To Calcutta...from her errant child

The autumn breeze envelops me. The season is wrapped in nostalgia for it brings back the hum-drum of Kolkata...its wayward streets ending at right angles, punctured by frippery in blushes of red, festooned with rows of colourful paper strung on wires - a trail to follow perhaps for my aching heart. The first sight of the day, the sun shining gently on the expanse of the park in front of my home is an every day reminder of the disquiet that is amiss; the exhilaration that is adrift. Calcutta, her scent is fast fading. Her songs, I now listen to on YouTube. Its lilt no longer fills my mornings. Its drumbeats don't reverberate in the corridors anymore. I still can't read and write in Bengali. My vocabulary is sparse, at best modest. I do not know more than ten songs of Rabindrasangeet. I have read Srikanta in English. Fourteen years of schooling with English as the language of etude and a mom who was an army kid and did not grow up in Bengal are the most glaring reasons of my ignorance. The genuine reasons are indifference; inattention...tedium even. I seldom made a serious, concerted effort to be unlike myself. A lot is lost now: friends...memories...delightful winters, what is also lost is my disregard for her, for it is only she who knows of the childhood irreplaceable, the follies unmentionable...the unforgettable interludes with the most beautiful lover. The colours have faded, fade they will still, but autumns in my life shall only belong to Calcutta.