Where are the songs of spring?
Ay! Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
                                                             -John Keats

     Come autumn, leaves will scatter on ground and village women in orchards will sweep fallen leaves of trees for fuel. This leaf fall season has a great appeal for every one of us. The most pleasant season of the year, which lasts from September to November, has a story to say. Not just music which is heard when the yellow leaves fall down to trample on the ground but more is recalled when autumn arrives. People store for their coming use. Days are usually short and nights long. Chinar trees create a beautiful look. They turn reddish as if they are on fire. Farmers are busy in storing their corn. Children, across valley, remain all the way engaged with examination preparations. Daily life faces a change. Cold dresses are replaced by warm winter wear. Dust gathers almost on every thing whether it is in the city or in village, and creates many respiratory diseases like Influenza, Cough, Bronchitis and Giddiness etc.

      Does this autumn remind you of something? For me it is bliss. It reminds me of everything. The silence that spreads far and wide just after the darkness overpowers short day’s light; the fear that silences hearts and echoes minds; the pretty silver moon that illuminates earth; the leaf fall in the nights silence; the loitering of children; the rustle of leaves; the withering flowers in the lawns; the migration of birds and the like – all remind me my own time. Though I’m a young man now, still I love to venture out to welcome autumn because whenever autumn arrives, my senses are enlivened. It excites me to share with you lots of things that I’m often recalled of. I feel a little sad about why I have grown up to a youngster, so quickly… Things have changed around me. But I’ve the same golden heart and the welcoming eyes that I’d have when I was a small boy. The rhythm I used to feel in autumn days will perhaps never turn back. Those wanderings, with women, in orchards to sweep fallen leaves of trees for fuel, the wheelbarrow (Hagur) whose wheel would often broke in the way, that playing of gulli danda (tip cart) in the corn  harvested fields – everything is simply unforgettable.  I want to be the same boy I used to be, when autumn arrived.

          Autumn plunders the beauty of trees. It leaves trees naked like human being when rendered bare and stripped of their clothes by force. Leafless trees become blacker with no greenery at all. Yellow leaves of trees fallen scattered on the ground get crushed and make them shapeless with no cry of protest. Autumn makes many songbirds migrate and leaves them exiled and worthless. It makes its impact on plants and flowers…and it leaves thousands of memories behind that one loves to recall.

This storing season has always been contrasted with the old age because this comes a critical stage of death. About this season, the revolutionary Urdu lyric poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz says:
This is the way the autumn come to the trees,
It stripped them down to the skin.
Left their ebony bodies naked,
It shook out their hearts;
The yellow leaves scattered them over the ground.
Anyone could trample them out
If shape Undisturbed by a single moon of protest.

(Feedback at manzurakash@yahoo.co.in)

Lastupdate on : Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Tue, 23 Nov 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:00:00 IST