My Favorite Haunt

By Moumita Kundu

There is no one place that I like to visit but only one road that leads there : that is "down the memory lane". Through this lane I can visit or revisit any place I want to, as many times I as I want to, wherever and whenever I feel like. And this one road is where I am a constant visitor to. I've visited the lane umpteen times and I never seem to get tired, never can get possibly. When I am there I find my ‘self’ -- my quintessential self that is beyond any definition, without any social imposition, sans any sort of constraint and I love to be in this Lane for as long as I want to. During this apparently pointless pastime, I ponder over petty things and try to critically examine the actions, reactions, thoughts and emotions of myself and the people surrounding me: the expressed as well as the latent.

In short, retrospection is what I engage in. But the magical aspect of this land (read lane) is that I can visit all the places I have never been and ever wished to visit. I can conjure up stories of me travelling to all those places I have only fantasized about, that too with my loved ones! That imagination which mixes memory and desire can only be found in a walk down the lane. Here I can’t help quoting T.S. Eliot:

“Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.”

This "rose-garden" is the best place to visit because, afterall, "human kind

cannot bear very much reality.”

By Moumita Kundu