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.

The Tezpur Pin- up

There once lived a young woman in possession of varied powers and an immense strength of character by the name Chitralekha. Her powers were paralleled only by her commitment for her friend Usha, daughter of the daitya king Bana. And as stories go Usha fell hopelessly in love with Aniruddha, grandson of Lord Krishna, who appeared to her in a dream. Chitralekha then undertook the long and arduous journey to the yadava kingdom, abducted Aniruddha and carried him in her arms all the way back to her friend. Then there was the inevitable war where the titans- Lord Siva, in aid of his devotee Bana and Lord Krishna, the Vishnu incarnate- clashed. Myth is that blood soaked into the battlefield and coloured its soil red and the town came to be known as Tezpur (City of Blood).

Ghost of smiles

Of love and other demons
Of a gray long - winding road
Of whispers in the night
Of the ghost of smiles
growing less opaque with days
Of longing and hatred
Of sharp fingernails drawing lines
a little too deep as if to hurt
Of jealousy that clenches
tight upon the chest.
Of a thickly spun web of tales
and to be trapped by its sticky threads
Seduced, Repulsed, Enamoured.

The Nation Across

Before stepping into the aircraft, I looked back at Sree who was just behind me in the queue. In unison we gave a loud unearthly whoop and laughed gleefully. For the past few hours in irregular intervals we have been doing the same (to the general entertainment of our co-travelers) and we will continue to all along the weekend. We were on our way to Kathmandu and could hardly believe it to be true.

It was a long awaited break. For Sree, from a hectic and tiring schedule and for me, from a long overdrawn spell of general lethargy. Yet the plans were made in less than two days. We found the tickets to be affordable, our schedules to be matching- a weekend that could be folded and packed neat and light into our backpacks with much room to spare for all the excitement.

Less than 500 nautical miles away from Delhi, Kathmandu hardly feels like a nation apart. But rarely are boundaries determined by distance. Rather it is the little white immigration form, the step over the yellow line, the scanning eyes of the official at the counter and the suspicious ‘departed’ stamp in his right hand that draw the line for you.