When the wind blows

The pressure inside the client room seemed insanely intense. Sweaty palms, nervous voices, scratchy heads filled the room. Which was obvious - five years, millions of dollars later, the core banking system of the client was in an absolute mess, the future bleak, with even a good chance of the regulator snatching away its licence. What was not obvious was, why I felt so oblivious and far removed from all this hullabaloo. I knew why - and I turned my head to look outside at that muse of mine, standing far away on the hilly horizons - wind in her hair, she was looking up into the clear blue skies peacefully, while dancing slowly to the windy whistle of Wellington. On her own, she conquered all of the eastern skies and kept reminding me I should have been outside on the jade green hills with her, instead of being jaded inside with the ennui of costs and bills. 

Muse indeed, for the white windmill seemed to move timelessly in a slow-motion haze, drifting me to a different universe - In the miyazaki movie of my mind, I had already turned into a flying dragon, and was out there in the emerald hills. Of course, the enterprise solutions seemed tedious - they were too mundane, practical and boring for me. And thus it was that the windmill became the totem of liberty for my fertile mind. Thereafter, every time I would feel uninterested at work - which was pretty much all the time - I would stare out of the glass windows on the twelfth floor of the tallest building of Wellington, gaze at the slow motion of the windmill, which would in turn crank the bioscope of my mind.

You might wonder, what’s a windmill doing inside a city? Well, that’s Wellington for you! The city has grown with a wall of sinewy hills on one side, the harbour on the other. The windiest city in the world, evidently resulting in the cleanest urban air in the world, has further installed a fleet of windmills on its bony spine, to power the city with green energy. So there you see, my muse, was the closest to the city in this bevy. On her one side were the verdant green hills, on the other, a sprawling city filled with boxy buildings, milling multitudes, and one pensive poet. Flying into the city, I would always peer through the glass pane of my window seat to look at this spectacle - and what a spectacle it was!

The view from my office space in Wellington was grand - left to right, you could see the translucent blue waters of the harbour, with an occasional white inter-islander drifting onto sea. Then there was the Te Papa museum, New Zealand’s most iconic, and the bohemian Cuba Street, all framed with the imposing Mt. Victoria in the background (which is where the wraiths-chasing-hobbits scene outside the shire was shot in the LOTR movies - yes, I told you, this is Wellington!) It was only at the extreme end of this panorama that the windmill loomed. Yet, despite this heavy star-cast, the cameo stole my heart. Unnoticed, lost in solitude, always whirring with joy somewhere far from the madding crowds, it stood like a silent sentinel, a watchful guardian of the city. And there was peace in that gaze. Perhaps the thought that it stood on the threshold of civilization, all wilderness beyond, made it more alluring - just like Sam Gamgee’s scarecrow (again borrowing from Tolkien’s trilogy, the scarecrow being the farthest that Sam had ever ventured, making the world beyond stranger, murkier and even forbidden). Perhaps it was its solitude. Whatever it was, it evoked that desire to actually walk the hills one day and reach its spot, to see the world through its Janus - eyes, city on one end, the wilderness on the other. 

Yet, I never made that journey. In my few months’ of weekday stays in the city, I travelled a lot, with whatever breathing space I could gather outside the boredom of the boardroom. I had walked all the way to the top of Mt.Victoria, and walked back in my indigo suit, my formal shoes being coated with dirt. I had hopped in and out of the numerous museums, drowned in a rich sea of eclectic and  unforgettable coffees and chocolates, and had even taken the Inter-islander ferry on a weekend. Yet I had skipped the windmill. It was quite far off, and was actually difficult to cover - but on hindsight, perhaps a part of me never wanted to accomplish that, for it would mean formally reaching the esoteric, after which there would be nothing more to long for, gaze out and feel excited about, in the middle of yet another mundane workday. Perhaps Sam would be disappointed if he had ever stepped out of the shire’s scarecrow, because then there would be nothing left to feel anxious about. In a way then, my subconscious mind had already mapped this out, and kept it for the very last  which would never come. The project got completed, the travels ceased, and all that remained were a handful of memories, a pocketful of un-treaded paths and the whirring circularity of everyday life - all the same, still slightly enriched with the longing of faraway dreams. 

Sometimes, when the wind blows fiercely and you can feel the chill in the air, the mind drifts in time, the bioscope gets cranked up and vivid memories return. At first, the saudade is always melancholic, but then life reflects on the profundity and gives a little smile. Sometimes, after all, the most fulfilling love is that which remains unfulfilled...

25th September, 2020