The gentle swing of outspread wings,
The subtle tilt of head.
The beauty of the strangely weak,
The blemished white on red.
We sit together, they and I.
And often… often do we try-
to catalogue Beauty,
to contain her.
Search and science, we try to use,
to see if she can’t be MADE.
We flick an extra brush to see,
If the Piece is prettier then.
And along comes a wild white lily,
And trumps us with disdain…
My grandpa had this endearing habit of constructing rhymes in his head and blurting them out straight. Of course, that meant that some of his rhymes did not make much sense.
I looked up, interested. This was quite good. Not the usual stuff.
“Dadabhai, that was khool! I mean that was quite nice. Why don’t you complete it?”
Grampa was sunbathing on his old rocking chair and holding a tattered diary.
“I wrote this when I was twenty, buddy.” Grampa was my ‘Dadabhai’. And I was his ‘bud’dy.
I came over. “Wow! Let’s have a look.”
He chased me away with his walking stick. “Never look into another’s diary.” I could see him writing away on the last page.
Rules were rules. I never touched it again.
After his death, Grampa’s old things were shifted to the attic. I sneaked the diary one night and opened it.
There was a single entry on the first page: The poem, I had heard. Beside it, a caricature of what looked like a girl sticking out her tongue could be seen. Grampa WAS always horrible with his sketches.
I went through the other pages. They were all empty. Somewhere in the midst was:
1947. 15th August. We are free. Officially. And then the speech by Nehruji.
This was again followed by brittle, yellow blank pages. I passed them by, disappointed. Why had he not let me see an empty diary?
I turned to the last page. And I felt Dadabhai looking up at me from the yellow page, smiling behind his glasses.
I know, you’re going to read this sooner or later, Bud-dy.(I made sure that you do)
You are a bud, my child. A bud I have seen and nurtured…
FLOWER.
