Views

As I look out through the dirtied window panes I see flowers blooming out side. No I am not looking carefully, they come to me vaguely as something seen very distant. But they are not distant, they are near. They are in fact on the next plot. Yet the view is not clear. Jutting projections of concrete and the presence of iron bars on the windows are obscuring my view. Yet the play of colors is vibrantly visible. Some of them are of the hue of vermillion, some yellow and some alternately yellow and red. Are they the real colors I do not know the names of the flowers, was never good at names. Can recall face though, but what would that do?

It’s a garden; I have never seen a gardener there. Perhaps the people living there are tending it. May be they are florists. What little we know about people who live near us.

I can see coconut palm leaves slowly dancing in the weak breeze. There is a mango tree underneath it. Its leaves are barely stirring. Near the compound wall there is a Badam sapling. It is never going to come up. I have been seeing it all through my five years at this place. It has remained the same. It is in the shade of the house and is stunted for lack of sun.

There are aerials and transmission towers all over the horizon. There are electric lines, cables roofs fitted on iron trusses, asbestos sheets, and concrete crazies, old and blackened tiles. Discolored walls of buildings, sewer pipes, dirty and drying cloths. I can see a bit of sky too covered with infertile clouds, cream colored and thick. There is not a fragment of blue anywhere. Everything is very dull and bleak.

Most of the buildings are old. There are no concealed plumbing and wiring in them. They look ugly with pipes and wires running all over them.

There are some flats right opposite to where I am sitting. I now watch a woman come out to the end of the corridor and wring her towel. She might have just taken a bath. She is not young and good looking. She is probably married and might be thinking on something very immediate. Her movements are sure and certain. She did not seem not very dissatisfied with life. She seems comfortable with it. She went back inside and my view became dimmed.

It is wonderful how a conscious being lights up the place it is in. It brings an element of purposefulness into the scene. Un till it entered the scene was boring. Its very presence alters the vision altogether. Everything becomes more definitely aligned and clarified. It projects an air of authority and mastery over its environment. It may have had nothing to do with the things that it sees, but its air of command and power is unmistakable. Its emotional life does not obliterate its control over what it perceives. It has an interesting sort of cunning to it. It is manipulative and intuitive. It sees possibilities while an animal may see only immediate benefits from that which it surveys.

Life comes to us through scents, sounds and sights. It reaches us through touch and taste. As I sit here I can hear the steady bustle of traffic behind me on the flyway near our building. It has become part of our environment. No one notices it any more unless they take the trouble. It remains there as a background to all our activities, filling our lives with noises from concealed engines and exhausts, brakes, horns, pulling up and down of shutters, bells, air blasts, creak of suspensions, and other instrumentation. Strangely the voices of people are absent from it. What are all those people doing, sitting inside all those vehicles? Are they thinking, or sleeping or day dreaming?

Yes there would be thoughts, emotions, grunts, exclamations, twitches, pains, palpitations, chest burns, change in postures, new touches and sensations. None are visible to all of us. Perhaps all our actions are perceived by only a few among us that and too imperfectly, but are they really meant to be seen by them? What do all these actions mean? Are they merely biological or do even the silliest of our actions have a purpose behind them? Do they all add up to something, do they say to us, “you see, …..”

What do the touches say? Do they convey intimacy even when they are accidental, or do they transfer fear and distrust. Why do they occur at that point of time? Do the immediate causes follow up back a long line of events? Do they mean anything, do they bring us something. Do they illuminate some point about life?

You can always find a meaning in the grander things of life. Love, hatred, desire, war, they are all meaningful to some of us in one way or other. We talk about them, we even rave about some of them. Why are the little things not like that? Am I frightening you? Think about a situation where everything has a meaning, everything leads up to something, even the minutest movements of our mind and matter signifies something.

It is frightening.

Chaos is terrifying, more so is order.

Which is acceptable?