Something called Love

{Fiction}



“I missed you” the first time she heard it, her heart fluttered.. his feeling found words while hers still ached in her heart..  she swallowed and fought her tears.. it took him two whole years of separation from her to realize this and 6 more months to finally blurt this out in a party, to which they both seem to have decided to go only to catch a glimpse of the other person. He had looked into her eyes and said it sincerely and meant it.  Their relation dated back to their college days, where they experienced love and romance and lust for the first time in their life. Her concept of love and his were different as night and day or as any men or woman would want. When his thoughts hit the right side or the pendulum she was swinging towards the left. He sought to take it slow and she fancied extreme steps like marriage, acceptance and eloping more than anything she needed confirmation.

That was the point when he felt that things were moving very fast, her demands and love suffocated him like overdose of sweetness, he panicked, advocated this sabbatical, she accepted, to satisfy him, to shut him and to have him come back she waited for 2 years doting her love for him as much as or even more than the love as such. If he had noticed it then, she would have made a good beloved and understanding wife, the one he always wanted, the one his hypocritical mind ridiculed but craved for, in those endless fantasies.

Meeting again after 2 years, and with those magical words they were together again, like there never was a split-up. Soon they settled into their pre-separation era and continued their episodes with more passion and fire and vigour. Her days were filled with his memories and his.. waiting for the moments with her. Apart from the regular clichés and hormones there was something else that made them come together, they felt that they were meant to be together.

To a normal eye, she was a typical modern woman secretly crying over her fat and blunt nose and he an epitome of gloominess and was a more depressed version of her, a simple man indulging in his dark fantasies unspotted behind his locked and dark room of his parents apartment and ridiculing them in broad day light before others. But together their veil lifted. To her, his erotic fantasies were an obligation of her beauty and her submission an victory to him.

They continued their courtship and romance with the same vigour for few more months until one day he wakes up again feeling different and that they were not similar at all. He then casually and unintentionally sprinkled that idea into her with his fights… pointed glances and double ended dialogues. He enjoyed overpowering her with the doubts.. but why? He never knew.. but it worked and started to go ablaze and shook the whole foundation of them. It alarmed her, on a fateful day, they argued, cried, pacified, sympathized each other competing to walk out as the more pained and suffered one, as the one that can be un-guilty and blame the other for this situation and call themselves cheated and call it a sacrifice. Like serendipity both their untouched coffees were removed by two different waiters separately. Then the boy and girl, I like to call them as a boy and girl or a man and women and not give them a name, a name detaches them from me and us, without name they are in us and around us. So the boy and the girl walked away in their separate ways.

After three more years, when she lay sprawled in her room after a long day’s work, undisturbed by the storm outside she receives an email with only a “I missed you”. After a delay, she sat up and cried into the phone.

I understood that she was crying because he took the phone and walked away to the bathroom and started pacifying her. I lay in the bed awake on contrary to his thoughts that I was sound asleep and his voice was chocking. I listened turned to the other side of bed with silence, just  the way I listened on my wedding night when he recited to me about his love and the girl with rough hands and probably soft bosom. To me.. it is something… called love..  

{Fiction}

Mirage

{Fiction}

Whatever I saw seemed to be experienced by me alone, or as they said imagined by me. They, my strict relatives consisting of many uncles and aunties headed by my grandfather considered me half witted or crazy or even possessed. They even brought in priests to exorcise me. If it was not for my father I would not have survived my childhood at all, but he also couldn’t help much..  he was brought up to respect and accept them and not question back.. But he believed me or so I thought,  when I told about seeing mother every day, he would smile and say he saw her too.. although she died long ago..  that made me happy but then he would add that when we love someone so much we tend to think they are with us, when I stressed that I spoke to her every night, he gave me a heavy and sad smile. I was not sure if he believed me, but at least he did not look at me like a strange creature like others.. and that was enough for me.

But when he went to Mumbai to carry on with business, I knew that he was escaping from them, he wanted to take me too. But grand father wouldn’t accept.. the old man seemed to see though his sons plan. So it was decided to let me stay in my ancestral house until my school days are over or until grandpa passes away whichever occurred earliest, and then move to Mumbai with dad. I prayed every night to become 18 soon, but at times I prayed for my grand father to trip and fall, on such nights I would sleep guilty.  Kids of my generation were scared of me and avoided me as and when possible. Soon I got acquainted with this loneliness and started making so much out of it.. 

