It was yellow. I loved everything about it though I could taste sand in my mouth. Between my teeth and in my nose. It was scorching summer heat, combined with a blinding storm of sand. Me and my bicycle were the only things I could spot among the blurring mass of flying sand particles. A strange sense of deja-vu always erupts within me whenever I recollect that visual. That was precisely the scene I'd imagine and project on my sub conscious mind during all those times in my childhood, when I'd walk back home from school with my aunt, staring straight into the sun through the fibres of the pallu of her cotton saree pressed in front of my eyes. The diffraction through the network of fibres caused the scenery around to appear much sunnier, drier and dustier than it was in actual. I would then imagine a world when the sun, dryness and the dust would be normal. I would envision a world without greenery or water, without life of laughter, inevitably digressing midway through the imagination to distant possibilities of migrating to moon if there were ever such a facility, so that I could escape experiencing the end of life on earth as I saw it. I have always loved to live. Ironically, that same emotion and spirit kept me from fending off the sand storm I was in the middle of that hot afternoon in May.
As much as I wanted to live the experience of a sandstorm; to feel and see what I'd never felt or seen before, a parallel track in my mind kept feeling extremely deja-vu'ed'-Is it coming true, after all? Is the earth and our surrounding getting drier, dustier and sunnier? Are we losing the race against ourselves trying to exploit Mother Nature.
Life seemed to present to me this unique opportunity to experience life as I lived it. To see all things as I'd wished and more. To know what it was to anticipate and expect and what it was when none of what happened was anticipated or expected. Life is after all a test of how we live through the rounds of tasks it sets us and how well we fare at them.
