Introvert Ink

I still remember the first time when I saw the milky way galaxy on a summer night. I went to my village for the summer vacation. There was a power cut. It was a cloudless new moon night. I could clearly see the arm of our galaxy, spread across the night sky from east to west. There were some familiar stars, like the Big Dipper, and the Orion’s Belt, and there were millions of others. I asked someone innocently how many stars there were, and they said infinite, uncountable. I silently thought to myself, “there couldn’t be more than a thousand. If we can take a photograph of this, we can count all of them.” It was awe inspiring. I was wondering about all the planets that must be revolving around them. There could be other people out there. How would they look, I thought, could someone among all those stars, be looking at the sky and thinking the same?

That was more than 30 years ago. Slowly the stars began to disappear. It was not abrupt or sudden. The village started growing, more people go electricity, and power cuts became infrequent. The sky is not the same now. I could not see any stars in the sky this year. It could have been more than a year. In winters the city is covered in dense fog, and even in the summer, the light pollution makes it difficult to see more than a couple of the brightest stars. Sometimes we can see venus or jupiter if we’re lucky. The sky is boring and depressing. There is no reason to look up now. People just look down, burying their face into the screen in their hands, not wondering about the infinite stars, but lost in doomscrolling through endless posts.

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