A different place….

Awazon ke bazaron mein,kamoshi pehchane kaun,

Muhn ki baat sune har koi,dil ki bat par samjhe kaun?

[ In the market of sound and noise, who listens to silence]

[Anybody can hear what comes out of loud, but who can

Decipher what your heart says]

These 2 lines probably sum up everything I saw on those faces, everything I could

Decipher from that silence and everything I could make out of those smiles.

Being a case of CIWS(Chronic impulsive writing syndrome),limpidly put ,I write only when something hits me, hurts me and rarely enough makes me really happy.

Though in this case, visit to OmAshram(that’s the old age home(not house) me and my friend went to, thanks to him),didn’t hit me, didn’t hurt me ,it was just a soft and a coy touch which was probably far more poignant than anything else I have experienced.

For the first time ,I was kinda happy with the role of a good listener I usually take up when I am at a new place or something. There was somebody who just wanted to confide in me everything, all of their pain, frustration and happiness whatever they did experience throughout their lives. But believe me, there was nothing philosophical, no big lessons and nothing sardonic in anything they shared. It was literally anything and everything you could imagine under the sun. From their jobs to how they used to hang out with their friends to the festivals, everything they said, I could manage to categorize into only under one genre “Life”. Everything they talked about was so alive (probably the usage alive sound inapt, but you will second my thoughts if you heard them).It had no mention of pain, isolation and bitterness (all 3 classic traits of our lives).

It was just straight, plain life. In one of my attempts to perceive the words of one inmate (a lawyer by profession) of the home, he said,

”I think you realize it when you reach my age, that its better to have a sweet reminiscence of the life you have left behind, otherwise with everything else, it does hurts when you are left with nothing but bitterness. For me at least now more than looking forward and getting solace from the void its much better to look back and manage a smile”.

Well yeah, I was not ready for such a precise and yet simplistic opinion about life, it caught me off guard; it never occurred to me that death is such an invincible part of life. He probably caught the expressions (told you right, he was a lawyerJ) and just looked at us as if saying, yes I know it, this allusion sounds a bit alien to you but for us it’s a mirror in which we look everyday.

May be to some it may sound depressing or something but the pragmatic tone in which he said so sounded like life talking at its best and it will be an insult to their spirit of life itself if we label it as downcast. Before leaving his room, he just said,” it’s a different place you know”, and the smile that passed across his face said it all about the place.

And indeed, its is an altogether different place, yes it may not have the spice, the vigor or the speed to which we are used to but it had some preternatural feel to it, something which gave you strange warmth which you never realize anymore in life.

It was there(can’t define in words what),be it talking to the lady who was so happy talking to us, even though she had to alternate between 2 languages, Tamil and Hindi(she is 90+ and can speak 5 languages) or the one who was sharing her experiences as a freedom fighter in “Suddha(pure or perfect) Hindi(believe me when I say this, it was not easy to follow her and I thought I was good enough in my command over hindi),or the one who just sat near to us and didn’t speak anything. She just gave us her share of biscuits and smiled. It was indeed too much to take but well as lawyer uncle said,” this place is different, you know”.

Usually, its pretty ordinary lane of thought to have some be overwhelmed with sadness, feeling how old age makes you dependent, fuming as to how people could forget the ones who actually made them what they were today, but at OmAshram, I was immune to any such thought, I was just plain happy to see that someone was their taking care of them. In the words on one active members of the home,” I don’t know what life all of them lead when they were able to take care of themselves, but I can’t deal with the fact that just because they are in this phase of their lives, they should suffer”. And probably that tells you the reason why the home which started as a pay and live care center has become an organization, fighting all odds to take care of everyone who knocks the doors of OmAshram.

I have been writing under the spells of short bursts of myriad emotions (probably one of the most beautiful ones I have experienced so far) and probably that’s the reason I wont edit it, I wont make a new draft of this article, I am going to just post it up and hope that these words carry and make this feeling, a bit further, a bit stronger.