A Page from My Diary

I went for a walk...

Truth That Slips the Frame

Morning slid in quietly, and before I knew it, my feet had wandered into streets that didn’t know my name.

The orange sun’s first kiss brought the green back into the trees — slow, deliberate, as if morning had to be coaxed into shape. Light spilled over corrugated tin roofs, curled into the cracks of alley walls, brushing against the hunched backs of stray dogs still folded into the night’s leftover chill. I followed it farther than I’d planned, letting it pull me into streets my feet didn’t yet know.

The sounds came first — the coarse braying of donkeys, the impatient squeal of pigs, the thud of a bucket dropped into a puddle. Then the shapes emerged: shoebox shanties squatting side-by-side like tired relatives, their walls stitched together from rusted metal, sun-bleached tarpaulin, and scraps of billboard promises that had never set foot here. A small plaster god perched high more by devotion than design, its painted lips chipped but still smiling as if in on some private joke.

The air hung heavy, carrying the sour rot of a neglected gutter curling through the settlement like a reluctant river. It clung to my skin, burrowed into my clothes. Somewhere, a dented radio bled out a Bollywood mix — scratchy but triumphant.

In the centre stood a tire swing on fraying rope, suspended from a wind-battered tree whose roots knuckled into dry earth. It swayed without urgency, its ropes groaning like an old lullaby. Nearby, children with sun-drunk skin and muddy knees chased a metal hoop with sticks. Their laughter cracked the morning open, letting something warmer spill through. Their eyes held that unteachable kind of joy — the kind that didn’t ask permission; it simply rose.
Everywhere, there were smiles — not polite, but wet, luminous smiles, glinting like coins in the first light, unbroken by the weight of the day. It felt like everyone here was in on a rhythm I hadn’t yet learned, a beat I couldn’t catch no matter how I tried.

I trailed them with my camera. It was only supposed to be cerebral flirting and an act of anti-mainstream. Shifted it to something more. My lens drank colour and form. Not for beauty. Not for pity. But for truth. And truth, I realized, doesn’t stand still. It moves, it breathes, it slips out of the frame just when you think you’ve caught it — like the heat pressing on my back, the thick scent of drains, the sting of dust in my eyes, or the curve of a cheek mid-laugh carrying over rusted roofs.

By the time I returned to my high-rise, my shoes wore a coat of dust, and my mouth wore silence. The shift was abrupt — the elevator’s clean metallic sigh lifted me into air-conditioned stillness, the faint scent of citrus candles, the low hum of a city sealed behind glass. The air here behaved differently. No donkeys. No pigs. No gods on crumbling altars. Just espresso humming in the corner, my phone blinking with office emails, brunch plans, and requests to join our weekly Vipassana gatherings.

I poured a coffee and scrolled through the photographs. Each brimmed with colour and chaos, but also with absences. They didn’t carry the heat pressing on my shoulders. They didn’t carry the smell of drains or the sound of laughter lifting itself above it all. They didn’t hold the metallic taste in the air, the creak of the swing, or the way the sun leaned in close as if trying to listen. They did not tell the whole truth. And the truth they left behind gnawed quietly at the edges of my comfort.

Because what had I really done?

I had walked into a life I could leave, admired its resilience like a tourist admires a sunset, and returned to my own without consequence.

Some moments refuse to be captured. They are like leaves drifting on a wind-swept stream — visible, even memorable, but impossible to hold. They are meant to unsettle you, to remind you that not all rivers run both ways.

@Rashi M