This evening, I was sitting out on the terrace observing things around me. I sat there for more than an hour. The initial idea was not to observe but to just sit down and relax for a few minutes as I was feeling tired after playing with my sister. The loop of observations began with me looking up at the sky and seeing dark clouds on one side of it. This reminded me of floods, landslides, and cloudbursts occurring in different parts of the mountains in the Himalayan regions. The things around me seemed quiet and peaceful. The plants and trees were blooming with greenery and looked so fresh due to the constant rain falling upon them in the past few days. Although my heart was in a great level of grief for the people dying due to the climatic disasters, I still felt very relieved and grateful to be in a safer place. The thing is, that I don't usually sit outside to observe my surroundings and hence, everything around me seemed so magical.
The sky had started to get darker and I could see a few stars up there. Looking at them for a few minutes made me get tears in my eyes. I've no idea how but I started wondering about the purpose of existence. I wanted to cry. I was questioning myself again and again that if such huge stars can appear to be so small in this vast sky, then what and how small am I?
I tried to meditate on the thought of it. I closed my eyes but couldn't focus. Abruptly, everything around me seemed so loud and chaotic. At this point, I was observing a lot more happening around me, even having my eyes closed. My ears kept shifting their focus from the sound of bhajans that were being played somewhere far away to the sound of temple bells my grandma was ringing to the sound of utensils from the kitchen. Okay here, all other sounds disappeared and I began to think of what Mum must be cooking for dinner.
A loud "didi" in my sister's voice interrupted my thoughts. She was asking me to come inside. I refused and started looking at the houses nearby. Some people had lightened up the electric bulbs outside their houses whereas some had lit a fire outside the house - people do it in monsoon for the smoke to keep the mosquitos away. Amidst this all, I saw a firefly flying past me. This took me back to the thoughts of the purpose of existence. I looked up at the sky, it had gotten much darker. I could now see more stars. I saw a star traveling at a very fast speed across the sky. While trying to follow its path through my eyes, I noticed another star coming with the same speed from the opposite direction. They crossed paths at one point and as they kept moving forward in their directions, it was hard for me to follow both of them at the same time. Eventually, I lost the track of one of them. I followed the other star for a long time until it disappeared behind the dark clouds - which weren't even visible to me now, in the dark sky.
My eyes shifted from this to the mountains, far in front of me. It was all dark and people living in those mountains had also lit up bulbs outside their houses. The light of the bulb is the indicator that there's a house. Those lights flicker due to the varying density of the air and seem to twinkle just like the stars in the sky. Hence, when you look at the mountain from far, it appears like a part of the sky with many groups of stars. There were certain places in these mountains, where I saw only one light among all the dark surrounding. I wondered how people live there all alone amid dense pine forests.
I have been seeing these mountains since childhood. Over the years, I've seen the number of lights decreasing in some parts of those mountains. Those people must have migrated to the cities in the plateaus. I suddenly saw a bulb being lit up at a house on the same hill where my home is located - but at some distance from my house. There are three more houses beside but only this house is inhabited. I remember one of the houses next to that one was also inhabited a few years back...they too have migrated now."
