Showing posts with label riverbanks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label riverbanks. Show all posts

Monday, October 10, 2016

Gangey

The way she moves, makes my body quiver with delight and frenzy. The muse, the lover, the artist, the mother. The strands of her hair glisten in the wind, and dance aflutter, pulling me deeper into herself. The sun kisses her cheeks and imparts them a golden tinge, and the rays bounce over her skin to deflect some radiance on me, the cursed one, also ironically the lucky one. Her thoughts I can read, the goosebumps on her skin I can feel; they are a bigger intoxication than anything that will come to follow in the day.
Her visage I can trace in fine detail on this morning. Her essence I try to understand better. Her calm and her rage, both can be felt in palpable terms now that I am closer to her than ever before.

She sways to the breeze from the east,
she talks to the clouds crowding in the sky awestruck,
she teases each tree around,
she glances over me briefly
and I live the delusion that everything is found.

Monday, December 20, 2010

Ganga

Routine again. Step out, down to the river, maybe a 'Hi' to the freewheeling Baba in his bamboo hut along the way and share a chillum or some tea, finally down to the river whose lapping waves and the cold sands in the shadow regions serve a hint to its freezing waters, and the whirlpools at some distance a hint to its torrid nature, strip on the sandy shore, scream and come running and dive as John M does, or gradually walk in deeper and deeper as I do, for a slow sensory awakening, feel the hypothermia waiting at your physical threshold, another dip and then another one, and now in lost notion of all proprieties you walk back on the sandy shore shivering like a rattlesnake's tail and uneasily whistling, find the sun a blessing and sit down atop one of the rocks to sun yourself dry, talk and think like Plato, feel absolved of you 9-to-6-Monday-to-Friday routine, stare into solving the mysteries of geography about you, listen to the discordant truck horns in the distance, pat your canine friends who have confusedly followed you to the river, study the footprints, the ripples, the words that never get to you, the smiles that forever beguile you, the rugged spirit you will forever admire, the nostalgia you will fall into next when you're here.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Washed away

The Yamuna, that nullah that i last remember it as, is back to being a river now. It's as odd as the resurgence of hair on a bald person. The pontoon bridges lie reduntant. Any businesses near its banks - like the juice vendors and farmers - have displaced. The banks lie desolate, but beautiful. Now that the water levels have risen and the banks are closer, I walk upto the edge, right where the land ends. I assume that the edge won't erode and continue to act sophisticated. An odd fisherman or two are the only population around, if you ignore counting in the migratory cranes that decided to break their journey for a couple of days. The water is muddy brown - which is a welcome change from the earlier shade of evil black. Countless eddies churn the waters, but to no effect. For the first time it seems that the river has the potential to support life. And I also come across things that suggests the river's affiliations to the end of life. There are tiny earthen pots lying around, which MUST be containing ashes of the dead. It is confirmed when I spot hollowed, brittle bones around one of the pots that lies smashed. The rest must have been washed away in the agressive currents The water levels are conspicuously higher.
She flows with great intensity, thanks to the torrential showers. The monsoons haven't arrived yet, I'm told. If that is so, then I can foresee the great Delhi floods of '08.

Once the rain clouds go away, Yamuna would be back to 'black greasy smelly chemicals' mode it was earlier in. I shouldn't mind - the pontoon bridge would be up again, and the sugarcane juice vendors would come back to its banks and ring cute little bells to attract their customer for another glass of refreshing juice. Blue bulls - currently living deep in the forests nearby - would move outwards, where I can see them grazing once again. But the greatest delight once it's back to being so is that I get to reminisce; reminisce over each and every artefact that ties to my memories.
The scenes today would make for reminiscence the next year. Fruition period.