Memoryscape

Memoryscape

They say sights make lasting memories and a touch imprints forever. However, it was the smells that lie splattered across her memory-scape. This story traces an olfactory journey of a lifetime as she put pieces together, wondering what lies next.

1980 – It is the smell of soap – an expensive luxury bar of white soap. The silhouette of a man with that soapy fragrance is still vivid. She was barely 3-years old. She can recognize that smell anywhere but does not come across it often. She cannot remember who he was, yet the distinct memory captures her. 

She frets that she needs to dig deeper into the recesses and find out why the fragrance of that soap and the man are so alive in her mind even after 40 years. There are no answers; she does not even know whether that time was good or bad; whether that memory points to any event in her life. The lack of an answer makes her uncomfortable as they remind her of an unknown man and his soapy odor from when she was barely a toddler.

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Emotions

Hidden, unspoken
Behind a facade
Of the daily grind
Chores to keep the mind
Away from the surge
Of emotions unheard.
Latent they lay
Waiting for the day
To capture their prey
Rip apart the semblance
Of holding it together
Stronger they grow
The more you ignore!

Despair

I wrote this before 2019 – a different context & mood – when we did not know about a pandemic waiting to be unleashed. Macabre, how true these lines are today, as we battle second wave of Covid19 in our country.

I see darkness
Bloom from within
Sprouting like deadly fungi
Asphyxiating our breath
Killing our senses
With neon doses of despair

Admirer

I see the blossom
In your hair wither
From morn to dusk
The petals are now
Brown as twilight
In the evening train
Back from work

Before the Sun Sets

They run through
The sunlit grove
Summer in their hair
Sweat clinging to strands
Sun-kissed now
Sunburnt at dusk
It bothers not much
For childhood is about
Fruit orchards
Yellow fields
An amusing prank here
A scraped knee there
Making memories
Before the sun sets!