An Indian friend of mine speaks a fluent sharshop.

This might come as a little shock to you if I say i know an Indian guy who has never been to Bhutan and had spoken very less with Bhutanese but knows sharshop fluently. Well he is my classmate and he is from Arunachal Pradesh, from Tawang to be precise. My jaws completely dropped in amazement when he spoke in sharshop in the class today. Later i went to him and asked him about his whereabouts and found out he is from Tawang. He said it is this language they use as a medium of communication back at his village.

Then, it was his turn to be speechless when i replied in sharshop. The talks that followed between us was in sharshop.

Two people meet in a classroom somewhere in India , one is indian the other is Bhutanese and they speak in sharshop. Common man, its interesting!

To be continued....

Dear Bunu

Dear di,

I just wonder how proud Phupa must be to drop you to your work place and drive off to his with a contented smile. And the smile that glows Phupu’s face might not have dropped for days now. In fact I have a feeling that she smiles even while asleep. And you should know that you are the reason behind those smiles. Despite all the odds in your life you moved forward and brought those smiles. Congratulation!

And now there will be queue of people waiting outside your chamber waiting patiently for you to treat them. They would come to you hoping you would ease their pain and when you actually ease their pain you bring smiles on their face as well. You will be the reason behind their smiles.  That’s how great you are now.

But I am greatly disappointed of the fact that I couldn’t be your first patient and I shall blame the time for time has placed me somewhere miles and miles away  from home that I can only imagine myself being your patient.

Anyways, I pray that you have successful years ahead and that you be able to maintain professionalism in your work.

Hope to see you soon.

A Caged Bird's Home

A bird I had caged

And why wouldn’t I ?

For it had the silkiest of feathers

And oh, how lovely had its tail.

And all day it sang

Sweet melodies of songs.

Caged it was

Not for many decades, I must say

For it must be cruel

And of course inhuman too

To cage a bird for long

But I recall, and distinctly

It was caged

Not more than half a decade

And then I set him free again

For it to fly,

And to spread its wings

For the rest of its life

For you know, I have a heart of an ocean.

But then, a day the heaven chose

And I found again

The same bird and of course in the same cage

But it did not sing today

For it had turned, lifeless and cold.

Then I look at haven,

And I curse it

For of all the places on earth

Why it had to die here?

And trouble an old man of my age.

But then I assume again

Why wouldn’t it want to die here?

 For the cage had become its home

And home it is, where we take our last breath

And lingers our smell, and our songs

Even long  after we are gone.  

Solitude

Solitude

A chapter, it is

But in the book of life

Have I seen a book without?

I ponder much

And to conclude I decide

I haven’t.

Particularly characterized it is

And smell it has peculiar

Nothing lingers much

But it does

Hovers around, as though dark cloud

And shadow it casts

In it souls must dwell

For Once, Once Again

                                           For once, once again

In the vastness of sand it stood

Not many but a lonesome tree,

Its bark turned dark

And its leaves I long to be seen.

It’s the sun, it needs to be blamed

For it burned the bark

And the lively, lush green leaves.

But now it longs,

For nothing else,

But the heavenly shower

And for one time

The leaves must smile

And of course it dance

To the rhythm of wind

For one more time

Its branch must spread

And once again

A pair of birds must dwell.

The haven must listen

May not be for many times though

For the tree has aged

But for one more last time,

And just, one last time.

  

To Pen a Poem

A piece of cake it seemed

Not so long ago

A year before of the last

To pen a poem.

Just as I put my pen

The words flowed

Unstoppable

But today I see myself again,

The pen is stuck

And words forgotten

Just to write a word

It seems

Not lesser than work of Hercules. 

Jackfruit and Its Tale

Every Saturday morning I would start the car and wait for my mother to come with basket hung by her shoulder for Saturday used to be the vegetable-market day. It used to be just us most days but sometimes the lady house-owner or sometimes her daughter would wish to go to market with us.

The vegetable market in khuruthang, which otherwise remained deserted would be flooded with buyers and sellers agreeing to a price profitable to the vendors and absolutely cheap to the buyers. Only the upper-hand knows how a price of such equation was solved altogether.  

There in the market I had only a little work to do; walk along with my mother and carry in the basket whatever my mother decides to buy for she thought I had no knowledge or a very little knowledge over the selection of vegetables. How my mom selects goods from a heap is a big mystery that my aunt and I are yet to solve. It was once that we were selecting dried fishes from a heap and she picked one from the heap and said, “Pick one of this kind” and raised it in the air. The one she had picked and the ones in the heap looked all the same. My aunt and I would start fishing from the heap and my mom would say again, “Not those, this kind! This kind!” and it would same again.

It was on a certain Saturday market day that I found a huge jackfruit kept for sale. I haggled with the vendor to a comfortable price and paid him hastily before he could change his mind again. I think that day my mom realized, I could bargain quiet well.

As we reached home I watched my mom separating the blobs of eatable fibers from the fruit and I ate it hungrily that morning. One after another blob, I kept on eating.  I ate until I could barely move and just as I stood up after much struggle, my head felt dizzy and somewhere in a distant memory, a long time back, I heard my father telling me, eating a lot of jackfruit fiber-blobs makes a person sick for days. Needless to say I puked that morning and was sick with headache and nausea, precisely jackfruit-nausea, a semi-medical termed I coined that day.

My father often told me that it’s best to be moderate, “Extreme is dangerous.” He would say. I learned it that day; he had always been right.