This is going to be a short writeup.

For a lot of time now, I was worried about one thing: my age. I always wanted to remain a child forever. The carefree-ness, the absence from big responsibilities, the unconditional happiness, the sense of accomplishment in little things … I was always afraid of losing it all. Even though legally an adult from last seven months, I had been trying to deny the fact that I have grown up, and a child no more I was.

Even if I accepted the fact on rare occasions, I felt there was a latent sadness in the acceptance. Losing childhood … argh! It was a tough choice, a tough realization.

But yesterday, a brainwave changed this all. I had a new, revolutionary thought.

Let me establish the background first – that is important.

So it was a rainy weather. All these thoughts about happiness and age were running at the back of my mind. Nevertheless, it was a fun journey going to buy some milk from a nearby store. The street had puddles of water, and you had to navigate your way at every step.

To take a shortcut, you divert from the street and embark on the empty two-sided ground which joins the store (with the gap of a little road). Two or three dogs are usually lying here and there on this ground like some mops.

It was here in this ground I had this brainwave I talk of.

All before that, I had been imagining the graph of happiness as something like this:

Or something resembling this:

Or to be more visual, I will say that the mountain of childhood is the highest among all other mountains – mountain of adulthood and mountain of age etc.

But all of a sudden, I had a new realisation. I revisited my problem: my problem was that I had lost my ability to enjoy life as a child can.

This picture of tall and short mountains perplexed me.

And then came another picture, another viewpoint: what if instead of increased and decreased happiness, it was just “different kinds of happiness”? Maybe a child could be happy and an adult too could be happy, but they both were happy in different fashions? If that was the case, my attempt at pretending to be a child so that I could be happy in the same way a child is happy, will be futile, because happiness made for my age is just a different kind of happiness!

The only difference is that the mountain of childhood is different than the mountain of adulthood. They may have different kinds of grass or trees or environments, but they tower the same.

So even a sick, helpless old man can enjoy life to the fullest, only if he cares to identify what kind of happiness is life ready to offer him!

There are moments in life that can’t be recreated. Moments that just happen. Moments that delight you and make you feel that life, after all, does carry some meaning. When you smell the trees and get strokes of cool, comely wind on your face and cheeks.

As monsoon season commences every year, the first few showers are nothing less than bliss. They are relief from scorching heat, and the weather in which clouds keep the sky closed for hours on end, and sunlight comes sporadically in evenings and mornings, is just awesome and something worth living for.

It was one such evening, a few days ago, while I stood near a parapet grill. We live on the second floor, and when you stand near this balcony grill, you feel as if you are a lot closer to the clouds and the sky. Just twenty or thirty feet above the ground, and you are already almost touching the sky!

Now let me describe the scene I was witnessing. Just as a side note, I had seen some clip from the movie Jurassic Park that morning, and the scenes had been replaying on the back of my mind. I wasn’t hence surprised when I saw a certain group of clouds forming a perfect, roaring T-Rex at one corner of the sky. Clouds and stars – these are two things that can give you almost any shape in the world. Some see in the same group of stars a simple, commonplace dipper, and some, amazingly, see a fierce, stood-up-on-hind-legs bear!

Anyhow, it was a T-Rex that I saw. The clouds were quite stationary that evening hence I could expect it to stay in sight for quite some time. There was a yellowish tint to all of them, as Sun was behind one of those groups. From yellow it slowly turned to orange and soon to pinkish. The change was spectacular.

As extra frosting, there was that cool wind which comes with such weather. Now wind comes in different flavours too. Sometimes it carries some heavy, unbearable smell and moisture which brings lethargy. But today it carried some scent brought from some rose-fields. No air conditioner in the world could rival its soothing coolness. The same wind rustled through the leaves of a tree at a distance, just as it combed through my sideburns. Maybe that tree was where from where it was issuing. For a split second, I felt as if I was out of my body and some beautiful cycle was in progress. My nose exhaled air that danced across to the tree the underside of whose leaves breathed it. As a return, they gave out air that was pleasant to me and was balmy and sweet. It was perfect cycle, as if we were complete in ourselves and needed no third thing in the world.

At this point, I felt as if the T-Rex smiled at the thought that in the bilateral exchange, I was forgetting the power, the medium, the expanse, space and openness, which was making the magic happen.

You will be stunned when I will tell you that the street in which we presently stand, is being seen by us for the last time. You and I are seeing it for the last time in our lives! Do you look at that old man with rough beard over there? Yes, very near to that pole. That one with the wooden cart. You did not notice him before, did you?

What if I tell you that you are looking at this man for the last time in your life? In your long life that is going to follow, you will never see him again! Doesn’t that surprise you? Yes, when I first learned that most of the people we see in our lives and can’t care less to notice, are those that we get to see only once. Isn’t it spellbinding to think that you and that rough-bearded man will continue to live on the same earth, on the same planet, for years and years to come, and your paths will never cross again!

And this street too.

There is going to come a time when you will not even remember that you were ever in this street, a street that had a pole and a faulty streetlight, gazing stunningly standing beside me. When I will come and remind you, you will wrinkle your forehead, scratch your head, suck your lip, but you won’t be able to recall. You will say you don’t know, that maybe you were, maybe you were not. It will be a history lost in the past, and no one – not even a single soul on earth – will know you were here, on these pieces of gravel, on this wearing down road, under this faulty streetlight.

