‘I think I should tell him this’ Mathruka said suddenly, without opening her eyes.
‘No.’ replied Tanya, understanding the head and tail of it instantaneously.
‘No, Tanya, you do not understand this, I know he is in love, I’m too sure of it!’
‘Oh, I didn’t know there were confirmatory tests, what are they anyway?’
‘I saw his eyes shining…they were too brilliant that I was blinded that very instant.’
‘Cut the crap. You know that I love him. Do you happen to see that supernatural light in my eyes too?’
‘You should be asking him that.’
‘Sure you can say that. Admit it, you want to square it off, act great, don’t you?’
Mathruka laughed a careless laughter. ‘Seriously, you overrate me.’
‘No. You are making his life a living hell already. But the madman that he is, he thinks it is a blessing. What you say now will shatter him into pieces, and mind you, a person in love is made of glass, no mending possible, ever.’
‘Like I care. I repeat it, I know for sure that he is crazily in love with me, and would love irrespective of whatever I have said before, or will say. But, I am not phony enough, what do you say?’
‘Explain.’
‘The incident that lead to the moment? Sure. Just that it is nothing much for a person who did not see what it really was. I had asked him for some water. I wasn’t exactly dying, but needed it anyway. I didn’t even ask him that, he looked at me checking out the shops and was off in a moment. He was back in a flash, and that is no exaggeration. Now, you know that I’m not touchy about love. I never believed in stuff which ranted that love gives you power. They are wrong. Love gives enormous power. It makes one extraordinary from a nobody. You cannot go higher up without paying for it, doesn’t make any sense to me. ‘
‘Shut up, you are gasping.’ Tanya said amidst tears.
‘Now, take me to his room.’
‘What? You mean he is in this hospital? What?
‘Don’t worry, he is alive, fractures in legs.'
‘How did you manage to kill yourself Mathruka? What is this insanity all about?’
‘I did say, I saw the light and was blinded.’ (Gentle smile) ‘Now, Tanya, take these moronic stuff off my body, I want to say this once to him – ‘I don’t love you, Vishwas!’
It has been three years since I fell in love with her. I remember the moment I met her, wearing a salwar of milk white and olive green, gleaming happily. She instantly stuck to my life, became a part of my thought process, echoed in every living memory. I gathered courage to meet her eyes and started talking to her. It was hard in the beginning. I had so much to communicate, but would not know where to start nor where to end. She kept her patience.
She waited until my thoughts took the form of words and pegged me on to talk further. I presented her a black cum blue salwar as a token of my love, she took it with an embarrassed smile. She introduced me to her friends. Ah, her people…were they all different! She has an amazing world full of strangers that you typically find in core literature...solid individuals. They shared their lives to me, in bits and chunks. We became joyful people who bartered only thoughts and nothing else. She was not complaining.
She welcomed my newfound freedom of thoughts. I got into a job, the infamous practice where you slog for money and at rare times, justice. I could not attend to her as I earlier did. I kept missing dates, cancelled the short meet ups, at times even stopped thinking about her. Nevertheless, whenever I came to her, I was hers, all hers. She knows that I do not come to please her nor do I talk to her because I have to. I do, because I want and need to, no other reason. It has been a bond beyond words and descriptions. She still has not slipped in a word that I am neglecting her. She knows that I love her with all my might and time. Thanks, Bhavna, for your unconditional love.
Oh my lovely moon, Doused as you are now, Deserting me of my light, Far away in a land of dunes, Accompanied by a lone flute, With its holed up body, Silence closing in calculatedly Like an anticipated death, A gentle choke of wreath-like fragrance, Time walking against the moon’s gravity, Egging itself to still slower down.
Oh my lovely moon, Your beam reeks of indifference, Playing with my likes and dislikes, Compromising with life, Living the compromises, Pruning my wings, To reach your heights, Heart it shatters And resumes its knelling With no pace nor space Cowering in the corner of a circle.
Oh my lovely moon, Mean as you always were, Floating winds to bring a wave of Sharp malice and her shrewd allies, Leaving me tearless, In an arid land of acidic rain, Where flowers bloom in black, Where the insanity of winds, Topple the banyan and peepal, But fail to lift the deep rooted Despair from the mind of people.
Oh my lovely moon, Dare not neglect me any longer, My dryness will find its drop Of nectar in His empyrean touch, Gushing forth like a freed bubble, Spreading forth its worn out wings, Exhibiting the mirth of life long slavery, Masking and revealing my self randomly, I shall not share you His wet sight, To anyone and sprout inside Little flowers dripping with honey.
