... to one who has been long in city-pent

It costs everything to fulfil our everyday desire. However, it seems it costs nothing at the day's end. Our desire is never fulfilled. And that's the source of all our displeasure. Displeasure being the source of all our vivacity we live. Remembrance of the past is usually the cessation after a tiring workaday onus which cripples our thinking and with which crippled our entity becomes.

This morning is a little toned down – quite like a long-worn silver habiliment. I looked at the sky with a view to discovering any blue patches. I could hardly mine any. Dull and dark and dusk – a sketch with three basic colours of Nature in our populated-cum-polluted city. A mute sketch speaks everything that you wish to listen to.

I could breathe a wet-soil smell. Really cool was it. I inhaled a lot and exhaled a small amount of it. Little pigeons and sparrows and some big crows made a raspberry for some displeasure, although it came into my ears as a morning solfa.

I saw a coconut tree with its brilliant green leaves spearing up into the sky, as if, complaining me about the rise of choking carbon particles. Its old famished leaves on its young shoulder have lost all its glory. Our blind globalization has sapped out all its green energy.

No doubt, I live in the village of our city. This part still keeps Nature to its bosom. I took hold of my coffee cup and drew two brilliant sips. A jocund company of ducks and drakes started splashing in the pond. Here a child has got measles and I can't take his pain away. He is taken out in the open.

Suddenly a doorbell broke the silence. Yeah, the middle-aged Muslim coconut-monger, whom I really like watching climbing up the tree with his edge tool, bending a little, commenting on the maturity of coconuts and which ones to knap off. My mother keeps some and sells the rest to him. He ties them adroitly on his bicycle and goes away to earn a profit at the day's end.

Much have I seen, much more have I not. Today's city gives me but a handful of dust and wraps me with a habiliment of suffocation. Spending is our vainglorious colour. Getting is our buying lust. I tracked Wordsworth in my lips:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The moment we think the world goes ill with us, we actually start going ill with the world.

..........

Coffee went to the dregs. Horns of lorries and trucks slowly began to drill the air.

I wish I were as happy as the coconut-monger.

3 comments:

A said...

Quintessentially "Wordsworthian".
Powerful emotions lament the loss of love for the simple and natural. Beautiful pastoral elements and the great sonnet of Wordsworth make it more compelling. Good lesson, yet difficult to pursue considering our times and the life we are used to. The least we can do is control our own self-desire of getting and buying more than necessary.

Dibakar Sarkar said...

... thanks A

Jayaar said...

Well expressed! We have come too far to go back! The nature we had is now shared via blogs! Your article takes me to the bygone days.
" she dwelt among the untrodden ways besides the springs of Dove" - are they still untrodden?

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