In your short life that happens to have passed, you must have stood like this in many streets, looked at many people, said and heard and read countless things; but try whatever you can, you will not remember many of them.

Ah, so I seem to have made you wonder what life is about, then? As you walk with it, just like you walk with me today, you pick tonnes of sand in your hand, which unfortunately slips by, leaving behind little grains that you are able to recall as memories. What happens to what all has slipped by, from life and memory both? Is it like it never happened, because no living soul remembers it, not even you whom it was about? And even if you try and are careful from the very start, how much can you really hold in your little, frugal hands, while your fingers have spaces between them?

And what about the memories of those millions and billions of humans that have been? One day, the beautiful and prized picture of this street and that rough-bearded old man will be completely forgotten. There must have been streets in the past, and there must have been numerous old men who owned carts; but how many of them can you recall?

So let us sit down here in this street for some time. I know a shop nearby which can offer us a place to sit and a nice view of this street. We can together sit down and watch this singular picture for a while, enjoying it, savoring it, making a memory of it.

That night I realized that even one little closed room can become your whole universe and mean everything to you.

Like in the previous anecdote I wrote about, electricity was again gone. But this time I was not on the rooftop, simply because winters were picking up and it would be chilly up there.

My parents were in the kitchen, preparing dinner, and my sister somewhere near the main gate.

I lay on the bed, in a dark room. So dark, so black, that if you could see one thing, it was a shade of the door to the room, luminated slightly by the candle burning in the kitchen at some distance. Except that little glow, it was pure darkness.

For some reason, this darkness provided some warmth, as if more than simple absence of light, it was some sort of blanket. There is something about these colours: white colour seems to represent coolness, winters, and black seems to stand for warmth, heat and summers.

In such circumstances where you are enclosed in darkness, it makes really no difference whether you keep your eyes closed or open: either way, it is a black colour which you see. But even then, it is a different kind of pleasure to keep your eyes wide open and stare at the ceiling you cannot see.

And suddenly something starts to happen. All your senses seem to be thinking one same thing, which you are yet to figure out, and in this concentration, you are no longer in the room in which you lay on the bed. The ceiling is suddenly like the open arenas of outer space and you start to see planets, asteroids, black holes and galaxies hanging at little distance from you. So this is that big picture which God sees, you can’t help wondering. Looking at this like that should be boring, or that is what your mind thinks, but instead it’s calming and a pleasure of its own sort.

You want to enjoy this forever. You want to leave your body and become a silent part in this, like a little piece fits nicely in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s an ocean and you are a drop, enchanted by this all. It’s a magical experience, and you want to learn this magic too. For a split second, you want to become God who must be living somewhere around here, in a colony where you are but a visitor. Out of the blue, some word drops into your mouth and you start repeating it in a cycle. It’s akin to chewing something extraordinarily delicious.

Someone calls your name and you return back to your dark room. All the lights that the suns and moons had been giving, are out now and it’s complete darkness again, and it’s slightly haunting.

But you pledge to yourself that from tomorrow, you will not sleep. When every day all the family members would have slept, you would stay awake and wait for this experience to happen again. You would do this every night, and even in future, would prefer a dark room. This would be your nice little secret: that you didn’t sleep at night but instead went somewhere to a different realm. That would be something you would live your rest of life for!

But rare such experiences are, you do not take long to realise. But increasing frequency of such ecstatic, mystic experiences must be a sign of spirituality, experiences that fill every cell of your body with wonder.

One night – one night that was just, but I was mystified one night!

Electricity is out. It is nighttime, almost bedtime. Dinner is due to arrive. I am alone on rooftop, flat against its floor, searching into the space.

Stars are after all not as many as I used to think I would find upon looking at the sky. Do I see Milky Way when I look up? Nah, not a full glass of milk but just little dabbles here and there.

Moon is the center of attraction. Clouds dare not touch it – it stands alone, steadfast, taciturn, like some ruler of the night. Little stars twinkle at times, only sporadically, but when they do it is pleasant.

What is surprising is that even if it is night and even if I lie spreadeagled on the roof covered by cool night zephyr touching and tickling me, I am not likely to fall asleep anytime soon. If this is what spiritual experiences are like, I will choose more. I will wish that electricity goes out every night and owing to the absence of fans, I am caused to climb the stairs, pat the one-leafed plant lying in the mid of the stairs, and lie down here like now. I will not ask for any blanket to spread, won’t need any pillow, my bony hands are enough for me.

But nights are there to pass. Moon is visible only half of a day, and even less if you bring in no-moon, half-moon, and crescent-moon nights – and we still notice it so less. If it were up there all the time, never going, never fidgeting from its place, we wouldn’t even care to notice it! It would be as common as the blue colour of the sky, and we would lose any sense of wonder in it. It has some respect because it is ephemeral.

A stroke of wind gently passes by, caresses my cheeks, my eyes get closed mildly, and my lips part. It really must be a spiritual experience, looking like that at the universe.

I savor the flavor of this delight for a few more moments, until the wind suddenly stops and I open my eyes and join my lips again.

As if an algorithm is running, one second after the wind stops, some bright glow spreads all around. It takes me another second to realise what has happened.

I put my hands on the cemented roof, push myself up, get seated and look all around. My name is called, stating that dinner is ready.

Electricity is back.