Of broken china, cracked tiles and unwelcome bygones

Today morning, as usual, I was sipping my morning tea and pacing around the living room, preoccupied with some pending tasks at office. I walk around pretty fast, so much so that, when my mom entered the room, holding some washed porcelain cups and saucers, I collided head on with her. The cups and saucers went straight down, and in a second, the two hundred and fifty square feet living room was strewn with all kinds of broken bits of china. The scene, inspite of the mess it created, seemed quite beautiful to me, as beautiful as a floral carpet, maybe because it was solely my handiwork. The bits came in all sizes-plain and white, plain with flowery patterns, some slightly discoloured, some exquisitely shaped as if by some strange design, some clumsily, some with their insides out, some big, some small, some nearby, some at the far corner of the room-and as if to add to the china's paisley design, there where cracks in the floor tiles too, cutting a criss-cross pattern across three or four of them.

Mom was palpably angry, the china being new and quite expensive and the floor tiles relatively newly laid. But I was so immersed in the spectacle, that her high octane tirade went in through one ear and straight out through the other, just as a superfast express train would cruise in and then out through a tunnel. Instead, what struck me then was a sudden idea, something I felt I could write down somewhere, without getting it into end up in the waste bin. I am someone, who loves to write a bit, but quite often my imagination lets me down, it does not get aroused as much and as often as I would like it to. That is why I adore and am even slightly jealous of those who successfully churn out one novel after other, each set in a different milieu, with different characters and storylines.Unfortunately, most of my such ideas, spark off literary endeavors which mostly end up as ill-fated works with a more than lavish sprinkling of unintentional plagiarism. Though unintentional, this instantly dawns on one of my friends who gives it the first read, and makes sure that the piece never gets to see the light of day.

The broken porcelain, I felt, drew a parallel to our memories, scattered across our consciousness, some of them vivid and could be gathered with minimal effort, like the bits of china which had fallen near my foot. Some of them, faded like an old sepia toned photograph, are hidden away deep under layers and layers of the past as the pieces, hard to recover, just as the bits which had fallen to the deep corners of the room were. There are colorful recollections as there are pretty broken pieces-the anticipation on holding a wrapped birthday gift, the pure joy as a kid on the homebound journey after the examinations with a long awaited vacation ahead, the mindless indulgence of first love, the first smile from your newborn kid on his hospital crib. And then we have the painful and less pretty recollections like the oddly shaped discolored pieces of porcelain-the memories of separations, of bereaval, of rejection and failure, of being left out, of taunts and ridicules, of the many tears shed in loneliness-which leave wounds in the mind even more prominent and lasting than the cracks on the floor.

The short philosophical mood was cut short by a few more extra decibels from mom, and the whole thing had to be cleaned up soon. The fountainhead of my imaginative juices were cruelly swept away, gathered in a dirty, crude sack, and dumped away in a remote corner of our courtyard. Some time later, when I spotted the sack, sitting desolately in a corner, I felt it had another story to say. Maybe memories, aptly symbolized by the porcelain rubble, be it good or bad, happy or sad, are always a burden, an unwelcome and heavy baggage. Every thought about the bygones takes our time-be it mulling over missed opportunities or basking in the glory of one's achievements which might be as old as the hills-we loose an opportunity to savor the present.
Maybe it is best to dump the past, never dwell on it, and manfully try to live totally in the present.After all,today is a gift, that is why it is called the present.