I’d look out from my windows some nights when I feel lonely, and wave to the travellers living in the balcony next door. I’ll take a beer if they pass and stay talking to them all night.
Life would be a lot more easier if it were just a hostel with nice Graffiti.
I wouldn’t even mind making my own breakfast.
We’d be in for such little time anyway.