There is something pretty about rainy days. Like the romantic incense of the wet jasmine, like the earthy fragrance giving a sense of completion , like the virginity of the water-soaked streets, like the galloping sound of the rain dollops, like the shirt sticking to the back, like anything hot going well with the tongue…it does fill all the senses. On a hard day everything mentioned above can be quite life-taxingly annoying. I am not sure what this rain is doing to me, though.
I remember my first outing in the rains; Dad had lifted me up to his shoulders. He does it quite often, but it was something special on that rainy day. I thought I caught him in two minds. One on hand, he wanted me to enjoy this strange sprinkling from the sky that got me out of his control, on the other, he was afraid I would catch flu. ‘Is it an angel taking bath?’ I had asked my dad in euphoric amazement, he had smiled back. He had tried to convince me to drink the ‘masala tea’ in the corner shop. I had refused it, calling it jaundiced milk, and embarrassed the ‘tea master’ to such extent that he stopped making those yellowed, spiced and watered milk. My dad had chuckled with an unexplained pride. I had blinked in surprise.
The next striking memory is that of the ‘adventure night’. It was a time when 7.00 p.m was considered night and 10.00 o’clock was midnight. My friends and I, 5 girls and 3 boys to be exact, were coming back from the Stadium after a hectic ‘sports day’ celebration. Soot stained faces, unkempt hair, eyes shining, rejoicing the victory over some old rival, we decided to walk down to our homes. The scorching Sun who looked straight down at us when we were being fried during the relay races and long ques for high-jump and long-jump had suddenly absconded into oblivion. We certainly did not mind it. Then it started drizzling. We were hooting to start with, singing all the rain songs we have ever heard in our life, including ‘Rain rain, go away’ which was of course, silly. Nevertheless, the rain-god was not listening to it. The showers intensified, and coupled with loud thunders and sword-like lightnings. This alarmed us. We realized we had spent all the money in the gol-gappas and kulfi-ice creams, and had no money for the bus charge. The guys took the charge almost heroically. ‘We can walk, no problem’, declared the eldest. Two girls to one boy was the hand-clasping, safety measure ratio we could afford. That means the third guy would be left with the 5th girl. You knew it before, it was me. Neither of us knew who was shier. Somehow, the 2:1 ratio of the rest went unnoticed and I was teased all through my high school for holding hands with the older boy. I wonder where he is now...
School whizzed past in front of my eyes, the college days were glorious. It used to rain everyday then. We used to jokingly call our college as London just for that reason. The shyness and gawkiness from the school days has vanished. Holding hands with men did not symbolize ‘crush’, ‘love’ or anything remotely close to that. It was just holding hands, simply. A sign of togetherness… friendship, at the most. On an educational tour to the nearby hill station, we purposely left our raincoats back at our hostels, so that we could get to our rooms drenched. Our plan worked, it rained heavily. We lost our way in the woods, though. Anti-climax? Not yet, we were badly ragged by a group of drunken locals. And I, familiar with the local language, couldn’t hold my tongue and had started retorting to it, and got an earful back. Luckily, for us, the patrol car had been roaming around and we were dropped back without further incidents to cope with. What a night it was!
Then, the day of my marriage. Nobody foresaw a heavy rainfall on such a clear May morning. It was not even the monsoon time. It had rained cats and dogs on the fateful day. All the flower arrangements at the hall entrance had gone waste. The crowd that we had expected did not turn up. It looked like a birthday party at home. His parents, mine, and the people who had stayed in the hall overnight were the only witnesses. The black clouds, the dullness it spread in the faces around, the piling waste of food cooked for the people, the well-picked clothes going unnoticed because of the lack of audience did irritate me. Add to that, the thought of adopting his home as mine, the climate seemed cruel. I had to be torn apart from my Mother, literally. I had hugged her and cried for almost 15 minutes that even my Mom was shocked to know that I loved her so much. Who but me knew that all I had wanted was a shoulder to cry on...and it did not really matter whose it was.
