The year's last day

 

It’s a balmy afternoon on December 31, 2021. The sun-warmed moments are sleepwalking their way to a cold evening. The last hours of the year on the peripheral, marginal sprawl of another time unit readying to say goodbye. Time and its slipperiness, it elusive prowl reaping sheaves of lives with the scythe in its hand. Space and time in an emblematic tussle, laying out a well-manicured matrix of things, phenomena and happenings.

There are the thinnest sparse traces of white in the blue skies, some kind of little commas in the seamless narrative of mother existence. It turns the afternoon blaze to a kind of yellowish tinge. The sky looking down with an unpretentious grace as the earthlings’ vaulting desires hurtle up to form a cosmos of their own.

The frost-beaten trees hang there with their attitude of tortuous durability. The sparrows are engaged in sharing chatty tips. A tiny group of six or seven parrots goes with their thrilling and fascinating squawking as if discussing the seamless fabric of fruity flavors. A flock of pigeons, a few dozen of them—maybe around hundred—flies in a beautiful formation as if drawn by the smell of some unusual delights. Every time they turn southwards, their white underwings flash a silvery blaze in perfect symmetry. What a celebration of the spirit of freedom! We humans may harbor traces of melancholy but they are bidding a happy goodbye to 2021. And their formation and the flashing of the silvery underwings against the sunrays, as they dive in a particular direction, exposing the whitish underparts of their wings to the sunrays, beats any aerial show managed by we humans to commemorate our victories, national days or other landmarks in our history. It’s a subtle, simplistic saga and augurs well for the coming year. We have to hope for the better because mother nature is splashing her joy with such prominence through the emblematic agents of peace.