Terrace and the 3AM silence. The space behind a thousand-liter water tank which I am sure hides me from the eyes of the neighborhood. The view of the night sky adorned with millions of stars and constellations. With this environment, the terrace never fails to give me solace. Amid the silence, sometimes, there is a random kid crying or some dogs barking as if with every sound and the stories wrapped in them, terrace calls me, to be an audience of those occurrences. And what stories it has stored on its half a meter walls! Apart from my own silent emplacement, there are a million other stories it observes and, in some, even manages to be a part of.
The way I view it, I see it as a stage, a play stage in which each actor is the main character with their own stories. These actors make a presence together only on occasion, it’s the solo performance in which they give their best story. And the terrace welcomes this. The entire sky as it’s fly tower, which sets its ambience, itself a director and the audience but only of the observing kind, not a critic. The terrace stores in it every narrative, silent cries, deep conversations, and the promises of dreams that never get fulfilled.
It’s décor of seasonal gardening atop, carries the hope and resilience of the Sower and at times, the hopelessness the plants bring. The cloth lines planted across the entire area carry in them the heaviness of wet clothes along with the scent of the individual they belong to. In all these, the terrace just watches, as a witness to the stories that never get told, the hurt that gets bundled up in those wet clothes and dried in the sun, to never be revealed.
Like a person’s life, a terrace gets its decent exposure to both light and dark, cloudy days and the sunny, windy and deluge rainy days. I wonder what it likes best; The hot sunny days on which it is avoided by all, the warm sunny days on which everyone finds peace in it, the overcast cloudy nights, or nights on which the entire cosmos remains visible. Or perhaps, the power cut nights on which everyone rushes to the terrace and holds a small get together, sing songs, and forget the busy schedule until power comes back making them retreat to what awaits them.
For all I know, it may not even care about the stories that live within it. With the whole sky to look up to, knowing that the limit is so far within reach, maybe it prefers the hills that surround or the airplanes that pass over it sounding their loudest roars. The terrace is so used to stories, imagine what more it could find in all those planes, passengers, and the residents of the hills. An observer in its best form, with all the ambitions it witnesses, I imagine it to be aiming for higher. In the end, it may just come down to the fact that, the terrace is just an inanimate thing that just sits there, not knowing all the tales it carries, the sobs it records and the happiness it echoes.