IMAGINING MY IMAGINATION (Binita Rai)

M

y imagination is audacious and knows no boundaries. It flies up as high as you and I believe the human world ends and the celestial world begins and dugs deep down to the earth, to its dark crevices, reaching to the infuriated volcanoes ready to punish the intruders who dare to disturb its slumber. As a true imagination should be, it opens its eyes and inhales its 1st breath every time I hear the sound of boots crunching on a wet graveled path, the moment I feel the bubbly air brushing past my face, when I get a whiff of divine food from our small kitchen downstairs, the time I hear the silent whisper of the dog -eared pages turning, the ringing of voices so distant, yet so deep, the sight of huge, white, unfathomable clouds and the elusive blue sky, the unearthly feeling of dreaming, living and believing every sentence described by the storyteller.

 My imagination survives from the diminutive fragments in me to the humongous share. It knows the way and is the survivor amidst adversity of the dire world. The dismayed souls may pull me down to the ground, tie my helpless body in chains an obliterate all my muse but then again, my impervious imagination will rise from the mayhem and flutter its way back to my heart and remain invincible. My imagination is cold and it’s warm, it’s earnest and it’s arrogant, it’s prude and it condones, it endures and it revolts, it has veracity and it’s a liar, it forgives and it dies for vengeance, it’s a priest and it is an atheist, it redeems and it maroons, it is filthy and it is impeccable, it’s a poltergeist and it’s guardian angel.

It’s everything but then it is none. It is a shadow accompanying me in the sunlit days and in the dark alleys unlike the banal kinds who hastens to end along with the raise of the sun. The never finishing magic of imagination and the company of shadow have morphed me and now I view the world through a different eye, with a childlike fervor, new to the “usual” ways. Crying my ways, smiling it up, or writing it down are the array of paths I can choose from in order to vent out the welled up self – gratification my imagination has endowed me with and thus I imagine !!!

Binita Rai