I hated him at the first sight.I had married the man I can never love, I had assumed. Am I glad that it was a wrong assumption! It was the rain again. For all the innumerable times I had been out in the rain, I have never even sneezed once. There I was, bedridden, eyes sunken, looking every bit like a soggy Pomeranian pup, cuddling in his arm more for the warmth of his affection than anything else, because of the rain-special outing the previous evening. What a pleasure it is, to be loved! Rain is a catalyst for romance, I must admit. Though I learned soon that he did not share my love for rain, I came to know that he tried his best to love. The long bus rides on rainy days were the highlights. Then it became bike rides, and eventually car drives. They were good too. He was a fan of instrumental music and played it during those magical journeys much to my utter delight. At times, we would stop by the beach and gaze at the hues of blues and the pinks of the twilight, letting the time fly by and the tide roll by in their own course. I even remember catching a dewy rainbow on a pleasant evening.
And, another new member was ready to join our voyage. The day my daughter was born, is still etched in my memory. It is not unusual, you may think, but it is. That is right, it rained like hell. There are some problems in life, which you cannot get over with easily. Labor pain comes under that category, I think. The roads were flooded; we needed to sail through, literally. Our car engine was gone, and the only option left was going by an auto-rickshaw. I had called out every other God’s name I had come across in my life, none seem to hear me out. It was terrible, I tell you, extremely terrible. He had called up everybody he could think of, but, who would respond to a challenge from the mother nature? Finally, a kind auto-wala had turned up, possibly taking pity of my screams and all. We were just in time to the nursing home, and yes, all was well, as I had hoped for.
The cycle of life repeated for good. My daughter is happily married now. Him and I, were back as couple. It was a repeat of the honeymoon days. Dripping of raindrops, profusions of liquid love through the battered veins…heavenly. But life does not stay the same for long, it is said. It is cent percent true. He had to leave me permanently. There was a cloud burst on his final day on earth. The deluge was symbolic, like a eulogy to everything he has been to me.
These days, when I walk alone in the rain, I think of everything that rain has given and taken away from me. Raindrops go misty and turn into water vapor at times, and at other, they weep with a composed smile, like me. The rain memories, stay in my mind, un-evaporated and uncondensed.
Let the world wear itself out in wars, And the sky sink into the sea, Let the world wake up with peace, And the sky sail across the sea, For my life hath given me, The most beauteous of all gifts, A smile filling the chasms Of solitude in me, A smile filling the miles Of paths un-tread, A smile filled with tears, Of joy and love.
The secret crave of the mind, Is answered not with words eloquent, But with a language patented by eyes, Through years and years of static penance.
And when the God himself appears, The eyes falter with insane love, Passion and anger her two sides, They vanish at his very sight, Silenced, light and lady-like, She puts her head down, And turns into bridal red, Shedding down her serene whites, And the tears, they all wait for their turn, Hanging at the edge, Holding on to her clothes dearly, Some too eager, pushing back others in the line, Fighting like warriors in the way, To die, To cleanse themselves, Drop by drop, For Him, for her, Washing His feet with her rain, Spontaneous hot tears of hers, For a gift she had preserved, To preserve, to be deserved.
I thank her for her gesture, For thanking Him Can become monotonous and vain, She flutters like a butterfly, That makes Him smile; Ending her lifelong penance in the banks of water, She dies in her arched coffin And freezes that second in her memory, To remember in her next birth, And the last drop of tears of my moon, Dies in His muddied dimples, To live again, with Him.
It was one of those hazy days. Neither warm, nor pleasantly cold. It was a murky day sans any hope of rains. I tried to fix my eyes on the half opened window, wishing something would wade through it to keep my interests alive. My room suddenly started smelling of wet sand. I let the aroma invade my mind and closed my eyes in a momentary bliss. Just then I saw two little palms outstretched, pointing towards me. I peeped to get a clear view of the person involved. A little boy, aged anywhere between 2 and 22 years. I chose the number 4, randomly.
‘What’s he doing here at my window?’ I had no clue. I knew there was none at the vicinity and continued looking at my assumed-4-year-old boy. ‘Could he be an angel?’ I wondered. He seemed to wear a black dress. I call it a black dress, for I couldn’t make out what he was wearing, a pant-shirt? Tee-shirt? Kurta? Whatever. Kid in black, that’s all for the fashion details. He seemed to look at me with an exothermic intensity, intentionally. His eye balls exhumed fire bubbles, and for all I could see, he wasn’t angry, nor did he look feverish. An inexplicable chill ran through my spine as I tried matching his steely, ripping apart look with a sincere look of my own. Moments passed away without much drama. Or the drama was too conceited in its imagined reality. I was appalled, maybe he wasn’t even looking at me, he seemed to look at everything around me, though his eyeballs were steadfastly fixed on mine. I turned back to check if someone else was looking. I think I will regret that second for another lifetime. I didn’t enjoy the ethereal connection between me and him being snapped by my untold insecurities. When I gathered enough courage to gape at him, he was smiling at me, without moving his lips. It was one of those biological wonders, I told to myself. The demeanor remained calm, his eyes didn’t expand in excitement, I didn’t find a pearl set flashing at me, yet the smile was on. I thought I was smiling at him, hoping he would find it too. There wasn’t any apparent recognition.
