A City of Joy

By Sampurna Chakraborty, B.A. Honours English

Edited by Nandana

Enclosed within my heart is a casket embellished with beads of sacred pearls. In it sits my city bedazzled, cold enough to pierce through my heart, calling with its moribund vitality. Yet in its incandescence there's a fleeting glory, one that lights up the pits of my life.

I wonder what the colour of JOY is. Blue or red with its overwhelming virulence or yellow with its gay vivacity?

But for me, my City of Joy is a canvas of colours swept across with impervious fervor like a child who is discovering the world with his own eyes, passionate yet unbothered.

It's green on days when Providence bestows her grace.

Black, when sins anoint man's ways.

White, when rain falls hard enough to erase her edges,

Yellow when she caresses the walls with brushes of smiles and giggles.

Each lane whispers a secret, a story told in the solitude of the setting sun. A mother's voice calls out to her son who has wandered o , in search of his dream. Somewhere, a man weary of old age is timidly reaching out for his wife's calloused hands. He too has a dream like our young boy; but his dream entails a desire to transcend the boundaries of mortal existence.

I stand on a balcony in a city that I've been taught to call my own. I see a father carrying his daughter on his shoulders. I see their hands reaching out to each other for succor.

I think of my father.

A smell of fresh food wafts across the street. It reaches me. It carries a longing. It carries warmth.

I think of my mother.

I think of myself. Someone that I left within the four walls of a room, in a city I was born to call my own- My City of Joy

My City of Joy calls out to me in waking, in sleep, in nightmares, in daydreams. She is weeping with me.

My arms are outspread yet I can't reach her. The casket is lying open now yet I can't touch her.

I can't reach her