Moonlight Musings

As usual I was wide awake during the journey when all and sundry are likely to sleep. It was 2.45 in the morning. The bus was on it’s way to Bengaluru. The wayside was cast in an unnatural glow by the moonlight. My musings were just about to begin, I could feel them soliloquizing in my head running around in circles, looking for a vent in the form of inconsequential thoughts. I quite like Rowling’s idea of thoughts having a silvery-white colour and like wind made solid and light made liquid. When I read that line I felt a melancholic sadness because I felt so deeply that one wouldn’t ever be able to see thoughts in that form ever. It still seldom fails to make me dismal and casts an unfriendly gloom over my solemn features.

I saw the moon meander it’s way across the sky back and forth though the road seemed not to twist and turn. But it never left my gaze. I travelled a bit to the past, a year to be exact. It was 2.45 in the morning but that time I was comfortably curled up with a blanket in a train on the lower-berth looking out at the moon’s reflection in the dark, still and silent waters that were barely visible but for the moon’s glow. And suddenly a mist springing up from nowhere meandering like my inconsequential thoughts, those water-side weedy marshes harbouring unfamiliar perils and the green taking on a dark grey colour, reminiscent of ghosts slithering in the light but steady and cold breeze. How I wished that I could just touch all those once, wash my hands with that eerie ghost like moon-light as the train wound it’s way through the Siliguri corridor. Sublime beauty. I consider myself to be very fortunate to experience this sanctified splendor. Yeah, I was lucky once upon a time.

I was unable to give word to those images conjured up by that night and I still believe that I fail to do justice to them. But the moon beams in the night made a few words tumble out never-mind the fact that it took it a year to do so. This journey showed me plain barren land with a few dry shrubs springing up never so often but far and wide. Though the landscape was not so distasteful, it was probably the reason for me to give word to images of a year gone by. This dreary background had seemingly strong trees near the road covered with dull grey flowers like a sheet of lace and the road seemed to journey fast. There was beauty here too.

But this treacherous heart vanishes a-plenty to rest in that unfaithful beauty. It put up a pretty show once for me and how the heart wishes again and again…