She cannot anchor where her heart belongs
Her love catches the wind like sails
Can never steer clear off the storm
She rips open on jagged rock edges
And among the sea weeds she is entangled
White crystals of salt settle on her scalp
As the ocean breeze tousles
Her gray and black curls..

The Tezpur Pin-Up: Kaziranga

“It will be just like Kerala”, is what quite a few of my friends told me before I started for Assam. During the next few days, peering out of the train window, riding on Jeetender’s auto and strolling around the university campus and the roads of Tezpur town with Anju, I would be reminded of this statement time and again. The vegetation was the same shade of deep green, complete with the same wayside bushes with their little yellow and violet blooms. Leaning on to the bamboo fences of their village homes, middle aged women chatted with each others, One end of the top piece of their off- white attire  tucked around the waist and the other thrown over their right shoulders in a similarly careless manner. The bulky brown sacks piled inside the roadside shops of Tezpur, emanated the known ration shop smell. It was a familiarity that was at once exhilarating and slightly disturbing. For what the sights evoked was not simple recognition, but a faint nostalgia mixed with images from disparate sepia frames of old Malayalam movies.