Life in Colour

Life ,if seen superficially, is a journey towards death.A journey marked by experiences of love,guilt,empathy, jealousy, hatred,passion,complexes, possessiveness,fear,courage,loss,bliss,rejection,glory,loneliness,
compassion,abandonment,victory,failure and many more subtle ones, known only to the voyager .Certain sights,events and people leave deep and much lasting impression on the mind.He may never see these sights and may never hear of these people.These may not have held significance at the moment of their occurrences or even other wise in the general sense of things,but their relevance and meaning to the voyager increases with time.

A friend of my childhood,a year or two younger to me,had then felt ignored many a times.I had other friends and he, I then felt, was too little to fit into my company.Kids can be very mean; I was.
Years later,bettered by life,I thought of him and remembered the last time we had met.Another friend of mine and I were running away from him.He was running after us,wanting to play with us.He was a little kid of four years.After some distance,I suddendly stopped and turned back to check if he was still there.He was no longer chasing us.He had stopped near a gate,about 20 yards from me, and was looking my way through the bars of the gate.I could see,in his eyes, the sadness and the feeling of being left out and ignored.That moment ,some how stayed with me.I ,then,had not comprehended the emotion that his eyes shared, but later in life I was to  experience and know it. A week later I learned that his father was transferred to another city by his employer and that the family had moved.

I have forgotten his name.The child is lost in the years.His heart will never open to me and my apologies will never reach him.

One of the two pups that had survived the gutters, overflowing with water from the rains of the previous night , had taken shelter in the porch of our building.It was bright white street pup.My mother hated dogs and I had to steal food for it.It slept in the porch and I played with it after school.This continued till he had grown into a strong-street-dog.I was proud to be aquainted with the dog.But with time, my interest and situations changed and I saw the dog less frequently.Then one day,for the last time, I saw the dog on the street.It had been many months since I had last seen it and it seemed to had lost the memories.I imagined the possibility that it thought the same about me.I believe,both of us didn't want to make the recognition evident,it no longer meant anything.

It has been many years since that day.It must a dead dog now.Somehow,to me, it has become a metaphor for the lost relationships .

On my way to visit a friend, staying on the other side of a hill,I heard a mild wailing.The sound was from the bushes nearby and it was of a young woman.I couldn't see any one but I felt there were two people-a woman and a man .The woman was pleading to the man not to abandon her.Her voice seemed to had turned hoarse from crying.She sounded devastated by the experience of being deserted.The man was silent; didn't seemed moved. The whole thing had the eeriness of a lingering death-the ultimate loss.I continued walking but laments pierced my heart and has since remained there.
I wonder what happened to the woman.The possibilities were infinite-from happy life with her beloved to an end of all possibilities, death.I would never know.I would never be able to tell her that she deserved better.

Every morning as a child,out of bed,I sat at the window sill,staring out to the street.I used to see a boy who always looked sad and lost, on the way to his school.His face was usually expressionless.The boy had no friends and it didn't look like he wanted them either.He lived with his parents down the street.There were always sounds of his parents screaming at each other in the night.The child seemed lost for ever;roughened by the parental conflicts and the mental illness in the family.I was a distant observer.I was much younger to him and didn't have the courage to go up to him and talk.The pain he was suffering was fearful.The fact that I was equally vulnerable to pain scared me.He was too real for me and I tried hard to ignore him.
One day I came to know that his mother had hanged herself.In few months the son along with his father left the place.

I would never  meet the 'young son' again.I would never be able to tell him that I was sorry for him and that life can be hard at times but it can be beautiful too.I would never know if he survived the painful childhood ; if he had carried that baggage for rest of his life or dropped it and move on.

Many people,many lives,
Many stories,lost in life
Some told,most forgotten
Some earned,most misbegotten.

The experiences,presented by the life,are broadly perceived as grey and dull or as colourful and bright.But the life's intent is to elevate the human consciousness.A life well learned is a life well lived.Such a life would be more fulfilling and less regretful.Understanding the other's pain,the want to share the hope with the weak,recognising the love in the other, embracing the other without having to search for the purpose,telling the lonely and the ignored that you are vulnerable too,expressing the love and the care because you want to,equanimity in highs and lows- these are the signs of the learning.

The varied experiences are the colours of life and its perception is going to make the life black and dull or white and bright. Colours are primarily additive and subtractive i.e they can be created either by adding different colours or by subtracting certain colours.When you create colours in life by subtracting certain experiences you eventually create a dark and dull life, and when you add every experience to discover a new shade of colour the life turns rich and bright.