Once upon a time I lived in the outskirts, waking up every day with a variety of birds. Boundaries were generally superficial, mainly because I could sit on any fence.  Nothing really mattered between the sun above and earth below. Not even the lives of the ordinary people visible through their  kitchen windows,  easily accessible from the boundary walls. The metamorphosis of the butterfly from the caterpillar had my undivided  attention, the yellow chick in a shoe box hidden under the bed, my best friend, or the solitary white mouse purchased from savings from my pocket money. Sometimes, if I could afford it, a kite lazily wavering in the shimmering scorching sun, the scalding roof top burning my childish feet.  Girls were actually boys wearing skirts. Life was easy. No cell phones. No world wide web. What you saw was what you got. Open spaces, butterflies, rainbows and the blowing of conch shells thrice in the evenings.

Things got moving pretty fast thereafter. A time lapse study of metamorphosis. People came in all shapes and sizes from all directions and settled down in the locality, at random. Some with their hands on their hips, frown on their faces some with fake smiles and mostly all with the 'I know better' look in their eyes. Amidst all these my space was still empty. People came by once in a while. Some stayed back , some didn't. Some left with a good bye, some with menacing looks in their eyes and curse on their lips. Life was balanced. Summers were cooler and winters bearable. Once in a while there were rainbows , at other times, as I lay on my back, watching the night sky by  myself, shooting stars forebode bad luck. I was an unperturbed atheist  without boundaries. Slept late, got up late. A normal living being with normal habits in a world of millions of other normal creatures. Only ,  I was not living in the outskirts anymore. I was in the eye of the storm, so to say; 'Waylaying the meteors with a drawn sabre...'

Then there was a huge storm for a period of time.  An untitled superstorm.  Thunder lightning et all. Nights were more or less sleepless and days depressing.  And then one night the storm stopped suddenly...like all storms do and in the deathly silence there was this sound. The sound of a sharp knife entering the human body.  In the dead of night, it is sometimes impossible to fully analyze a sound or shape.  And sure enough the next morning, there was no bleeding dead body but just a bag of garbage on the green grass of my empty space.  My empty space.  Somebody dumped a bag of garbage on my space!  Initially it was just a garbage bag with unknown contents,  till some crows got busy and started picking on it with determination and gradually the rotting stinking garbage with the history of some household came out tumbling and lay scattered like blood from a shotgun injury.  I knelt down in front of the garbage, Sufi style, with outstreched arms and cursed at the sky, the Gods and humanity. The sky did not respond, Gods did not bother and humanity did not care a damn. Some dogs came running for a taste of the stuff. Otherwise life went on as if nothing has happened.

From the next morning   the whole scene changed. Except for crows, birds no longer chirped, as if offended with the open display of filth. People who stopped by at other times, for a word or two, went past in silence with a look of accusation  in their eyes.  I wanted to tell them that it's not my fault if someone threw their garbage on my space! But I couldn't. Mainly because they never asked me and neither  stopped to listen and the very few who did, kept nodding their heads in a 'yes' but their eyes said 'come on...'. Things slowly went out of hand. In  the dead of the next  night and all nights thereafter, the sound of the sharp knife went on and on, stabbing repeatedly,  and every morning the pile increased in size like a malignant tumour. Rotting stuff was all over the space and before long the whole area was covered in an ocean of garbage, the grass below wilted and bare earth bared its teeth. People hurried past, blocking their nostrils, the same people who dumped  their stuff the night before. Slowly the pattern changed, so that garbage was dumped right in front of my eyes, and nobody waited for night to descend. I was suffocated, nauseated and prayed for a miracle. But nothing of that sort happened. Only that I realised I had gradually become transparent or buried under the deep sea of filth or a killing field. 

I knew it was time to move.

I am once again waking up every day with a variety of birds. Boundaries have gently faded or are non existent. Nothing really matters between the sun above and earth below. Wild flowers are slowly emerging  from between packets of filth and colourful kites are all over the sky. Faces and places pass by like ordinary stations. My head is home to a thousand clouds and my heart is echoing with church bells drifting across vast, deserted green fields. I am once again in the outskirts. I am free.