Why are they urging me to open the doors of my childhood,
Which I had shut stiff a long time ago –
To keep away my still smoldering pains,
To tamp down my recurrently reborn anguished hopes?

I do not want to see my grandfather’s cane
Keeping step with me in our jaunts in Shimla bazaars;
Nor his care-worn face gleaming with joy on seeing me;
I do not want to hear my aunt’s carefully calibrated voice
Narrating a romantic folk tale in a series of evening sittings;
Neither do I want to feel tormented at the separation with my cousin.

My childhood is a life apart –
A sealed capsule of pristine time,
An island in the stream of my variegated experience.
Its joys are the rapturous blossoms of my existence,
Its wounds the unrelenting spurs of my catharsis.

If I could have done it,
I would have liked to die in my childhood –
To foreclose the ignominy of my later years.
A beautiful blossom of God
Must get defiled through its journey in the world
Before it returns to its sublime eternity.

I want that life to remain sealed
Till I am safely out of this world,
And take it with me to the other world where there is no hurt,
And open its doors there to my joy and happiness.