Another Dawn

In the wee hours of the morning, when the world was still asleep and the street lamps cast a sickly yellow hallow on the dirty, dinghy, mud-streaked city streets, she woke up. With the air of a cautious cat she stretched herself, savouring the feeling of early morning crispness, punctuated by that feeling of pure bliss that the 5 a.m wind brings with itself. Then, with one eye still closed , she cast a look around her bare one-room home -- that is, if a bed, a mirror, a bookshelf and a few utensils -- all of then put under one roof with all their respective incongruity, could be called a home.

She walked into the bathroom -- a modest one shower, one commode affair. Then, wrapping her long fingers around the tap -- with a convergence of soft skin on rusted metal, she wound it open. Water ran. A flimsy silver ribbon. Tiny drops raced each other where the water leaked through the plumbing. So much like us, she contemplated. So much like our own mundane lives , so much like the everyday race, the mindless everyday race. A society which is happy within its congested, self imposed barriers. A society which is, metamorphically speaking, faceless, anonymous. A society where every action is merely another ritual, where human and humane connections are lacking. Everything is just a big show...a thousand different people, raising a thousand different shutters, in a thousand different rooms.

She comes back to the present. Into the ugly picture of modern urban squalor that she so detests. Back into the sordid, half-dozing half-awake society that she'd rather not be a part of. She splashes water on her face, keeping her eyes shut, almost as if tasting the feeling of leisure on the back of her tongue, trying to make the feeling last like a child trying to drink the froth even after the glass of milk is long finished. The drops run down her face, caressing her features, making her more perceptive to the world spinning around her, yet, pushing her further into her pensiveness. From somewhere in the distance, rock music drifts into her ears. She almost smiles at the bankruptcy of life around her. It intrigues her -- so many meaningless actions, so many soulless individuals -- yet, somewhere, somehow, bound by ropes that will never break to let them free....or maybe, they will never break the ropes to let themselves free -- not that they can not, they will not.


She lets her hair open -- it falls, a soft curtain of black, gracing her shoulders. And then beyond the window, dawn breaks out. Myriad shades of red and yellow and orange interwine and fall across her face. The dawn. Finally. Creeping almost furtively through the window. It erases the darkness. Lightens the lives. And even if it can't wipe out the ugly facets of mundane existence, it successfully disguises it, bathing everything in its gentle radiance. She breathes. She's found what she was looking for. And there, in the midst of annhiliation, she feels alive.