Pearson India Blog

In my dream vacation, it’s a late afternoon in March. The trees beside the lake are swaying gently in winds that bring the promise of summer and the memory of winter. The playful winds tease the still water of the lake, and an almost-shy sunlight rides on its ripples. There I am, sitting under a young champa tree, taking in its heady scent and reading a big fat novel that I started in the morning beside the lake, feeling ‘dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep’.
In this fantasy world, I have started taking dance lessons again—getting the same adrenalin rush I did the first time I took lessons as a little kid. There is nothing more beautiful on earth than the sensation of music flowing through the veins, making one move to its rhythm, joining the physical to the metaphysical. In another age, I would have been a whirling dervish.
At the start of the vacation, I began dusting the corner of my mind labelled ‘unfinished projects’, and one of the first things I found there was a sketchbook and pencil. I am very rusty, and will in any case never be very good at it; nevertheless, sketching what catches my eye is a self-indulgence I’ve been dying to engage in. And that is exactly what I have been doing. Sometimes I laugh at the result; sometimes I manage to surprise myself. I also jaunt across the small jungle on the other side of the lake to the lush valley beyond it, often scaring away the birds with my usual enthusiastic singing and only feeling more invigorated with every mile that I have walked. My eyes are losing their concrete myopia and becoming used to the open again.
And as I now go to sleep with a contented sigh under the tree, I think happily of the next day—when I’m meeting my good old friends from school after more than a decade.
Maybe things are not so bad with the world after all.
Shinjni Chatterjee