A Ladle of Moonlight

With my barren eyes I could see the barren trees feel the barren moonlight wash each leaf many times over. Through that myopic vision I came to know that the night sky is not always meant to be dark, like the shimmering smile which does not reveal the bitterness of the stepwell-mind. The other day, which in a moment seems just yesterday, and in another, eons ago, I am reminded of the crescent from my fifth floor balcony -- a welcome little amidst the amply lit stairways of the surrounding buildings. And here was this night, with the full moon following me into my 2nd AC coach from Maharashtra to Delhi -- a scanty sight out of the predictably dirty Indian Railways' window. I was transported to Thimpu and Shillong and Goa and all the other places it has been travelling alongside, a lifetime.

The first rains have many associations of an itch to dance foolishly on the road, under the concrete sky, the ensuing cold, and finally warming up to a deserving nap after a sumptuous lunch of khichudi with or without ilish. The moon too has, I realized -- of a continuity of change throughout life, courageously. It allows you to grow from the rabbit of the Cartoon Network to the rabbit in Wonderland. It hops around you all over the world, although it belongs to a different world altogether, other-worldly. 

It touches lives, and leaves. An entire plateful of emptiness is served with a ladle of moonlight to an endearing foolishness of believing in the truest of lies. I hop with the rabbit, into lands beyond reason. It calls for a glass of golden liquid held lovingly in the hand, with music which needs no practiced ear to involve itself in, and the company of one's own self. 

A ladle of moonlight touched everything it fell upon, much like my sight which sits stupidly on anything and everything. And it touched me, like a pleasant breeze making me aware that I have beautiful hair, things irrelevant logically, but profoundly deep otherwise. Does it make sense now that with my barren eyes I could see the barren trees feel the barren moonlight wash each leaf many times over? Is it true that you tend to lose yourself when you bathe in it? I soak in the indefinite pleasure as I struggle to keep my barren eyelids close. Till the light takes over and you are lost in the untold barrenness of what a ladle of moonlight could hold...