Ode To The Old

Getting up at 6 in the morning after snoozing the 5:30 alarm several times, finally entertaining the doodhwaala, who would be banging at the door since ages, standing by the chunks of Verka milk bottles in his wagon, going out in the Nehru Memorial Park for a brisk half-an hour walk, rushing back home, and into the kitchen to prepare for himself a one-egg omelette with a half burnt toast and a strong tea and relishing the meal hurriedly before catching the last local from Bandra to Boriwilli; constituted the mornings of Mr. Goswami, a senior clerk in the Taxation Department of West Mumbai. A clean-shaven man with a supple and wrinkled leather, indicating that he was in his late 40’s, Mr. Goswami was a multi-faceted personality; an efficient bade-babu in office, a bal-brahamchari at home and more significantly, a prolific writer at heart. His study for which he had chosen Sadhna as the sobriquet, was a masterpiece, adorned with works as old as the Shakespeare and also providing an insight into the modern world of Robin Sharma and Chetan Bhagat. But the ‘commodity’ of Sadhna which seemed to be priceless for Mr. Goswami was the coveted wooden desk, lying in a corner and looking a century old, on which he had given birth to so many marvelous creations. While the water almost lobbied for crystallization in the cold winters, Mr. Goswami would sit for long hours in the nights in Sadhna which was warmed up, thanks to what seemed to be an ancient heat exchanger, sipping the sweet-corn soup to pump himself up, while capturing the magnificence of towering mountains and beautiful beaches in his lively poems and praising the Grand Hyatt delicacies in his ‘rude food’ articles. He was as sincere and witty as Karan Thapar and a visionary as Obama in his thinking chair.

As years rolled on , the Taxation Department employees were introduced to a new technology called the ‘computers’ and Mr. Goswami was not an exception. Apart from the clerical stuff, this ‘technology’ unleashed the treasure of writing tools like the Microsoft Office which engulfed Mr. Goswami, thus disturbing the ‘thermodynamics cycle’ of the ‘writer’. He would now no longer ‘waste’ his ink scribbling his heart out on the A4 sized sheets, rather he took to blogging, parting with his companion, the wooden desk, which had always stood by him in times, sweet and sour. Mr. Goswami indeed did a ‘Tiger Woods’ act! The ’thinking chair’ too was replaced by a strange- looking rocking chair.

One night, Mr. Goswami’s sound sleep was disturbed by an unexpected power blow-off. He got up, looked for his spectacles, but being unable to locate them, walked into the dark aimlessly. Soon, his path was obstructed by a ‘solid thing’. Hovering his hand over the ‘obstacle’, Mr. Goswami was unable to identify it. That very moment, the lights turned on and he found himself standing in the Sadhna with the same old wooden desk blocking his path, as if begging to him to return to his ‘old tradition’!