Well….Umm…I have a home like you all. There’s a terrace promising a sky and greenery. But when I have to leave, say on vacations, I have to leave. It tries to linger in my mind but I simply have to shoo it away. When I’m on train, bus, cars, planes this brick made residence melts away like the last trace of a monsoon cloud in an autumn sky. It’s wonderful to be a free spirit finding a niche in the Himalayas or roaming about the streets of a foreign land where no one knows you.
Yet why is it that I am never a free spirit? Because the other home, Sumanar/Lekha, catches me unaware. Like a transient orca it surfaces from nowhere and punts me high up into the moments of uncertainty and gobbles me up. As a hapless seal I am inside its body and see nothing but Words.
Lofty mountains transform into rocky nouns. Oceans wave into crazy verbs while I deck green Singapore with oodles of adjectives. Reality and dream merge in words. I realize the whole universe is nothing but words I cannot escape from.
Yet there are moments: Your whole being is sore; you breathe tears; your soul’s smouldering; your mind’s unhinged; you cannot undo grief. A numbing feeling snaking up the spine whispers you are far away from Home. You are a mere wayfarer traveling from birth to birth seeking Home. So ‘The ache for home lives in’ my being and I have become a seeker.
sumanar/lekha 