As I was brooding on my inability to write, I reflected on the words written by one of my favourite authors – Ruskin Bond. He said that dust bins are most kind to the writers. You have to do nothing – just write, curl up the paper into a ball and aim towards the bin. I don’t write on paper with pen, so no physical dustbins for me per se but I can always keep it here in my blog and forget about it.

Today, I aim to write about nothing in particular. 2024 has just started and 2023 a recent past. To me 2023 will remain as an important year because, finally, I could bring myself to accept deaths of near ones. Not very long ago, I read ‘Aimless in Banaras’ by Bishwanath Ghosh where he explained candidly using anecdotes and metaphors about accepting deaths easily. But even after underlining and re-reading the sentences, I could not accept the untimely loss of my parents. I kept thinking about them, pondering about how things would have been different if they were around, reflecting on possibilities of better times with them around. I kept on drawing myself in a shell cocooned by the warmth of past memories. I kept refusing to move on until in 2023, on our visit to Arunachal Pradesh, one of my near ones blatantly remarked that we can’t forget our childhoods, our dead close ones because they are our roots deep underground but the roots don’t stop the leaves on top most branches to have their own sunny moments, do they?

It was a nonchalant speech but the mark it left on me was indelible. What’s stopping me to have my own sunny moments? Why did I kept rotating in the same dungeon of memories. The realization dawned upon me the next day and as we left for sightseeing in Tenga on a Traveller, I decided to free up my memories of the two back to back deaths in the sunny air around and whooshed past towards the life lying ahead of me.