The store-room.

As you turn the yellow pages of the forgotten memories, it let's out the woody fragrance that it had held within its leaves for all these years. They fill the voids of this dank room, almost overcrowding the already unorganised arrangement, where the shelves stand clumsily on the books while the earthen-ware balance themselves precariously over the unstable shelves. The windows are shut and there is no room for light, not any more, the infuriated books being trampled by objects not as worthy as them, demand light everyday, demand being looked at, wants to breathe in the fresh air, feel the warmth of a touch, the gentleness of a grazing finger, tracing its non uniform, worn out edges, and almost on the verge of being turned to the next leaf, well that used to be the sweet old life. It longs and yearns for a care-giver. How on earth did you let this happen, you even allowed the emergency exit to be sealed! The ventilation cut off by a cardboard which once in the not so distant past served as a fortification to the blindingly white, best quality papers, where the inexperienced and crude hands traced deep dark lines with the no. 4 HB pencil, often using colours everywhere the hand and eye coordinated or un-coordinated, it didn't matter because they were colours with an obvious confirmed beauty associated with them. The tuni lights that irradiated the house you once called home, are now wrapped away in a black plastic, tucked away inside an earthenware. They do not go with the interior decoration, they said - "Not even during Diwali," they stressed. You should have been alarmed but there is something new about you, that leaves room for little to no reaction, for "little" things. You have bigger things to worry about, you should have a blue wall for the carpet you have been eyeing for a few days now, at the newest mart in the city. The old decors, the wooden panels with or without termite should instinctively be taken out, ofcourse. Some of the old photos have become as insignificant as their almost equal-aged, hence conclusively olden, frames. These photos are embarrassing for you, it shows too much of the ground beneath your stilhetto-ed feet. Look this is what your candid photo looks like, the face almost too chubby for a teenager, the dress almost too shabby considering your new apartment in a different city, your family almost too simple for your new porch and that forgotten child's smile almost too natural for the unnaturally large, new walk-in closet that you are presently designing. Some of these old ripe vanilla-scented pages get lost amidst the tucked heap of incense-sticks from your beloved ma's prayer room, they are being laden with natural stone tiles from a distant land and you cannot be leaving the remnants of such "things," lest they stain the floor even darker than their original taupe hued tiles. These are rarely available and quite priceless if you think about it. Why did you ever have a wooden stool made, Baba? - it is too tall to sit on and too short to reach the ceiling for hanging the designer chandelier procured from an even distant land? Remember the old tape-recorder - it played the the old cassettes and sometimes had little accidents with the delicate films, inter-twining amongst themselves, well it still sits on the old dining table with the specially designed glass in the centre, it added a little glamour as you thought once upon a time; the glass is broken now and the old radio which sat beside the tape-recorder still stolen and still unreturned by its "borrowers." The scantily furnished new living-room stands as a testament to your success and the over-crowded store-room, sealed from all its sides, even its emergency exit because it is no more holds exigent belongings and hence unworthy of such indispensable attention, hence packed away in the corner, is nothing but a jute rope that still restains you, pulling you from behind. The ground here seems quite shaky and so it should be since it is too old and too loose to hold you, your present self as mighty as your ego, your tone as boisterous as your car's blaring horn, so much so that all the keys of your old harmonium even when played in unison couldn't defeat that noise, well partly because even though unsynced, the keys were always meant to play notes of melody and not mere loud boastful noise of domination, a heraldic and demanding presence. Maybe the fact that you opened this dungeon today let out some unwelcoming smells to your study - bear in mind because you wouldn't want any distractions there. Maybe shut it as tightly as you can, banging the rusty iron doors as loudly as you can, reminding the lesser world crawling down there that it is their home now, this small filthy, shanty and grimy belongs to the lessers in the food chain and is by no means a place of the better, prodigious and paramount human-kind. So rest in peace old furnitures and books, old wall hangings and old lanters hidden in nooks, let the rain flood the dungeon and rot your innards as you let out hollow muffled cries, seeking a little sun, and a little rain, begging for just one last breath of fresh air before the flood drowns you one fateful day or one tempestuous night.