Outside the Window

The bang, the tucks, the screech and the horns. Daily life has changed from the windows that did not speak to the ones which storm right into the ears. There is a temple to my right, a mosque to my left, and in the middle of buildings competing over height, there is a tower which rarely gives a network. Sometimes it almost feels like a search beginning from the window, riding through the houses, towers, and temples and finally ending up at the glaring mountains that end up giving me peace.

While I am staring at the mountains, I wonder, how the world would have been if not for the ego, the pride, the greed of humans! All the houses with the same level of roofing, so I could see the ultimate beauty of mountains right from my window, glaring deeper could have had a chit-chat with the moon and the stars at night. Might be, the tallest tower would have been the trees, the ones that actually give network, the network of life. The tick and the tack, the bang and the thud would have been replaced by the charming voices of the birds! Who knows, they would have made a home near my home. I could have seen them waking me up in the morning and each evening, bidding farewell to the ones coming from far away land. The steady and mundane nature of the buildings, the ones with paints peeling off, and water running through would have been replaced by the continuous movement of the trees, and the leaves would have danced to their own rhythms, making me calmer, brighter and in touch with myself. 

Outside my window, are but, the voices of ambulances making their way past the everyday struggle of people making their way home. These voices are a continuous reminder that no matter how normal this world seems to be from the crooked windows of the room, it is not! The voices through my window sometimes take me farther from my seat to the house of a woman who has to make a choice between her two children for the one roti that is left! A decision so heart-wrenching makes me wonder if the soul is still alive within her. The voices outside my window take me to the lands of the migrant workers, who in the world, which was not ready to feed it when in need, has called them when the greed arrived. The world builds its houses from their hands but refuses to let them enter once it is done. The world is so masculine, logical, and brainy, that it forgets that the divisions that we have made in our lives, make no sense in the eyes of the same scientific brain. They can divide the human and human emotion on the cloth, the place of birth, the job, but these blurry lines made strong, can never defy that they all are true with the same kind of blood, the heart beats the same and the ultimate home for all is the mud, the one billion spit and spat, the same mud where billions are buried, the same mud everyone steps their foot too!

Outside my window, I can see an aged couple having their lunch, in the corner where the sunlight reaches them, laughing, joking with their child who has come home, for a WFH! The scene takes me to Delhi where so many farmers are protesting for their rights! Sometimes I wonder, the people who are responsible for taking humanity’s steps forward, do they deserve to fight for their rights, to be told that the ones sitting comfortably in a seat in AC rooms will understand the agony of thousands of farmers working in the sun, rain and cold!

Outside my window is a world, a world fighting, a world surviving, a world that is like a mirror of the actions and decisions, the world inside the human brain takes!

Avantika Tanubhrt