Photographs by Ipsita Deb
Memories can be deceptive. Memories can be wrong.
“The water here doesn’t run very deep”, my friend told as we were taking a stroll by the lake. She
seemed a bit preoccupied with the thought how someone could drown in a boat capsize in this
lake. There had been a case reported a day before we visited. The shadows of the trees from the
sidewalks fall in this side giving it this dark hue. As the evening fell, the shadows grew darker. I
felt I saw the shadows creep under the water and I found my friends had already moved past me
and I hurriedly followed them.
I love hills over sea. For hills, there are the twists, the bents – the zigzag path make you aware of
the motion at every turn. I see never ending lines as I stand on the river bank. Looking at the
straight lines for hours often unsettles me. Monotonous, regular straight lines with no curves –
curves mean movement. These lines, ever stretching, make me remind of the inertia. It suspends
your capability of action. And as I kept staring…
Days melting into the next and the next and the next and on…
This is somewhere in Shillong. Empty chairs make me imagine the weirdest of things. Like looking at these I imagined that there is a deserted cottage nearby, maybe a family once lived
there, it is a family of a grandpa, maybe two kids and their parents. In the evening they would all
sit here and had their tea.
Do the dead return to the places they once held so dearly?
It was Titayi who first taught me to look at clouds and see things. And he often would find the strangest of things like he could trace a turtle flying in the sky, or a sailing boat. Clouds are funny
as they are always fleeting. By the time I could follow Titayi to his “See, there’s a horse!”, the horse would melt into maybe a giant snowball. Wonder what Titayi would make out of this one.
Scene from a wintry night. Probably it is 2018. This is a hotel room in Darjeeling. “Why is it that winter feels to be the longest of all seasons?”,
I often wonder. There is nobody on the other side of the door.
Ipsita Deb teaches in the Department of English at Rajganj College, Jalpaiguri. She is currently pursuing her PhD from the University of North Bengal. She has published in journals and has contributed book chapters. She loves travelling and has an ardent love for photography.
Parcham Online 
Leave a comment