IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM

Birds build nests but don’t cling to their confines. Only humans, having mastered the art of high-rise nest stacking in claustrophobic condos, delude themselves they’ve finally got themselves a ‘life’.

Every time I leave it all behind, every time I drive out into the countryside I feel freedom rise tingling and effervescent up my nose – like soda uncorked.
Sunshine skies and yellow mustard fields… Sugar cane loaded bullock carts ambling along, a tractor load of gaily dressed men and women, joyous because they’re off to a wedding.
At the rail crossing vendors tempt with luscious pink centered guavas and others beckon with freshly peeled red carrots and white radishes displayed on a bed of green leaves.
I laugh out loud for no reason other than just being, burst into song, uncaring that I was born tuneless. This is how Free Willy must have felt, I tell myself happily, when the great whale finally smelt the wide-open seas…
On the way we stop to explore a ‘gurmandi’. ‘Shops’ set up on the roadside, under an arched gateway whose ancient doors whisper of forgotten centuries. Stacks of freshly made golden brown slabs of gur change hands. Business is brisk.

We move on, stop at a village. There’s magic in the air…
The smell of earth. Of cow feed and boiling milk. Of mustard oil rubbed skin of women and of tobacco smoke from the hookah two old men sitting on a jute-string charpoy share as they chat. Nearby placid cows stand chewing endlessly. All the time in the world in the world is theirs…
Not mine. I hurry. I need to soak it all in before I get back to the confines of my city life where I’m too poor to buy my own time.

I’m everywhere, tapping into an energy I never knew I had. Camera happy. Clicking everyday lives of everyday men.
Cow dung patties stacked in decorated heaps. The shy smile of the young girl standing at the threshold of her home, of her life… Strutting boys who insist I shoot them with their motorbike.
Suddenly I pause. Envy floods my being making me sick. Why must I go back, I groan to myself. What would I not give to live their life? Free. Unencumbered…
Free? Are they? Truly?
Or is it just another chimera of my mind, an illusion only? This ‘freedom’ I crave – maybe there is no such thing. Maybe to be born human means to be confined.
And what of this hankering of mine? What of this hunger that like a petulant child will not be denied? Will this yearning prove one day, to be the sun that burns my Icarian wings?

The author Veena Nagpal is a novelist. Her novels include The Indian Café in London; Radius 200 and The Uncommon Memories of Zeenat Qureishi.