2000
When I moved to the UK, I witnessed the splendiferous autumn and fell in love with it. Having lived mostly in North-Indian cities until then, I had not seen this glory. The colourful carpet of leaves and their crunchy crispness beneath my black boots. The conversation between the path and I, the soft murmur of these feather-light beauties rolling around on the ground. I picked orange and brown leaves off the road, placed them flat in my bag and pressed them inside my Oxford Dictionary of English. The pages in all my books were marked by these gifts of autumn.
2014
Sheets of leaves decorated London pavements like wallpaper. Trees denuded, headed for their winter slumber. Their canopies, atop streets and rooftops, screamed transformation. The dance of the winds in red, yellow and auburn at street corners were like flames.
Autumn was the enemy. It had swallowed the one dearest to me and now they would return only as memory. Yes, leaves were falling off trees but what of kids dying before their parents? That had to be wrong. The leaves would return in the spring. Not my baby. The autumn was wrong.
This “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, an adversary forever. The trees would stand forever naked and I would stand bereft beside them. This grey air seeped into the pores on my skin to deepen the darkness within, as the skies up there grew black and blacker still. As shadows lengthened on the outside, the darkness deepened on the inside.
2026
Mid-September is here and hints of the season have started to show. At first sight, my body tensed, guarding me against the known unknown, reminding me of the helplessness of those hours, all those years ago. Familiar echoes started to emerge from the void, and the shadows of sorrow started to shimmer on the far horizon.
I stopped and brought my gaze back from the distance to what was right in front of me. A pure red leaf looked straight back at me, in the shape of love. Without the backstory, the sight of yellowing leaves was magical. In its purest form, this splash of colour had no meaning, no great significance. It was a simple unfolding of things as they were.
I can now see that autumn was not a cruel tyrant but an innocent bystander, much like me. It meant no harm then and is harmless now. A cyclical visitor, it oscillates to the rhythm of the planets, humming a rustic tune to itself. It will soon morph into other colours and winds. We will call it winter, spring…