I wandered aimlessly in my grandfathers plantations. But always met at least one of the workers there and was shooed home.  But soon I found my niche in the isolated family temple located on the far corner of the plantation. The temple had a strong legend and people still feared to go near it on mid days and night. The only time the family gathered around the temple was once in a year and then the temple was opened and cleaned and prayed. Other times it remained closed and uncared rendering it a kind of mystic feel. That was where I crashed almost all of the weekends and holidays. 

The temple was surrounded my many jasmine vines and tall neam, banyan and coconut trees, and thorny bushes of some unnamed cactus and pineapple. The fruits, coconuts and flowers that blossomed and ripened there was considered to be the deities and never touched. Because of the fear of Grandfather no thief dared to cross the path either. There was a rock facing the temple where I would sit wondering something or the other. The stream of little pond that glided nearby gave the place a Eden like feel, and when the wind blew the place was enriched with the smell of jasmines. Even sunlight seem to be in love with the place giving it an enchanted glow.

But nature was not the thing that pulled me there, it was the legend of the place. The deity there was not the usual God, it was an angel (gandarvan) punished by God, doing his penance there, but instead of involving himself in godly duties, he found himself fall in love with a damsel in the nearby house. (A great great great ancestor of my family). Back in those times, love was true enough to shake the faith of even angels. So they decided to live happily in the world, but a cunning man in the family itself recognized the real identity of the angel and entrapped him in a statue and threatened to kill his lover. So being in love the angel obeyed and stayed in the statue and every full mooned night the lovers meet in the mystic forest.

My rational mind failed to believe it fully but the other part of me was enthralled by the love. I empathized with them and at times when I sat staring at the temple, imagined myself as the lover girl and waited for him to come to me. At those times, I did not bother the wind or even my own hand trespassing improperly. At times I felt uneasy like being watched by someone, and would run home as soon as possible. On a full moon evening is when I first met him, the receding sunlight and the looming full moon both played around the place making the stream sparkle like gold, then a figure “him” walked towards me from the temple guided by the light, he sat near me and smiled, he was a boy in his early twenties, with long hair, sandal wood paste in his forehead, sacred thread around his fair bare chest, he wore only a white dhoti and smelled of sandal. I was in a kind of trance and got up we stood facing each other, he smiling and me dazed. His hands clasped my face and he spoke of waiting for a long time for me and when he was about to kiss, I panicked and ran away.

  Nothing he said or did made my doubt go away, for there was something intense in him, when he came near me, when he touched me and there was a look of fierce passion in him that never was there in the eyes of people I met. His passion at times got diffused into the forest too.  That day, when his kissing became intense and our breathing shorter I became strangely conscious of the nature and its intensity. The trees shook like they were being rocked to and fro by strong giant hands, the wind gushed brutally in my ears, even the stream flew violently. When the spirited passion got carried back to him, I saw in his eyes the passion and calmness, he looked at me like I belonged to him, I surrendered for the first time in my life to my love, till then I was unaware of the ecstasy of complete surrender to love and never will I ever be.

Next day when I went back to see him, although being aware of the previous night’s storm my heart sank seeing the state of my charmed forest tore down, and below the trunk of the neam tree I found his open hand, moving the truck away I spotted his face, it was the same, unhurt but lifeless. The coldness in the eyes attacked me like a poisoned dagger. I blamed the nature, I cursed god for taking him away from me. I walked back home silently, and next day as I imagined there was no sign of him there and I resented going there anymore. I blamed my eccentric mind for mourning something that never existed. I accepted what others said, it was all in my mind I found them unusually kind towards me, as they helped into the train to Mumbai.  After all its easy to blame oneself and the nature than the cold blooded brutal human for separating him from me.

In Between

{Fiction} 

There was nothing new in the journey back home; it was just like every other day. While I was mechanically driving the car, she was calmly reading a novel. She had been reading it for the past one week, day and night that almost three fourth of it was already complete, but still she held on to it selfishly like a life jacket and read on. I had once asked her what is was about, and she said building a church. I was amused to see my wife, who can get bored by my analytical skill to be entranced by a book that talked about buildings and church; God was another thing that got her bored. She does bow down in front of the beautiful deities every morning, but never has her eyes filled with tears or her face bore a look of pain. She prays for the sake of praying, some habits die hard.. 

If our roads meet

The foot steps, the aura, the smell
Bred the familiarity ablaze
Forgetting the long said farewell
Glowing anticipation arose
 
Welcomed by the enigmatic smile,
I stare for, its picture perfect
I doubt reality, still you stand
Regretting the worthless fights

My face to you is a puzzle
and you turn away in disbelief
Leaving my heart in a dazzle
You move away fearing grief
 
Like a Greek goddess I remain,
Transfixed into a melancholic rock
Waiting for you to return when
Rejection or reconciliation is no bother!