For a Peacock : lines written on a Thursday morning

There is a peacock, a peacock”, yelled my maid hysterically. “She must be nuts,” I muttered under my breath. It was 8:30 in the morning; a time which haunts every woman for at least thirty years, if not more! My husband was running late for his appointment at the passport office. I was “like “Wallet...Check, papers…..check, cell….check,…..pen….check.” My maid was still going on, “didi….didi…. mor, mor, “What the heck! I peeped out for a second and saw a sight that I had least expected! On my terrace there was really a peacock! In all its be-plumed splendour! It was moving around regally as if it was the most natural thing on earth for it to be on my terrace. As if it was a regular haunt of it’s! Time stopped, the rush of mundane life stopped; everything came to a stand still for a moment. There was a PEACOCK on my terrace.

As my husband drove away, warning me time n again, “could be aggressive, please don’t try to get too close,” I stood there for minutes watching the peacock sauntering lazily. It was so breathtakingly beautiful that I stood in awe! It turned and looked at me with eyes that seemed outlined with white kohl, and my God! Was it splendid!? I regained my senses n ran inside for my camera, but it had flown to the next terrace by then. It looked so out of place in our concrete city! I would like to correct myself; our concrete houses looked so out of place in its backdrop, so ugly, so lifeless! And here it was, moving with such a majestic grace that had me spellbound!

Some things in life, certain incidents teach us once and all that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever!” I so envy Keats! He did not work for a private concern. He was not worried about losing weight; he had no idea about passport renewals, and never had to pay his credit card bills. If I were Keats, I would sit down and write, “Ode to a Peacock” and posterity would read it with awe and worship! I am not trying to be funny. No seriously speaking, I don’t love the way I am leading my life. I hate waking up with the alarm, eating muesli for my breakfast; coax my little baby to get up for her school so early. I despise malls, I hate odonil and other synthetic room fresheners, I am sick n tired of waiting in a queue at the counter of the grocery store. I feel so repelled with what I do with my life daily. I would rather pack my bags n head for the woods for a lifetime! Or better even, grow vegetables for a living with my family on some far away mountains. But I can’t. I don’t have the courage to do so. So I make do with this lifestyle as millions of human beings are doing! I don’t have the guts like those handpicked few who can denounce worldly pleasures for a life they want!

So I stand and watch the peacock that came to my terrace from some other world on a Thursday morning to give me a reality check. To show me a mirror of how dissatisfied, how ordinary and how helpless we were in our quest for success, in our race to be excellent. And as I stood deep in reverie, suddenly it turned its head towards me, looked me deep into the eyes n flew away, leaving me thinking, would it be able to go back to the Utopia it had come from? Or will our cruel, selfish, bloodthirsty city life snatch its life away? The answer came to me as if by itself. Peacocks don’t die; I do not ever remember seeing a dead peacock. They come back to us suddenly one overcast morning as an emblem of beauty and bliss, as a denizen of that world we dream of, but never dare to create!