Unfinished Love story ( Part I )

Since the day I saw you, I looked at the world different. Your Mephistophelenous crackle had a divine melody which always managed to make my lips dance on the tunes of your laughter. There was always a wind in your hair. Your eyes covered by the fringe of your hair always seemed to be winking at me in delight. Part of me knew you were never going to mine. But the other part of me, which was wickedly in love with you always dreamed of kissing you under the midnight’s moon.

Here I was all dying. In all honestly I was always in a perpetual state of death until you came along. But tonight not even your humble existence could make me stay. Here I was dying right in your arms. Your husband was out talking to the doctor. You were politely telling me how it was all going to be alright. But my love, you don’t even realise how you saved me from death a long time ago.

I remember. I remember every minute detail so vividly. Your hair was tied up in a pony tail which you opened after an hour and left loose to hang on your shoulders. Your bell bottom jeans were rubbing across the floor like a broken tree being dragged across the forest. Your Yellow kurta was hanging loosely on your breasts. You had this aura of being a stranger. Even though you were stepping on the sands of your nation, your world was not the same as that of those around you. You wore black jhumka’s. But the one thing I remember with much more clarity was the ink you wore on your wrist. Till date I find myself staring at it in amazement. It was a name. Hazariya. You wouldn’t tell me who this person was until much later. It was written in black surrounded by blue birds. But that’s not why I remember it. I remember it because everybody was staring at it. Everybody looked at you different because of the ink you wore. Everybody looked at you weird like you did not belong. That was when I knew we belonged. That was when I knew we were meant to be together.

Even today when I think of it, I think it was then when I fell in love with you without even knowing what love was.

You walked with such grace. You smiled this pained smile. I know because everyone around me had that smile. You walked in and spoke to each person around. They all wanted to touch your hands. And you let them. I silently waited for my turn. I wondered what it would feel like. I created scenarios in my head. Lost expectations arose, and I found myself lost in time. Finally you came up to me.

“Why then, would you only stare or would you like to touch it too?”

That wicked wicked smile. I knew not how to respond. I raised my hand to touch it but kept missing the spot on your wrist. Finally you held me hands within the tenderness of your palms and guided me to the name. It felt like an inscription of my freedom. I clapped. Like all those around me I clapped. It felt good to clap. It felt like I was capable of motion. It felt like I was capable of feeling a certain amount of happiness. It felt like I was capable of feeling alive. So I clapped. And that was how we became friends.

You’re still holding my hands. Even though the tenderness is gone, the warmth still persists. Even though I can feel the burden of your heart right there in the heaviness of your hands, the humbleness of your love holds me tight. Why is it that you’re crying then? We all knew I would someday be here. Why is it that your tears drench my eyes? Don’t you remember the time when you asked me if i would like to live with you? Don’t you remember how you my love changed my world?

But that’s a story for much later. Let me begin where I left off. Touching the ink on your wrist and clapping. You laughed and instantly won my heart. But then you left. And with your departure took a big chunk of me that I couldn’t hold back. That night I kept thinking about you. How you were different. In that difference we found our solidarity. I don’t remember much of my childhood. But from what I do remember is waking up every day to the sound of babies crying. What I do remember is the crib I would sit in, looking beyond the prison walls, and finding commotion. Kids would run wildly. Some would cry. Other would sit like me. My ayya would come and pick me up for a bath. I was scared of water. It overwhelmed me. The soothing touch of the water sometimes turned into a ferocious battle with my skin, and the shower suddenly seemed like the harbinger of my doom. I once had a nightmare wherein I drowned into the oblivious waters of my bucket. I refused to take baths. I would hold on to my crib’s prison bars and never let go. The prison became my world. From within everything seemed different. Everything seemed divided. On one side of the bars were the kids who never spoke. On the other side were kids who always cried. Right across my wall were the kids who were always laughing. The people who would come to visit us who go right across and sit with them. It was like the class hierarchies. And here I was refusing to involve myself in any division. I in true sense felt like I belonged nowhere.  Or maybe I did not want to belong anywhere. That was pretty much the childhood I had. There were others who visited and played along with us but then left us behind in the dark. Nobody told them I guess just how much we were afraid of the dark. Nobody told them I guess that that was the one time we wanted someone to hold our hands and stay. All we wanted was them to stay.

 I saw a lot of faces. I remember most of them. But your face was the most profound. It pierced through my conscious walls of self defence and marked its presence from the very first day itself in the recesses of those unforgettable memories which were to flash back at this very precise moment. The moment of death. The faces I saw through the divides of my crib never came back again. They were, as told to us by our ayyas, the faces of god itself. Like god gave us life, these people were to give us a second chance at it. Hence we were told not to drool on them or clap too much in front of them of cry or for that matter talk much. We were to smile a lot and show them our drawing skills which over a period of time evolved from the much clichéd mountains with birds and a river and a house by the river to the much evolved banana trees. The kinds you could see swinging in all their glory outside the windows of our room. It remained a distant dream of mine to be able to climb the tree. The god like creatures seemed much impressed with our drawings and even smiled at us. But from behind that bars of containment I could sense the discomfort in their shoulders. They would stroll a little by our cribs and then quietly go over to the kids who always smiled and laughed and played. They were the rulers of our small kingdom and we were mere subordinates which we came to understood over a long period of time.

But you seemed to enjoy your position with us. It was like you wanted to defy the laws of hierarchies and be deviant. There was a seed of rebellion in your soul which transcended itself in your sense of contentment with us. The roots of these seeds were planted years ago. You never really told me. But you see I had my ways of finding out. But as promised I kept my knowledge a secret from you. A secret that burdens me a little in my time of goodbye.

Would I see you again to maybe reveal the secret? Or is this the end of our love story?