Juri Baruah


Melting Heart

Rahmat Ali offered me a plateful of sweets –muri laddoos (balls of puffed rice stuck together with sticky jaggery). As I leaned forward to pick up the cup of tea from the table, my eyes strayed to land on a few old issues of the Assamese magazine, Prantik, lying underneath, along with a bunch of letters bearing the letterhead of the local branch of the Asom Sahitya Sabha (A literary body of Assam). Those letters too seemed dated and quite old. The wall in front was held together by wooden battens and a number of pictures were seen hanging on it. There was an old  black and white photograph of the iconic Assamese singer Bhupen Hazarika, singing with his hands on a harmonium,  a nicely framed map of Assam, chain-stitched on a piece of cloth and close to that was a framed photograph of Mecca.  A plastic flower vase, lustreless with age, was standing on a table in the corner. The glass panes on the book case were broken and one could see through them a collection of books – Malik’s novels, the complete works of Borgohain, a couple of booklets on Assamese spelling and so on.

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