This is my sanctuary of peace.
Here, some four years ago, winter came and got stuck on the rusted iron gate's handle. The moment I loosened the handle, a creaking sound trampled across my garden... The tailorbird's chick hiding behind the shiuli flowers took fright and flew away somewhere, leaving behind a torn feather steeped in the scent of sunlight.
Here the dead leaves keep falling, coming to rest at the foot of the cedar. The sound of that leaf-fall in the wind. In the wind, like ghosts, dance the stems of roses stripped of petals, the leafless branches of drumstick trees, the withering morning glory.
On the veranda where peepul leaves play hide-and-seek, clinging to the boundary wall with its peeling plaster, there sometimes Abinish would sleep with tender warmth in winter's embrace—that is, me—that is, my past 'self'!
Today, riding the current of eternal time, Abinish—that is, I—have come to awaken Abinish, that is, myself. The chest, the eyes of that old Abinish who once pinned millions of moments of peace together with pinpricks, and then...sleep... Yes, yes! I...I...I speak of that very 'I'.
I pull open my bloodshot eyelids and wash my eyes with blood itself. Strange! All this while, no one came to wake me from sleep! These days when I was stirring restlessly, at whose...whose calling then? Was it I myself, or was it some dawn that roused me each day...little by little!
This awakening could be that of the old Abinish, meaning the death of the new me, or of the new me itself; meaning, at last, however it happens, the awakening of the old Abinish!
Had the old me truly fallen asleep...to awaken the new Abinish, that is, the old me?