The tree lined street that leads me to your home..

“Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.”

It was like hundreds of roads I had travelled over - no different - a stretch of tar, lustreless, scaly, either humping toward the centre or elevated on the sides. On both sides were telephone poles, tilted this way and that, up a little, and down at some points..

I learnt an interesting word the other day - allée  (‘’a walkway lined with trees or small shrubs according to the Meeriam Webstar dictionary). It sounds so similar to the Assamese word “আলি” which means “road”; its French source venir ("to come") indicates, to emphasize the "coming to," or arrival at a landscape. The small street lined with trees that leads me to your home makes me think of that allée. An allée which is  the grey of your absence, the gold when we meet, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when I realise that the dark reality covers the allée with the coal of dead fires.....

The last few days have been filled with a gentle rain that has bathed the green leaves. It has been the prettiest June in my city I can ever remember. There's something so peaceful about the way the trees frame the road and the light off in the distance, in the home where you stayed, which can be reached by the small street lined with trees. I love the way trees line the driveways of old bungalows in the tea plantations of upper Assam ; they have a way of building your expectations and foreshadowing what is to come. Am I drawn towards that house because of my fascination for allées? Is it some fixation with sprawling bungalows made by English babus? Or, I wonder, if it is the magic woven by  the small street lined with trees that leads me to your home........

Like my life, the street too has crossroads. You make a bad choice and it's a tumble and a rumble before you get back on your feet again. But you'll get back on your feet. You'll find yourself.  Just like I did. I was at the crossroads and I had to make a choice. I tumbled and rumbled, but I got back on my feet. And it was here that I found myself, in the small street lined with trees that leads me to your home........

In the same street, hidden in the shadow of the tall trees, are the electric poles. I saw the years of my life spaced along that street in the form of those telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... fifteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the fifteenth...

It has been a roundabout ride, spanning a good fifteen years, add a couple of months to bridge the gap between March and May...I find myself in the same place, from where I started, stumbling, fumbling and rumbling, in a small street lined with trees that leads me to your home........