What could be the reason of her behavior...?
The wind is blowing hard tonight...no signs of rain though... and I continued to walk on the road, head down, hands in my pocket...smell of Ruskin, is it? Can't help much again.
I went past the boating post and site, and the sitting arrangement where once a man asked me to sit thinking me as a person waiting for his lady friend to come...I look at the room once again from where they give the passes and the food. I pass bye...the shadow of mine becomes longer and longer as I leave the neon behind me. I am waiting for my lady friend to come...but where will I place her anyway...
I do not look at the right side as it is forbidden to me. It repels me every time I pass the road...this repulsion has a strange thing inside it...it attracts too.
Kisses in the moonlight. Hungry kisses. Bodies fall upon each other, clinging tight, mouths unable to do anything but to suck the other, palms sweating, a faint moaning and panting....and in the midst of all these, a boy of 21 beating down the paths...but what am I writing....?
Three years have passed...
Every now and then as I think of her, I can remember the eyes of a person who was rigid from inside. She was firm, and the firmness is now preventing me to enter. Funny old world, isn't it?
I pass the popular cinema hall. 'Menoka', as it suggests. I go past the semi-colony thing as told by her once, and saw a crowd, dancing in joy.
A birthday party, or a marriage ceremony, I thought. People in these days have a lot of money to spend on nothing. I preferred to walk away.
And it was then I changed my mind.
What if one day I leave visiting her colony and see a crowd cheering. My life in the recent past hasn't cheered for anything, save it be a late night dream, but that's another story.
It was a Puja at a nearby temple anyway; I managed to figure out all. I took out my mobile, took a couple of shots from a distance. The pictures proved to be hazy, and nothing seemed to be clear in the photographs...but I didn't care...I want the lighting and the crowd afterward for my gloom to keep away; I don't want a megapixel for that.
The colony is as lonely as I have been seeing it in the last few years...I wonder, I only wonder why does a religious person come all the way from Varanasi to stay at the heart of Kolkata, here at Southern Avenue, with his wife and a seven - eight year old daughter...what could be his conscience, his sufferings, his family... the little girl, who had seen a very small part of the world, in the narrow lanes of Varanasi...running down with her friends, or playing sometimes alone on the roof of their house, or in the rooms...playing with dolls...
I wonder about the life of her family at UP, Varanasi. They say things never change, but they had to change, after all, it was not the same city, not the same language, not same type of familiarity and hospitality one can ask in Varanasi. Which school she used to go, by which lane or road, the paths she beaten, how badly I want to go someday to the places she has been... my idea of Zahir keeps growing with each and moment I am without her. I want to go to the places she has been, I want to see the places she has seen, I want to feel the things she has felt, I want to utter those words she has uttered with her lips...
I am not that lucky to write something like 'A time to reap and a time to sow' which I can expect to be in her lips, but I am lucky enough that I came into contact with her, not in the most difficult time of my life, but certainly, the aftermath has been torturing, and worst part of my life. Yes, I have known things I never thought of, or heard of their presence in the world....the sunshine, and the blue sky, how does it differ from the usual when you are in love, and you lose her..................
Perhaps someday, I’ll have someone, who'll say that she has come to rescue me...
It was the same road that leads to my colony. Southern Avenue was left behind, as every evening; I leave it behind hoping to come again tomorrow. Tiring legs took me to the roads I walked an hour ago, or rather; I was walking for the past three years.
These trees here will remain, like the only proof of my love. The love I had for her, I couldn't express to her, nor will I be able to express any time in my life. So I just decide that I will love her as I saw her in a very short span of our meeting. We never talked that much, we were not close, never close enough so that she could call me a friend in public, but she was, and she will be...just the way she is now...with me, as I type these words in my lone room. When everything leaves you, be sure that someone is with you, not that loneliness, not that darkness, not that silence, but it is her...................
Many works are unfinished..........'Friday', 'From the ghats of Varanasi', 'the no-private room', and so on........
I need myself to be more matured for 'Friday'. I guess it will end in around 2012 or may take even more time.
I remember some lines from one of my stories..."Options are not finished, that's the main thing." But as time has passed, the line has come in the very life of mine.
One thing is for sure, I will not ask for a love in the upcoming years, the rest, I will have to concentrate on my own life...I want to follow my fate...wherever it drops me.
Options are not finished, that's the main thing.
- April, '09
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