Flashback

There is an eternal loneliness that looms in every corner of the three-storeyed paka-bari that haunts an eerie nook of Asansol. It's a loneliness that has seeped into the very personage of every inhabitant of this neighbourhood. It's exuded from the walls, radiated from the roofs and reflected in every patch of newly set wet cement drying in the lugubrious sunlight painfully doled out from above. Imagery is a newly born child nursed in the bosom of this town, that cries its neglected presence in the grey lives of every dhuti clad urchin selling his craft by the road. A memory of an ancient picture taken seems to proliferate, by naught but elusive reason, a ghat with the morning laundry laid out to dry, smaller houses beside the larger houses, bidi smoke hazing the edge of vision and an old ambassador plying its tortured way through the narrow gullies. I don't know why it comes back to me the way it does, but every sketch of nostalgia that comes with an ounce of memory, draws an unearthly paradox upon my mind. That the horizon lacks skyscrapers, that the roads lack cars, that all the smiling faces of the past are a dream, black and white and haunting and gone.