THE PICTURE FRAME

                                              Opaque Sight

The teeming moments between this moment and the ones which have slid past seem bursting at the seams entailing the vast repertoire of stormy material which have grown pricks tattooing my heart with a graffiti  lurking eternally to gobble me up rendering me a mute spectator of the world going around

It  was a huge hiatus  a big blank between this moment and the buried  past. The other day I was walking over the corridors of Daryaganj  in Delhi. Stretched  out before me were the wide swathes  of books gone soggy and soiled in the dusty paths.People were walking past them and unwittingly treading  upon them which of-course could have been avoided if there was some thought for those beings of immense erudition whose blood  marrow and the karar of life was embalmed in the black dried up drops of their lekhni.Who were they?The hollowed out eyes of the Premchand were peering at me.His jaggy moustache  looked pathetically drooped . There seemed to be no resignation but a defiance in those still eyes. I got fixated on him   and picked him up gently and placed him a little away in a protected heap where already I could see his other bandus huddled together vying for  their space amongst the formidables of yore the yeats  the keats  the hemmingways  the fielding  hardy  the dickens and the entire conglomeration of cosmic wit and  the quintessence of human intellect.They were there lolling  in the muck and lost in the bidding sounds of their current masters the kabbadies who were trying to attract  the attention of the passers- by but who could care no less.They were  frantic to find their way in the dense crowd  since they  had bought the cinema tickets worth three times the cost of those classic jewels and were rushing like nervous wrecks. They  never wanted to miss even the trivial commercials showing before the main  fair.

I stood there having a pan view of the entire area.It smelled of a particular community.The smell of indigenous  ittars which was a mixture of incense sticks and  the warped air which had not gone through the regular circulation  that  happens in open houses.I stood there rooted mulling over my small bits of writing which could not measure to a fraction of any of these great souls but which cost me my life time.  .And there they were spilled on the narrow corridors of that Sunday market going through the ignominy  of neglect .Even censuring them would have been a tribute to them but the complete negation of their being might be corroding their thirsty souls which  got decimated  for the very   recognition of these mortals   when they were alive.

It was pathetic.I winced at my aspiration and opened my opaque sight to the common sights of the daily affairs.

The man before me was sprawled out..I  came closer.His whole body was full of sores .He was drooling at his mouth.I asked the shopkeeper what the matter was with him  he  simply  jerked his shoulders and went with his business.I wanted to take him to some emergency clinic but no body was ready to help me.The man looked at me in an amused manner while evading the flies which were digging into his wounds.He stretched out his hand in a subdued manner with a sharp glint in his eyes .I in a dazed manner put some money in his hand and quickly left the scene.