Never Let Me Go

( dear city of joy, didn't want to bid goodbye without a smile )


~

The leaves of the plants once put in our flower vase are turning yellow. They are going to fall off anytime now. In their place, new light green baby leaves are emerging ...such is the cycle of life...the new gives way to the old...and the old ? The old vanishes somewhere...into the folds of some memory that we once used to have, which is no longer relevant perhaps.

So, the plant mimics my life. Dear friends, I am leaving this city forever. I am leaving my place which I used to call my dear home in a few days. I am going to a new city. And ironically, this new city will also turn out to be like that plant in the vase...one day, we are going to bid farewell to the new city too and march on to another city...

People who get extremely and intimately too attached to everything that they meet on their way, people who are like me, cannot handle such a transition with ease. I get too attached to objects and people too soon. That is why I crave for some kind of everlastingness.

Something that will stay forever.

But as I am growing up, I am learning that everything including this life that you and I have do not last forever. Everything is transitory.

We love, we get attached and one day it is gone...be it your home, your loved ones or your feelings that  gave you some kind of security...even feelings and thoughts that we lovingly and tightly held since childhood are gone now...

I vividly remember the first day I arrived in Kolkata. After the flight landed in the airport, we took a taxi ...the taxi drove past rows and rows of slums... children bathing in the street with abandon...women drying clothes...the chaos, the noise, the heat and the dust..the big trees..cotton trees with big dark green fruits hanging over the branches...so many of them...people talking in loud voices because the noise coming from the vehicles around them are even louder...the rich and the poor co-existing with not much gap between them either in terms of housing or in their mental make up...I made a few friends among them...and today..

Today, I am leaving. From being a total stranger to an intimate friend, this city changed my life forever. Yes, that is a big statement to make, but it is also the truth of my life. I was never born in this city. None of my relative or family member live in this city. Yet, it took me up in its lap just like a new mother would take care of an adopted child. That an adopted child is capable of receiving so much love, I never had any sense of that before arriving in Kolkata.

I was only a human being before I came here. This city made me spiritual. You name any emotion- love, longing, caring, sorrow, loneliness, patience, sacrifice, happiness,melancholy, absence,  -any emotion worth experiencing was made to be experienced by me ...was forced into me ..by this city..in all its depths.

Only friends and relatives cannot make you human. 
The trees, the strangers, the sky and the air that you breathe in, day in and day out, everything has its role to play in your life....not only they make you and change you but they give you so much when no one else can give you...
I remember many a nights and days when I used to stare out of my window into the vast sky and into the big tree with many branches...I could find something that no human could give...at least in that moment of human absence, or lack- the sky , the tree and nature gave me company..

Now, I am leaving that very tree, that sky...and that home that I so lovingly decorated and caressed with my own hands like a mother would caress her own baby...for some it is just a change of place ...from one to another...but for me, it is like leaving everything that I got so used to, so attached to...

From now on, the mornings won't be the same forever. Neither the nights. And that tree which I used to look at everyday...right outside my window...

One day, I will come back, many years later to this same place and look at that tree once again. And the sky, my old house...Or who knows, I might forget it all...new memories will rise up in the place of old ones, forcing me to adapt and adjust ...like the plant in the vase, shedding its old leaves, giving way to the new ones...

But what about everlastingness then ?

Nostalgia. Looking back. Looking back with fondness or sorrow...

As long as these memories are tightly etched in my mind, even if new memories are forcibly pulling me by my hair and telling me to look elsewhere, they would be everlasting indeed.