Sacred Simple Home

Home.

My home is here

In the ink etched onto the ochre pages of a coming-of-age novel;

One that I would read covertly beneath the bedsheets through the light of my phone;

One that I would cry a napkin to a pulp over because the story might just wound up on the lovers’ lachrymose argument while one of the two buckles into a grovel;

One that I’d put at the top of my recommendation list and place at a distinguished area in my bookshelf, as though on a throne.

My home.

My home lies in the morning radio show;

One that plays precisely my favourite songs and artists;

One that mitigates every lonesome emotion that inadvertently surges in me and retrieves my heart from the isolation it got so well acquainted with somehow;

One that resembles the saccharine voices of river streams and rainforests;

One that, after shedding bitter tears of heartache, makes me have faith in love and renders it as sacred as a vow;

This is my home.

My home,

Which also lies in nature;

One that offers me varied fragrances of frangipani, periwinkle, bluebell and daisy;

One that plays the morning chirps of goldcrests and siskins, fading out every blaring horn of a car;

One that crashes the waves of its ocean with the obsidians, and paints the sky hazy;

One that rains harmonically while the neighbour’s daughter sits on the balcony playing her guitar.

In fact,

My home is the hustle and bustle of Kolkata City.

One that’s pervaded with the giggles of school children carrying mutton chops and fish fries home, wrapped in Ananda Bazar Patrika newspapers;

One that pops billboards of Mamata Banerjee every now then on flyovers while I travel from the airport to Dida and Dadu’r Badi and my father tries really hard to suppress his smile;

One that coaxes my grandparents to stuff the last bite of roshogolla, kheer kadam and malai chomchom into my mouth because my mother had reiterated time and again about my sweet tooth in casual banters;

One that bids me goodbye every vacation with a wistfulness that overspreads the sky like Durga Pujo’s dhunuchi, echoing tunes of the songs of Rabindranath I learnt as a toddler, all the while.

And finally,

My home lies also in the embrace of those I love;

One that could be instantaneous when my eyes swell and my cheeks stain with dried stripes of tears;

One that could last longer than forever and sustain as a memory in my mind till another lifetime;

One that could well my heart with so much warmth, I’ll hop in their arms laughing away indecorously, disregarding all my petty fears;

One that could speak all the words that they and I’d rather not have spoken, words that could be about anything but, perhaps sublime.

My home lies in simplicity,

Simple things tethered with strings of sacredness and divinity.

~Riddhi Chakraborty

Notes: Typical diary entry but make it poetic 😛