You left forever at the late night on July 28 th 2015. It was a rainy day. I got the news on 29th July early morning . It was my father's birthday that day. Strange Coincidences is it not. Most of my childhood is gone with you. And after you left, my baba also left me and I gradually became a different person, that naughty funny part of me lost for ever. I cried a lot that day. Even today, I feel bad when I think of our last meet. I last saw you just six months before you died. You could not recognize me. I was nowhere in your memory. Alzheimer is surely a cruel disease.  No one at your family runs this disease, may be that political murder attempt on your early youth caused it.  But I knew who you were and what you meant to me. That day while I was returning from meeting you I found, father had a stroke, he was in the hospital for four days.

Maybe God was giving a signal. But I thought you all would live longer and My childhood will be with me. During the last visit to my father in April 2018, I was very depressed. Tears were coming to the eyes again and again. We know everything in our hearts., is it not? May be I sensed that baba will also leave soon. 

As with many people the first day of meeting is remembered but with some people the last day of meeting is never forgotten. I was few minutes old when you took me in your hand, you might have cherished that moment for your entire life but I remembered your sad smile and blank look and your struggle to remember who you were and who I was. That pain and feeling lasted with me even now . But I believe that There is sorrow, there is separation, there is death. And these separations and deaths teach us to love our near and dear one even more. That pains gradually liberate us towards greater love and greater understanding of life 

There is sorrow, there is death, there is separation

  Still peace, still joy, still eternal wakes up.

Yet the life goes on, the sun, the moon, and the stars smile.

 Spring comes, waves merge, waves r The bud falls and the bud blooms.

No decay, no end, no wretchedness—( Rabindranath Tagore)

 The Blue Mountain 

Is it not possible that you and I once again go back to the blue mountain of our childhood ,where you and I used to go ?  That mysterious  mountain, and lake in the foot hill where we used to sit for long hours gazing the mountain and dreamt that one day we will climb it together. That time life was not complex .We engrossed ourselves in small Happiness and stories from  colorful  books.  We used to touch. lake water with our small hands and dreamt of solving the mystery of what laid deep inside that lake!  Then we used to walk through the  fields touching all the  daffodils  and  Daisies . Do you remember we never plucked any flowers !! Some times we raised our faces towards the sky feeling the wind  and smiled at each other whenever we saw  the clouds forming faces in the sky.

I still know that place is waiting for that child to return,  who once  promised to come back. By this time we know that life is a mere drama, a cosmic conspiracy. The illusive mind raises thousands of questions, ego creates millions of  stories.  We have gone through all the stories we experienced so far. These stories we carry through thousands of births. Life is a saga  of love, hate , passion ,charity, adventure, hurt ,pleasure and ego . 

You understand that we have nothing to say at all to  each other . We know it all well by Heart,  the spoken or the unspoken, the truth and the lie. Our quest to search for the missing part of the puzzle, the melancholy inside us, the haunting hundreds of stories we created and destroyed.

We know everything!!

And we know that You will return to the mountain and the lake ,to the daises and the daffodils, to the wind and cloud. 

I will wait for you there. You will find me right  there as you used to find every time you lost me.

I know you will find your way out to reach to the Blue mountain .

P S

 I wrote these random thoughts few years ago and this water colour painting was also done few years back. I felt this  writeup and painting complement each other