Ranchi and the new me
It’s 10th of July and i am relishing in wonder.
There are questions whose answers are better left unfound. Questions that do not like people to be curious about but to be left to be what they are: questions. They would be silent for your thoughts to skip doing its work on them. They would prefer you to bathe in the ecstasy of change and still keep the curious child of your brain unactivated.
I am in Ranchi after torturous six months in Delhi. It’s the city I like to think of as my hometown. But my relationship with it never shadowed my judgement of what Ranchi is like. Leaving aside it’s the weather, it is a place, I thought, as being as ordinary as any normal, chaotic city of India.
The past few days here make for an exception. From the moment of dropping off the train, my eyes have never stopped searching for meaning and beauty whatsoever they stumbled upon. The scene of the crowd in railway platform waiting, eyeing for the train, the kid tired of standing, importuning his father to lift him in his lap, an old man sitting in a remote corner alone in grave contemplation, boys restless in a long queue to bypass Covid checking, a middle-aged woman rebuking her daughter for getting too close to railway tracks. I marvelled at just everything. Passing across streets, bridges, statues, Sabjimandi,chowks, I felt as though each of them carried their stories too magnificent for them to be called ordinary. I tried to absorb all my eyes fell upon on my way home.
But nothing compared minutely to what were beheld just a few hours ago. I visited my school, JVM, after four years. Once my dream school had been relegated to be a site of the harrowing experience of aloofness and academic setbacks ever since I left it. we had been maintaining quite a distance from each other from those days. I never liked its physical structure either. Stunningly enough, from the second I was stopped at the gate by a guard informing me that the school was closed, I spent fifteen minutes only gazing at what was visible across the gate.
The painting on the wall in front was spectacularly done. The goddess Saraswati draped in blue colour had a tinge of Picasso’s ingenuity. The morning assembly ground had grown picturesque grasses, exemplifying greenery. Every glass window of classrooms had written stories on it, of how its dullness was a symbol of the shine it had left on the lives of students.
No sooner had I been warned to leave by the guard, I saw a vaguely human shape below the painting of the goddess. It would be about an eighteen years old girl, pretty and alluring. My eyes had been fixated for a few seconds, not for the fact of her beauty but the mysticism of her presence. I had to leave in perplexity at how she got there or that she was real at all.
I am yet to comprehend the sea of change and the force at work. But I have no desire for answers. Or maybe I know the force and am in love with it? No one knows. Or they do? Humans always have answers!