A-Z Challenge: D for Dear Delhi

D for Dear Delhi

You have been the jorum of dreams; you have been the heart of our country. You have been home to many drifters in the dawdling, dark hours of the night. You've been the flimmer of hope, the station of action, the place where vision meets reality. Since the antiquated centuries, you have been the maiden holding in her bosom monuments from which wayfarers still draw aesthetic nourishment. You have been home to art and culture, to music and drama; you have been the capital star of the country, its central conurbation, its cardiac organ throbbing with life. Dear Delhi, you have housed in your bosom princes and paupers, criminals and saints, men in white and individuals with shady reputation. Silhouetted against your painted red sky are skyscrapers, tall candle like structures often with tapering tops and pointed peaks finger-tipping the drifting lumps of cumulus. I see you as a pantomime, one with a painted face and communicating with gestures. I see you as an old matron tired with age, your back crooked from holding the weight of civilization. You stare at the city you gave birth to with eyes welled-up. You cannot hold your child by its arm anymore. It has matured before you knew it.

Dear Delhi, you have given opportunities, you have unleashed discrimination, you have pushed people to succeed, and you have forced them down hill too. You have been propitiated like god by your lovers with poems and prayers; you have been called a horrible monster by those who derived not a drop of milk from your buxom bosom. Dear Delhi, you have endured tempestuous disruptions, but what deracinated the essential human spirit in you was a blow hurled by a bunch of men. They hurled arrows on your chest; they robbed your bosom of their nourishing elements. They violated a woman, they violated you. A veil of assault was thrown at you and you were forced to display it. You now stand abashed, you dry maiden. The drought in your womb may never cease. Dear Delhi, you may never be the same again: the spirited central organ of the country breathing life and sporting equality for all. You have a scar on your face, an ugly defect that might never heal. You may still house wayfarers, breed dreams, but a piece of your ample heart that died on a foreign shore on a cold day last December , that broken piece might never re-unite with you; you may never be full and complete again,  my dear Delhi.