Mélange

"Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."

Dreams are like drops of rain, you live them, you love them but you can’t hold them. They can be as pleasing as the first monsoon shower that makes the environment breathe, and as dismal as the ones those bring floods, those devour lives. Dreams are full of imagination as well as reality, sometimes wanted and sometimes unwanted. They really have wings that make you travel to any part of the world.

There are some dreams that change life, that make you able to make fix on. My aunt too had a dream, a dream full of colors far and wide. She had a plain canvas and filled it with all the colors she liked. She recalled the moment when she gave birth to her daughter, who was a plain canvas at that time. She painted her daughter with her colors; red, blue, pink…all her favorite ones. She made her daughter able to carry out everything; she wasn’t able to do in her own life. She devoted herself fully to paint her daughter’s life. After that her daughter got settled with her new family, she was left alone at home waiting for my uncle till 8 pm to return from his job.

She had the whole day long, alone at home…wandering from room to room, sweeping dust off the clean furniture, switching on and off TV every now and then. At other times, doing nothing. Her husband and daughter were well-versed with her condition but were not able to do anything.

Then came her dream, that gave her a new direction and made her able to take decision of her life and she knew everyone would support her.

Now she wanted to paint some more lives, wanted some more canvases, more colors; turquoise, olive, mauve… she wanted all of them. She got the aim of her life. She was going to open a small home for the children who are deprived of parent’s love and who crave for a place they can call ‘home’. She wanted to realize the joy their convivial voices and catch a glimpse of the ingenuous glitter in their eyes. She ached for being a child again. She wanted to play, to learn and to live with them.

Now, she had no time for sweeping and TV. In fact, she loved that untidy home with toys and books all around. She had no time to observe her growing age in the mirror, instead, she ran behind the children for food and games. She recollected all her buried talents of kitchen.

Her lonely life finally got friends for lifetime and she painted their life with colors of love, delight, hard work, creativity and what not. Together, they made a charmed circle. She gave them wings to fly high in the skies, to reach from nadir to the zenith.

The place, whose loneliness haunted her once, now made her life an exuberant picture with the colors of relationship, companionship and most importantly a laugh, a real laugh that she lacked for so many years. My aunt is now complacent in the four walls of her home and now that place is called with great reverence as “mélange”.