Today, I went to my old house where I grew up. On the other side, behind the house in which I am sitting, I could see open space, it is beautiful to look at, towering up amid the green foliage. Although they mean nothing to others, but to me those open spaces symbolize so much, something within them exerts a powerful pull, and I think this is one of the reasons why I would love expressing my ideas through pen, for I feel that pull so strongly, and I know that it’s important, but I lack the words to express it, and therefore I don’t know what it is. I have tried, and I have capitulated.
Just as I was peeping into the space, I saw a young kid throwing away half-eaten guava’s in lots– Initially I was quite uncomfortable with this gesture of his, but I didn’t say a word, Maybe, because I wanted thus kid to gusto life and to have a sense of its abundance. I felt like its not a crime, sometimes, to feel that living is easy. And this is why I’ve changed my attitude towards guavas & now I realized that it is never really about the world in itself, merely about our way of relating to it.
Later that afternoon, as I parked my bike after a trip to the nearby convenience store, a plastic bag was flapping from the roof of my house. And some days before that, when I saw my garden having lot of dead plants, I have decided to plant new bushes I had bought and was digging holes for the same, I struck a layer of broken roof tiles wrapped in strips of plastic, which I realised from the printed logo must be shopping bags. How they had ended up there I don’t know, but there was something disturbing about the sight of them, for the thin plastic, so white and smooth against the black and crumbling mould, was so obviously a foreign substance. Since plastic takes such an extremely long time to decompose, since the number of plastic bags in the world is so huge and just keeps increasing with every passing day, and since they are so light and can catch the wind both like a sail and like a balloon, one comes across plastic bags in the most unexpected places.
Later on I did some research on plastics and found that the property soil has of transforming everything that ends up in it into itself does not apply to plastic, which is made in such a way that it repels everything: the soil slides over the surface of the plastic, finding no hold, no place to penetrate, and the same goes for water. The plastic bag has something inviolable about it, it seems to exist in a place beyond everything else, including time and its inexorable modality. I felt a stab of sorrow at the sight of the buried bags without quite understanding why. It may have been the thought of pollution, it may have been the thought of death, but it may also have been the thought that I wouldn’t be able to plant the redcurrants there after all. Presumably it was all of these at once. As I pushed the shovel down with my foot into the soil a bit further away and began digging a hole there, I reflected on why nearly all my thoughts and associations ran in that direction, ending in problems and worries and darkness instead of in joy, ease and light. Why could I hardly take my eyes off the submerged plastic bag?
I have cleared up all the mess that has been created by plastic and returned to my new house but the sight did not fill me with joy, I did not come away feeling happy. Nor was I filled with contentment when I caught sight of it, it wasn’t that something stilled within me, as hunger or thirst do when they are satisfied. This incident has a profound impact on my life and from this moment I have decided to change my lifestyle and try as much as possible to move from plastic bags to paper bags.
Cheers,
Aditya Telidevara
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