That Place

In the age where we have become slaves to technology I found myself at a place a bit far from all the technology based dilly dally. I was interning at a well established company’s headquarters in Delhi for about four months and somewhere within the last two weeks, during that time, between the noises and non-stop capital, I found myself taking two-three days off to visit my Nani, mommy’s mommy.
It had been 6 years since I last set foot in that quiet village which has a life of its own. That place has made a lot of progress and despite of keeping the same pace as the latest iPhone releases, this place hasn’t lost the touch of those fresh, dewy, rusty breezes or the smell of the cattle all around. The young crowd has been out and about this place to look for “growth” and “moolah”, saying there isn’t much to do here. And they are right to some extent.
But my agenda was just to visit Nani’s place. That’s it. No more. I wanted to feel that same sweet, salty, smokey taste of Chappati made on the burning wood, despite of the furnished kitchen and self-lit stoves; the smell of sun-baked fields carrying with them the stench of cow dung from the cattle house and fresh water from the canal nearby.
But the thing I missed the most was watching the sky at night as it lit up like nothing a town girl had seen before. These were the things that had defined Nani’s place. And turns out they still did. The new LED TV was a good source of entertainment and my phone was sufficient for connecting with the outside world, but for an old soul like me, I was happy within the fields, the open space, the stars. I was quite satisfied, away from the crowded city for these two days. I had no complaints.
My cousin, who was born here and had made other people’s life miserable with his mischievous acts found it difficult to adjust here now. As we drove to his parent’s, he counted all the things wrong. And how he felt he had taken so many steps back when he visited the village; how Uber, WiFi, home delivery etc made life easy in the big cities while this place was still a village.
But I was happy to stay here the next day. I’d rather be sitting here sipping the tea made from water from our personal waterhole (taken out and purified with all the new technology, of course) than be at a place where you do have privacy but no peace inside. I saw in his eyes a helpless look as he tried to reason with me to not spend the night here. He wanted me to be as comfortable as possible. But what he didn’t see was that I already was comfortable here. Why wouldn’t I?
My old soul got to sleep under the stars and clearly count all the constellations. It got to breathe the night air coming from the mountains and got to play with the animals one doesn’t even bother noticing in big cities.
Maybe if I had to stay here a few days more I might have sounded just like my cousin, but for now, I was happy how things had turned out. I was happy as I was satisfied with what this place offered me. As I still remember a friend telling me how the big city he loved offered him a view of only two or three stars at the most from his balcony while he yearned to explore more of that mysterious sky. And I was lucky enough to be a part of one such place. A place which offered the galaxy in abundance, something which even the cities had not learned to do.