An Attic Locked and Forgotten । Supromit Maiti

Afternoons never sang of solitude since my college days.
Now, forced confinement shaded my existence with myriad memories
flooding in from distant summer afternoons in the past.
In them I found dismembered carcasses of a happy childhood,
a little frayed, but holding the sinews of my existence in
this ancestral house with a familiar ease.
The memories came in heaps of colourful shades,
some ochred, some azured and others left in magenta hues.
Amidst them, I found the old attic, locked and forgotten.
The child in me had lived many a summer there,
breathed and laughed, fancied and lost myself in the labyrinths of weird imagination.
Innocuous apparently, these memories quivered in me
a curious desire to take the stairs to the attic,
smile fondly, and unlock the frazzled door,
the door that I haven’t touched for years.
I waited with baited breath as the door creaked open on one side
and the other refused to budge.
As I wedged in, sheepishly, I felt a strong musty smell hit me hard.
My eyes took in the sight of the frowzy furniture,
dressed in copious amount of dust and negligence,
while the frowstiness of the room spoke of all the time lost.
Irate yet swift movements of the lizards every now and then
whispered how unwelcome a trespasser I was
in their enclave, which used to be mine, once.
When the dying sun peeped in through a dent in the broken window,
the sculptures by the spiders shone golden in the air,

and it spelled to me in stifling moans,
that my time is lost in summers past,
in rains and winters as years drove by,
and I wore a distant sigh, reminiscing the summers lost and time.
And for one last time, I looked at my attic, locked and forgotten.