Paradise Turns Perfect Paradise

Sometimes it is okay to chase the sun with the windows down.

Your voice is the only thing carrying across the highway,

disobeying every speed law that you ever thought to enforce upon.

Sometimes it is okay to cross over all the hills, in hopes to get somewhere more beautiful.

Where the sun sets in its full glory and that is the only direction the compass knows.

This is it.

My last journey of 2012. And the very first of 2013.

Elevated at six thousand eight hundred and something feet, we swished quietly to McLeodganj and beyond.

Drove for about 12 hours only to be welcomed by a silver light of a winter skyline, beautiful enough that I didn’t remember where my home is any longer. The clouds were floating in, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colors to my sunset sky. The stars were beginning to shine. The moon was beginning to sprinkle its inner light. The foggy windows around me were only telling me that it’s the only place I ever wanted to be. The place is believed to be the land of peace and hashish abound. 

Trekked further to Perfect Paradise. There we sat with our legs stretched out besides the struggling bonfire and my lips shrank to the serenity in low temperature. Cupped the gracious Old Monk in my frosty hands when the shrill winds cut straight through the layers of my clothes, then the skin and got wrapped around my bones. I tilted my head towards the starry sky and let out my feelings with a deep exhalation. My feelings got translated into soft fog before my spectacle glasses. I wished if I could fold the sky like a newspaper and keep it under my armpit. 

the place itself is a home to a thousand mystical questions and answers about beauty, the right, the wrong, and the deserving. And music of course. Wonderfully noted, octaved and naturally composed, this place sings its own melody on a ‘high’ note.

During the last day of the year, I got to drench myself into a space, so occupied, so absorbing, and weirdly small shaped hole in the universe. The space certainly got so engaging that plunged me into the ocean of meanings. Far away from the bustle of concrete jungle into the peripherals of serene mountains. Picturesque taste was complimented by Tibetan flavours. That literally sang symphonies in the mouth.  

The morning heat brought with it the vibrancies of purity and newness, and I stood still for a while inhaling just the peacefulness. It's afterall the secret of life. I found myself lost in the oblivion thought of the faces dimmed out and mazed out and doped out and out there for me to search, at the silhouettes of the hills in front of me.

‘How was it that the birds sing, that they gloriously fly, that the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning,that the sky is not just blue but ohh bluest of blues, that the pleasant air love idling in the trees without a purpose, that every evening blooms with the songs of peaceful hymns, that the dawns whitens behind the black trees on the shivering summit of the hills?’ 

Walking down the hill in the day time and stumbling back by the bright moon light in the streets of unknown neighborhoods was more than enough to stuff my chest with immense pleasures. When there is crowd and noise, I feel there is some trouble waiting to blow up. And when there is silence and people are like localites of Mcleoganj, there is just perfection and nothing to fill the air. 

After 3 days, the time when I sat next to the driving seat, the rearview mirror framed the exotic collage of my new year. The mountains have left me feeling renewed and more content. I sat mutely among the series of sighs and the awe  just dripped from the corners of my eyes. Passing by the serenity I was positive than I’ve been for weeks, as if something has been given back after a long absence, as if my eyes have opened once again, as if I am tuned to savour the pleasures bestowed upon me, until the time I come back. Only if I had the talent to put the beauty in words... It was mesmerizing.   

  

The best of everything was the company I had. It was fresh, crazy, clever, eloquent, well-informed with a knack for adventure. That is what I call good company. In reality it helped me living a dream. A dream where paradise was a perfect paradise.