When no one was looking, the afternoon sun shifted and the Palash tree, laden with crimson flowers, cast its enchanting shadows on the pale yellow wall, the paint chipped from several spots. At the same time, its fluttering leaves and swaying branches made purplish patterns on the deserted coal tar road that wound and vanished after a few meters.
You pause to reflect, and some distant memory rushed back.
You've always been inexplicably fascinated by the interplay of the light and shadows. In your childhood home, in that small room that stood at the corner of the courtyard, right under the guava tree, its branches resting on the tiled roof of the room, as you looked out the small window in the middle of the night, you caught the full moon peeking through the foliage. The moonbeam filtered through the checkered grill and fell on the hard floor creating black and white patterns. They seemed to coalesce into fleeting shapes, murmuring half-forgotten stories.
The whispering shadows seem to be talking, tugging at an unknown memory, churning some unexplainable emotions, tucked somewhere. They evoke a bizarre feeling, transporting you somewhere faraway, and you envision yourself somewhere ethereal —a place totally unknown yet so dearly familiar, like you have been to that place before, as though you know it like every corner of your being.
A sparrow fluttered its wings and alighted at the windowsill, its neck making spasmodic motions, and just like that, you were snapped back to present.
You sigh and get up from the window. You have chores to do. But yet again, a memory was relived; your attention, for a change, steady for an unusually long time, your mobile phone quietly forgotten.
The sunlight would move again tomorrow, just as quietly, just as unnoticed. And maybe, like today, you’ll again stop for a second to see it, or maybe you won’t. Either way, it will keep moving, whispering a secret, and you will keep breathing in the spaces between.
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