Lampshade

It was from the early days of your embroidery classes, I remember, when you were perfecting your skills for a French knot, that you made me a lampshade. Discarding the dusty, butter paper hat from over the aluminium base, I had watched you drape the light with your creative accomplishment – a strip of orange fabric with three French knotted bright yellow daisies in bloom, etched equidistant along the length of the shade. You had then thrown the switch on and a muffled yellow sheen, permeating the satin, had drowned my gloomy room in a warm sundown glow. Across the sombre horizon of walls were our rolling shadows--outstretched arms curled into stick figures, a couple strolling hand in hand beneath low mountain peaks.

It had been many years now, since you had walked off your chosen way and the tungsten in the bulb too had snapped with time. But never for once had I desired to replace it from beneath the shade. Only sometimes, early morning, I move it from my table to the window sill and carefully place it in the path of the drifting sunbeams. For once, the daisies come to life. The rising sun screened through the lampshade, fuses my reality and the past into a happy possibility; until soon I hold out my arms against the yellow dust torches pouring into my room and meet a lonely, weeping man in the mountain shadows.

By - Sobhan Pramanik