Dear Miss B,
I know I shouldn’t be doing this. But what choice do I have? At a certain point, you have to open the valve of your emotions, or else the dam will break, splintering you into a million pieces. I don’t know what it is between us, or if there is even a us. But whatever it is it's beautiful. The wind that touches you, the sun that gleams through you, and the night that loses you become unspoken poetry that nature bestows upon itself. I have witnessed this magic many times and trust me it only leaves me wanting more.
That would be the “Runway look”. To walk ahead on a red carpet and look back on the jolting photographers. The bend of the knees, the sway of the hips and the tilt of the chin made so popular by Marilyn Monroe. But it wasn’t her figure or her blemish free looks that killed the show. It was the intensity of her eyes, the pain and the passion burning in them, that made her so unforgettable.
It may sound cliché comparing you to a movie star. But aren’t people we love and adore stars in the cinema of our life? It was not on a red carpet and there weren’t any photographers, but when you turned and looked over your shoulders, your eyes behind those glasses seemed like a world in itself. There were books, the clink of cutleries, the silent murmur of conversations, and in the midst of all you stood, in a black salwar clutching an oversized bag.
Your eyes smiled before your lips did. We shook hands and settled down. The bibliophile café in Panbazar, located above the age-old Western Book Depot, surrounds everyone in a wall of books rather than concrete. Not many can handle those weighty subjects, but it amazed me how effortlessly you slid into the ambience. It was as though written words had always been a part of you.
This was the first time we met. But why? I won't divulge that information because that would make things so obvious. There can be a million reasons why two people meet. We know why… let's keep it between us. “Us” this is what intoxicates me. To share something between you and me, that none would ever know. This is what I yearn for.
I don’t remember much of what we spoke about. But it was me who did most of the talking. You just listened, a nod here… a smile there. We had ordered pasta and blueberry Mojito. I confided to you that I have been meaning to taste the drink for a long time. But its colour put me off. I thought it would look rather odd for a lone man to be sipping from a glass a blue liquid. You laughed…or was it a rumble…distant yet distinct.
A man, with a squint in his right eye, smoking a pipe and with round framed glasses stared at us from the photo frame. Have you heard of Jean Paul Sartre, I asked. No, you said and followed my gaze. Your eyes stayed with Sartre for a few moments and then returned to your pasta. I thought about what Sartre had said about life. About the absurdity of our existence That life has got no meaning…It is on us to give a meaning That moment, with you near me was like having a faint sense of that meaning.
Faint…because when I came back and thought about us. That faint was also fading away. Like an empty space left by a photo frame on a wall or the haze of the dying sun in the horizon. It is a sense of something but…that’s all it is… a sense. I live by my emotions, we all do, and my days are underpinned by the flow of those emotions. But when I think about us (I can't help but keep on using us), the first day I met you, nothing comes to my mind. A void. A white dot on a white canvas, a nothingness…and that’s what helplessly propelled me towards you.
The weight of your being, the fineness of your space forces me to live in the moment. No past, no future…just a moment in time, sliced from life A present that is unattached and unrestrained. So, on that particular day, over another plate of pasta, Punjabi flavored, (I would confess the fusion felt a little hopeless in taste) that I expressed my love for you. You smiled, dug your fork into a piece of masala-smeared meat and spoke about your work. You didn’t say anything. You couldn’t. You had your commitments I had mine. Time is not on our side. The if’s and but’s of life. Where are we headed?
It is not about, if things were different. It's not about a longing for a vista embellished with the hope of a different future. It is simply the ability to drench ourselves in the rain of the moment. Moments that make you and me… us. Even if it is for a fraction of a second. Nurturing the time with the agony and the ecstasy of our lives is what it means to be us.
The wind dancing in your hair when you told me you didn’t have a favorite song, Wuthering Heights wasthe book you had read several times, always complaining about the height of my scooter, drowning several beers when we sat under that starlit sky with the city spread below us, you wouldn’t just stop talking!
The new piercing of your ears that I didn't notice, when we left a restaurant without paying because we didn't have cash and our card won't work, draped in a white saree when you waved at me from the podium…your obsessively clean shoes, that hand on my shoulder as we rode through the city, you not picking up my phone, you telling me to get a life and…and a million of those moments floating in the void of us. The moment when you read this and know it's for you…these moments of madness…
I am ending this letter on an abrupt note because I have crossed the quota of words allowed by this esteemed newspaper and also because there is a lot many of us to come
Also Read: Evergreen Queen of Melody
Also Watch: