Song of seasons

The songs of seasons

May:

The Country road lay like a tamed snake, brown and parched, heaving and teary-eyed. Sunshine raced to distant fields like wildfire and bounced off broken heaps of images. The wasteland subsisted on dried tuber and the wisdom of defiant dry bones of the river bed. The fire sermon was delivered in May.

The ceiling fan in your room is a bit of schizophrenic, besides being old and cranky, and you lie in your bed, etherized; while the vagaries of Summer and memories melted in crimson flames. 1

June:

Monsoon arrived when the dark clouds with lightning streaks broke the skies’ boundary. The air grew dense. It wafted the scent of impregnated soil. Trade winds came and then came meghmalhar. An alaap began in vilambit interval swelled on to madhyam and culminated in an endless dhrut khayaal. A million drops of rain fell on the remains of life on Earth. The puddles, rivulets, streams, rivers, lagoons, and whirlpools flowed, swollen by a mass of turbid waters rushed with impetuous haste towards the seas, felling trees and deluge-struck mortals all around on their banks and washed them to a timeless shore.2

September:

A sudden light shower in the morning, left the yard exhilarated and let it regain composure. The laughter and mirth from the living room grew with sunshine. Today is Onam. There is weightlessness in reunion and barricading time to slip any further. Spring is now and hope is in the moment.

November:

Autumn is too short to pause and ruminate over the blinding beauty of orange evenings and golden yellow leaves. And yet one ruminates, invariably. In one of these autumns, Lorca3 moved to New York while it ushered in the great depression. The autumnal marvels of his Granada, its solitary rose breath and its leaves, reflections of pillars and arabesques in the pools, the splashing fountains and the profusion of myrtle and pomegranate – were all estranged, now. The loss of November!

January:

Winter can wreck your senses, nudge them into frigidity, and remind you that you live in a world of morbid nerves, clear and cold as ice. The cold winds blowing across the snowy landscape can bring in the visage of death and a possibility of enlightenment. You may even gain the courage to glance at the white emptiness that lay beyond the limits of your eyes and the moonbeam’s icy glitter. The winter in your sense organs would tell you that you have always been in a snowy country, alone and unable to speak.4

Note: The color and sound of the seasons have been inspired by the following writers.

1. Thomas Stearns Eliot (The Wasteland) 2. Mahakavi Kalidasan (Ritusamharam) 3. Federico Garcia Lorca (Poems in Newyork) 4. Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country)