The above stanza from “Khuaftan Baange” (translated “By the Call to Night’s Prayer”) has been mesmerizing me towards an unusual state of mind. I sit in the zoondaeb, a cantilevered balcony designed to view the moon, cozily warming my hands with my kangri (an earthen firepot we Kashmiris use to keep warm in winters). Outside the window, I catch a sight of the chinar trees morphed by autumn, and I can feel nothing more than the truth of my entire life unfold itself before me.

Autumn, a season of fall, is not only a season but the embodiment of memories, agony, melancholy, ripeness and ushering of a closure. Cold breeze, hazy weather and gloomy skies converge to make autumn Kashmir’s best season of all four—the chinar leaves seem to be set on fire, with each leaf resembling a flame. The colour autumn presages the cold and dead winter that fast approaches in the Himalayas, many times in ways that are unparalleled. Blossoms adorned and grown in a row start to shed their texture. However, some remain like brave hearts and some die like dreams. But the crimson texture of autumn still chants the songs of hope.

In the middle of this silent change that crawls at a snail’s pace, I find myself astonished by how it manifests in nature as I perceive that our life is not so diverse from it. Working for years in photography since my teenage years, I have developed an eye for visual elements, space, objects but also a deep connection with a silence that acts as a conduit for meditation and observation of the aforementioned by more importantly of the impact of time on all things.

My mind wanders towards fluctuations, transformations, dislocations, lapses, and other folds and leaps. I find myself thinking deeply about how to observe time and its effect on our natural world, an anachronistic view or frame needs to occupy the eye of the beholder. One must exit time or in the least take a step back from existing in its bubble to be perceptually suspended for a moment to be able to observe the morphing of the natural world from when things leave the form and material substance they occupied into a becoming something else. Here, in observing time play its role, I look at the natural forces and see gravity announcing to the wind the arrival of autumn, and thus, fall commences.

Coming out of my chain of thoughts and surfing through the internet, I see that poets have portrayed this season through ethereal words, musicians have framed it in their surreal notes, painters have stroked it on their canvas, photographers have created history by freezing moments  and lovers and loners have played their parts as well.

Standing still for a while, I step forth barefoot, crushing leaves as I feel them beneath my feet—one tends to ‘fall’ into the awareness of the other side of autumn as a season of fragility. The unrealistic facet of autumn remains in the view on this walk, as do the scenes, and as do the splendorous miracles of nature’s unfolding and crumbling into another season.