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KENOPSIA ( DAY 4)

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SANGEETHA KAMATH

Scritch-scratch…scritch…scratch..

I scribble away with my pencil for want of nothing better to do. Building my word bank, writing fiction, creating art…or just writing about the mundane rise and close of my day. 

Scritch-scratch…

Dear Diary,

Word of the day today is Kenopsia.


It’s a new-fangled word which I chanced upon quite recently, all thanks to the pursuits propounded during downtime and this inescapable lockdown. I took upon one of them to building my vocabulary. Though this word was a novel one, the sentiment associated with it was not alien to me. I just didn’t have a name for it back then.


Looking back, during my school days, I had always dilly-dallied on the last day before it closed down for the academic year. While everybody just couldn’t wait to rush home or to hang out with their friends, the arcane sentimental in me would always wait it out until a major part of the crowd had dwindled. I would get captivated and drawn to the emptiness and vacuum of the classroom, which at one point of time would have been bustling with my frolicsome friends and classmates, my schoolmates and their full of beans laughter and cheerful screams all year round.


The hardest challenge to overcome emotionally was when I had to pass out of primary school and no longer had any reason to enter the place the coming year.


This obscurity overwhelmed me so much that, on the last academic day, I took a walk up and down the old wooden staircase to the floors above where I had first started my primary school journey and relived each classroom and the people I had come to know there and grew fond of.


Oh, talk about mush! The memories—The Good, The Bad and The Mischievous, also that I would never meet my teachers in the same way again swamped me.


That made me wake up and smell the coffee. This was just one phase and more were likely to come…and go.


And it did, three years later when I passed out of High School. A similar vagueness, but I had already familiarised and braced myself for it. Nonetheless, a strange sadness overran me. 

Standing there and gazing; pondering about how a place of an exuberance of a magnitude this large could possibly transform itself into one of an icy hush in a matter of minutes.


KENOPSIA it was! I was not an oddity. My emotion did have a name.

****


Today, history repeats itself, though I’m not a school-girl anymore. A short walk after lunch took me providentially to the space where I used to have one of my cardio Zumba classes before it got suspended by the awful corona virus scare, and by Lord! —it was cordoned off… like a crime scene!!! The upbeat music, the catchy tunes, the energetic dancing group, our bouncing steps, our lively chatter during break, the boundless enthusiasm… our happy place had been rejigged into a dead zone?!


It looked like a surreal ghost town!


Adding to the effect were dried fallen leaves, windswept grounds and unkempt grass around the area. It was KENOPSIA all over again.


Old habits die hard, but after three decades, technology had made it possible for me to articulate and immortalize this.



What dawns on me as a lockdown??? When I have a ritual every evening at sundown to zone out and go sky-gazing, standing at my bedroom window. To spot the twinkling and pulsing lights of airplanes high in the sky ascending into the clouds till they disappear or making their way down with people happy to touchdown and return home, as I would like to imagine.

But not anymore!!

No more airplanes are visible in flight. All I see are starlight and satellites sprinkled across the night sky like stardust, which I guess is all what nature intended for us to see in the first place.

“When life knocks you down, roll over and see the stars”

Plus, what does a forced work from home scenario mean to me? Not much! I’m quite easy-going and adaptable. In the bat of an eyelid, I can switch from an ‘outdoor' and a people-person who dances away her blues with a cardio Zumba and ‘Yogances’ with her workout buddies thrice a week to be totally ‘indoor’ person.

This indefinite distancing will hopefully make our reunion and social interactions increasingly cherished when all this vexation blows over.

In the meantime, hovering on the brink, it was quite a smooth transition to metamorphose into a recluse engrossed with my unfinished art. Or an incomplete read or writing for hours. These are now my priceless Zen moments. I’m on a road to self-discovery and tapping into my hidden potential. Talk about a break in the dense dark clouds!

While I wait for Mother Earth to rejuvenate and restore herself, I will stargaze and let the moon rays soak me through the wide windows.

Scritch-scratch…my pencil blazes a trail on my journal and my hands are having a hard time to keep pace with my thoughts!

I'm a diarist, a writer---even today I still use pen, ink and paper.

I never did know how to follow the rules at first

But I've certainly mastered how to break them like an artist.

***

©️ Sangeetha Kamath 

Pic Courtesy:Image by Alistair from Pixabay


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