The silence was back on his face, it looked too natural to be meant as an ornament, yet I saw it glittering across his face. Ah, the face, of my tiny black wonder, spoke of ruggedness, of untold agony, of veiled kindness, and above all, the unmistakable joy of living through all the rubbish and rare gems, that life has to offer. His casual, relaxed presence calmed my throbbing nerves. The derisive, mocking smile disarmed me completely. His surroundings seemed melting unto him. He looked like he had a control over everything beneath and beyond. He appeared a paragon of everything explained and unexplained. Like there was nothing more to be said, done or felt when he was present.
The palms were no longer outstretched; I knew I had to get to him and cease his arms. The eyes had no invitation for me to join him, but I knew I was meant to make one out of it and embrace the little one with all the love I can muster. I couldn’t move an inch. He was holding me with his enormous power, one that of his mind. He wouldn’t move forward either, it was like the power balanced at the centre in a game of ‘tug of war’. Everything stayed in abeyance, the night, the day, the joy and the pain. I waited for the war to begin; I waited till the war ended.
I was bathed in a river of light, and felt like I was heading to the infinitely vast ocean of ecstasy. The distance was no more a distance; wehad come too close to each other without any physical effort. I wanted the vision to continue forever, but reality had something else in store for me. I shrugged off the vision, I shrugged off the reality. And the absurdity of it struck me, ‘how can one shrug off reality?’ My clock chimed thrice, announcing the start of a new day. I woke up and checked my cell phone, it read, ‘Happy Birthday Miss.No-more-a-teenager gal!’ I convinced myself that it was only a ‘birthday dream’ and carefully closed my bedroom window. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Did this happen for real?’
The smell of petrol was never that invigorating to him. Sweaty clothes were comfortable. He could fill and refill the tanks of another 10 customers now. All with a pleasant smile. Ishwar felt relieved that day, almost happy. He would be able to do some justice to his overtly cherished post, of fatherhood. Babloo, his 6 year old son, has been busy demanding one toy after another these days. Last week it was a balloon, not a toy exactly, another plaything that cost him a lot, all right. ‘Only 10 bucks huh?’ the gentleman in the black sedan had asked with a smirk to the balloonwala. Ishwar couldn’t bear his son’s face shrink like a punctured balloon then. He had made up his mind to get atleast two of those only-10-bucks-balloon for his one and only son that very moment. And today, he would get Rs. 1000/- increment, so that makes his salary Rs.3500/- now.
‘Why Ishwar, stop gaping and better fill the tank, lest our boss scraps your increment this month!’ shouted his colleague from another end, checking the air pressure of a worn out two-wheeler. Ishwar smiled a cheerfully guilty smile. 'It’s my day', he thought.
There whizzed past a black sedan, and Lo! the very same only-10-bucks-this-balloon gentleman. Divine coincidence, thought Ishwar.
‘How many litres, Sir? Asked Ishwar.
‘For 1000 bucks’ replied the man.
‘My increment money’ Ishwar couldn’t help thinking.
The tank seemed half full already. At Rs. 703.25/-, the metre stopped abruptly, indicating that the tank was too full for another drop of anything.
'Sir...' Ishwar pointed to the metre to the man in black sedan and handed over the bill.
Twitching his lips in impatience, the man took out a new Rs.1000/- note from his suit pocket.
Ishwar rummaged for the exact change, while the man triggered his engine to life.
‘Change is yours.’ He bellowed as he left the bunk in a flash.
That makes it Rs.1300 almost, Ishwar clasped his hands in utter delight! He stood last in line like a naughty school child, to get his salary for the month. The line grew thinner, there was just one more person before him.
‘Who received this Rs.1000/- note today?’ the boss asked suddenly.
‘It’s me’ replied Ishwar proudly.
His boss tore the note in 4 pieces and threw it in the dustbin behind his chair. Ishwar was shocked for words.
‘Boss…’
‘It’s a fake note Ishwar, be careful the next time. And I take the amount from your salary.’ Said the boss.
Ishwar stood silently, looking at his happiness getting crushed below the wheels of some black sedan.
