On Ruhi

These days she spends most of her time in her room.
I have hardly ever seen her downstairs.
God knows what she does in there?
For heaven's sake, is life all about writing those bloody things which no one reads?
Life is about behaving like a normal girl..helping me in the kitchen..
Life is about combing you hair, working hard, clearing competetive exams...earning money..and coming out of that rat hole she lives in!

These days she doesn't even return the calls of her friends..
When asked she says,
'Oh! I don't get to know when time slips out of my hands...
it's not my fault, but u know, I can somehow
never manage to do anything but laze around..'

You either find that soundbox in her room bursting and tearing my ear drums
But at times the music is so soft that I would have to toil that treck up the stairs to her room to find out if she is alive not in a coma.

To my 'Come down and Have lunch babay!'
There would be no respone...
I would scream'Ruhi? Ruhii?'
She would whisper 'Send it up here please'

And when I push her door open, I find her staring out of the balcony.God knows what she finds there.
I remember having argued with her father that we would never need that balcony, there is nothing worth seeing to that side of the house. There is some kind of a jungle, in summer the earth is all cracked up, in monsoon the creepers from it climb upto her room and no matter what she wouldn't let me do anything to them, not even when i threaten her that snakes would find their way up.
And now,that it is winter, the jungle is her laboratory, where she cooks up the fantasies she lives on.
When i take her breakfast up at eight, she makes me feel as if her vision can tear through that impenetrable fog.
Ruhi, can see things she wants to, she has always done that.

And again you would hear me shouting 'Ruhi, babay, Daddy is here..come down and let's have dinner..?'
Sometimes she would honor the ground floor with a visit, most of the times she would not care...

Upstairs, she would be pushed to one side of her bed like an ailing asthma patient, she would be scribbling things in her diary, staring into the dark sky.
Count stars, does she? I never asked..i never could ask.

I don't know where she will end up,i dread the consequences of her life..

May be in the way she lives, she finds the answers to her questions.
The answers that i never could find out in my own long life...