On a new year.

[Photo by Mayank Austen Soofi]

May the new year treat you better than the year just gone. This same wish goes for labourer Anand, who turned 65 yesterday and whose ageing body can no longer bear strenuous labour; for Bimlesh who is carrying on with her late husband’s legacy of a tiny food stall; for colony guard Saurabh, who is patiently waiting to get a job deserving of his graduate degree; for street hawker Shehzad, who recently lost his wife, leaving him alone to look after his young children; for elderly pavement hawker Rani who lost her husband and son, and earns for her grandchildren by selling trinkets; for Abu Noman, who in his 70s is single-handedly keeping alive a pre-Partition literary journal; for street recycler Shabana, who is alone raising her three young children… all these citizens have been featured on this page the previous year, including poet Jonaki Ray, who lost her father in January of the year gone by. Currently visiting relatives in Kolkata, the south Delhi dweller wrote this special New Year poem for us.

A Letter to the New Year

In the beginning there are numbers—the list of people to call and visit, the vegetables, bread, and milk to order, the chores to finish, the clothes to be picked up, the emails to write, the round of ‘Happy New Year’s to send and receive.

The first of the sunshine falls like golden rain—children have come out in groups of threes and fours and set up their cricket wickets and football nets. A few resolute adults are walking in circles around them.

The morning dust is lifting like threadbare curtains from the stacked tiffin-box-like houses, the roofs of towers, the templedomes, and mosque spires. I am in the city of my forefathers—once the capital of an empire, the bay where its merchants landed is now embanked. The streets here have old, terracotta homes that are empty of people but occupied by tree roots.

A yellow cab wanders up and down the street, the driver—an old man, trying to locate the exact address of his pickup, perhaps. Domestic workers and guards are trickling in—showing a card with their photos at the entry gate—what identifies each of us remains common but difficult across cities, borders, and times.

I think of the list of things undone, of the wishes unspoken, about the other city, Dilli, that is home to me being destroyed seven times and still standing. I think about letting go of the pain of what is lost—people, places, cities. Of finding the way when sometimes there is no place to go. I think of forgiveness, and of all that is yet to come and new beginnings.

PS: Photo shows Sarika, right, and Ranjana preparing for the New Year eve party yesterday afternoon in a Ghaziabad apartment complex.