Loved (Part III)

(Continues from below)

Do you remember our argument before the first split? It wasn’t a fight as much as the voicing of an end, a comma, perhaps a full-stop. At least, that’s what I felt.   

I celebrated at Keventer's. I bought myself a strawberry shake: thirty rupees, one giant glass, seven sublime slurps, a burst of dreamy whistling somewhere in between. I was sitting on the second stair of a flight of steps that led into the higher levels of the marketplace, my head four-feet above the ground, my eyes level with the waists of the many students who walked past, oblivious to my presence, gripped as they were by the complete sense of self-absorbedness that affects one at that age.

What did I do? I watched legs: some bare, some hairy, mostly blue.  

One pair of legs really caught my attention: they belonged to a fashionable young girl, who wore, as December would demand, a warm black blazer above her waist and, as fashion would demand, a pair of skimpy shorts that barely extended beyond the upper half of her thighs. On another day, I wouldn’t have noticed those legs at all; on another day, had you pointed them out to me, I would have pooh-poohed them, scoffing the peculiar demands that fashion makes of people.

And yet, that day was not just another day: I watched them approach and I felt myself breathe heavier; they were a beautiful pair of legs— long, sexy, suave –  the cobblestones seemed to roll-out in front of them like red-carpets. I watched them all the way to the corner of the road. Only then, did I notice my own self.

I was whistling softly, an old, flirty duet.

I was ogling. 

I was free.

*

Recently, a friend of mine told me she always sensed I was distracted, like I was running multiple trains of thought inside my head. I had this image of my brain as a giant railway junction: Neuron-Sarai, thought-trains criss-crossing,  running in parallels, a series of signals at the many intersections; and my own hassled self, working overtime on a single switch-board, pulling levers and ensuring the absence of collisions and cross-connections.

As my friend spoke, I was struck by the memory of a conversation you and I had, strangely also at a railway station. As you chatted about some character you had read in a play, a segment of my mind wandered with my eyes as they followed a greying man in a frayed suit, presumably the Station Master. He seemed flustered, like all the world had dumped its problems on him. I think you noticed my attention drift and paused. Almost on cue, I said, surprising myself: “But wasn't Igor an anarcho-communist?” “Exactly",  you said, beaming, as though pleased with the fact that I was indeed listening. I smiled, because it was wonderful to see you satisfied and talk away, a wave of stray, luscious hair reaching for your ears from across your forehead.

I smiled some more, barely believing my luck.

When I pictured myself in my head, as the switch-board operator of Neuron-Sarai, I seemed to bear a striking resemblance to that Station Master.

“See?” I found my friend telling me, “there you go off again, smiling to yourself”

*

If only love died abruptly. And if only such deaths could be foretold.

On his last night, Radheya, son of the Sun and the Mahabharata’s most heart-wrenching creation, sat by himself in his war-tent and recapped his life. I don’t know if we ever discussed this event: I don’t remember doing so. Fully aware of his impending death,  Radheya sits alone and walks his memory, deliberately—every thought, every event, every person is carefully (even lovingly) plucked out of his past, turned around, examined, and dropped back into the basket of forgetfulness. He could afford such an act, because he couldn’t bother with forgetting: death spells the end for things far worse than memory and regret.

I wish I could have done the same when you had moved on: mark out a night, drench myself in nostalgia’s heady wine, and walk out into a fresh dew-drenched morning, a new soul within, a new life to look forward to. But, I never gathered the courage to voluntarily walk down our past; and forgetfulness slowly chipped away at memory’s walls, until all I have now is a confused collection of thoughts, full of wonderful, visceral, floating emotions, not always moored to any context.

*             

I bought myself a string of fancy, decorative lights a few months ago. They are a series of small, yellow bulbs, encased in punctured, perfectly geometric, octagonal (almost circular) cases; and, as they glow, they throw the most fantastic, interconnected patterns of shadows on the walls. I love staring at those lights, they seem to stand for something new every time I look at them.

There are fourteen lights, the eighth doesn't glow, the bulb long being fused. Sometimes, I see those lights as metaphoric for my own self: difference facets of the same base working in various directions simultaneously and frantically, yet outwardly, projecting one whole image. An isomorphism—a real-world, visual equivalent of the Neuron-Sarai. 

The last time I looked at them, I thought of the one light that didn't glow: it stood, like the great Godel's Proof, as testimony to the fact that the most beautiful things are never complete, never perfect. What is the self, after all, but a continuous, iterative collection of past selves? Of a conscious made from memories, some scattered, some diffused, some fused with a being residing deep inside one’s subconscious? And memory, by nature, is chaotic, murky and often indeterminable. Consequently, the self, built on the bedrock of memory, is imprecise, yet affectingly beautiful.

Once I dreamt that you had married a rich, old businessman: his face was lined, but he wore a smart suit and a tie, and the news of his marrying such a pretty, young thing as yourself was the toast of the town, splashed across newspapers. When I woke up, I remembered that, in the dream, I hadn’t felt terrible that you had married, thereby rendering the idea of us, as two letters fused into one whole, forever lost to the realm of possibilities. I also remember being surprised by how long it had been since I had seen you and yet, how strange it was that I had dreamt of you.

Sometimes, the bulb that doesn’t glow stands for you: as the one that got away, yet exists somewhere, casting its own shadow on the rest, quietly, perceptibly: the beautiful blemish of imperfection on an incomplete self.  

(Concludes)