Ripples

Screaming peddlers; graying beggars

Tanned urchins flying their tricolored kites – blue, orange, pink.

The early morning market cried for takers

Only… I wasn’t interested.

I breezed past it all.

The berries selling - dozen for five rupees.

The blacksmith striking beneath the banyan trees.

And the mad old woman in a saree sans the fall.

To my beloved oval rock I headed

By the lake, removed from the town.

The thought of ever returning back I dreaded

As I made my tired heart comfortable.

The water, shimmering blue, lay still

The usual westward wind non-existent.

The grass an inch taller than my previous sojourn.

The gloom within me still as poignant.

Failed ventures; mounting debts

Landlord shouting for endless rents.

Life seemed mortgaged.

And me toiling to make it my own…yet losing.

Saarika, tender and loving, turned hostile too

Turned down marriage for my troubles monetary.

Tons of love would suffice I thought

How foolish of me to equate my arms to her security.

Fear and obligations galore

Hollowing from within…I was like bamboo

Not bamboo…for while hollow within, it stays firm without.

Not me…I was the rusted hollow pipe from the loo…cracking.

As I threw away the umpteenth pebble into the lake

Life suddenly offered a meaning new.

There was a lesson it asked me to take,

For me to rescue life from obscurity.

As the pebble kisses the lake,

Ripples dance through, shattering its calmness.

Disturbance. Chaos. The water forced to move.

And yet the lake finally lets the pebble in…and returns to stillness.

Countless trials await us in life

We term them “troubles’ and shrug away.

Why not let them drive us to action, like ripples in a still lake?

For us to finally take them in as the lake does the pebbles? Only to return to calmness.

Fuehrer