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.
