My Ethereal Yarn..

The officials visited each house of the town, No one was spared, white black or brown.  They hung a device over the throat which could count the no. of words per day, This is how they put a check on the number of words you could say.  Few agreed happily, some protested, but everyone had to accept, Noise pollution reached its highest level and this is how check was kept.  One two three,device counted in a line,  The machine beeped when it crossed ninety-nine. Any shout costed five words in a shot, First many days were going to be tough!  The babies could not cry their heart out, The mothers couldn't shout, The lovers fall short for words to propose, The old spoke the word as a dose.  The dusky girl who loved chatting all day, Cried and tried but could not find a way.  Then one day when she was almost ran out of her limit, The person of her dreams gave her a surprise visit. She tried but her words were short by ten,  Poo...

Those were blithesome warm afternoons in Dehradun. While baba was busy in office and mom was away to pick didi from her school, thammi and me had our share of good time. The large courtyard attached to our British Era Govt accomodation alloted to my father then, was a perfect place for our hangout in the winter chilled afternoons of Dehradun.  The sun kissed lap of my Granny (whom we called thakurma and sometimes thammi too), was the perfect place for this one hour after school break. The milky white saree she wore gave me the feeling of a pillow. Thammi used to sit with her threadbox and would complete the kantha work with coloured threads and needles. Red, blue, green, yellow,pink, those threads were the only colours in her otherwise white life. I used to either pick up a textbook from my syllabus and read it out for my thammi else she would tell me the stories of her childhood in Bangladesh. On one such occasion I learned about Kantha, the heritage of Bengal, h...

One night my son woke me up in the mid of his sleep and shouted saying Ma, can you see my dream? Face was glowing and a little tooth peep, when he held my hands and smiled in sleep. I wondered and asked..dream? how can I see what you are dreaming he held my hands and said, you have to see what I am seeing. That day he made me his fellow dreamer And we promised to dream together. No it was not a castle in the air, But we had a sweet little home, very rare. The beautiful roof of our hut was triangle, Outside, it was watched by a sea gull. "Sea-gulls in the mountains!", I wondered, that's weird, "That how dreams are!", nodded the old wise man waving his beard. violet,red, orange, yellow, green  and blue forming a rainbow, That's exactly how our garden looked from the kitchen window. I picked red,deep scarlet red and painted the sky for him. He picked purple for the trees and the sea was bleeding green. He created me a tiara in variou...