A sketch,

Every year, during spring, when the smell of leaves and flowers would stir her soul, Ketaki would think of her by gone days, her university days of having sessions of adda at the canteen,her first friend who turned out to be her love, her chasing T.S.Eliot and James Joyce and Jibananda Das, her finding solace in Tagore and Wordsworth and her death with the redness of gulal upon her face.

This spring, even after so many years as she had started arranging the bookshelves properly, and putting fresh flowers into the vases, and humming a Tagore in her lips, she found she had missed herself.

They had shifted to a bigger house with better facilities, her husband had got a promotion and her son post exams, having a vacation.
No worries.
Still she thought she was missing something.
She asked herself what actually she was missing.
Her life, her youth, her beauty, her longing for friends, her lost love?
What?

She looked at herself in the mirror.
No, she had not that grown old much.
She counted her gold adornments.
No, there were nothing missing.

Then she looked outside.
It was another beautiful day of spring.
Smell of moisture was there too.
As if dryness with moisture had made a perfect harmony.
Like harmonious remains life and death, light and darkness, happiness and sadness, winter and summer, the hills and the ocean, the rivers and the seas.

She finally realised, what she was missing.
She was missing her favourite thing,
Her favourite pastime.
Painting.

So thinking, she asked her son to bring a sketchbook and pencil box and watercolors and pastel tubes.
Adi was a bit surprised.
'You are going to draw?'
Ketaki was thinking what could be her proper answer.
She was thinking of finding a proper excuse.

'Why not? Can't she do that?'
She heard.
Angshuman had said that.
Ketaki was bewildered.
She looked at Angshuman with moist eyes.

Much later, when she asked Angshu how he could know that she was willing to draw something, Angshu smiled and said
'I remember finding your sketches in the cupboard a few days ago while I was helping you in doing the spring cleaning. And I noticed with how much care you packed them and put them into a folder...that showed your devotion to that work...and I loved that...'

Ketaki was surprised.
She smiled.