She is no more. But why should it hurt me so much? Well the main reason is that I am aware of the fact that I haven’t done justice to her at least once in her life. I didn’t give her a chance to be happy. She came to my house with a promise to live with me for ever, till eternity separates us. Initially I didn’t like her much because it wasn’t a relationship where in I knew her for a long time and then we got together which was what I wanted in a long term relationship. It was Nazim Khan, my music teacher, who introduced her to me. He said she was the perfect one I could get in the entire world. When I heard her singing, I was more than sure about what Nazim Khan said because I carried an interest in music especially towards vocals. I didn’t think twice. A few days later I brought her to my house without having a formal house entering ceremony.
Initially I found it difficult to understand her. Because it was my first time being with her or in fact anyone like her. I didn’t know anything about her. But then something from inside my heart was yelling out that I wanted her more than anything in my life. Later I started liking her and we spent the most of our free time together. Initially she was too shy to sing for me. When I came to know more about her and we became close, what I heard from her was the most beautiful sounds of music. I thought I have made the right choice in my life.
I left my job and we both came to the place where I joined for my higher studies. Well I have to agree that the first signs of incongruity started from there. It wasn’t my mistake either. I didn’t get much time to spend with her. Educational systems are made like that. Not allowing for anything beyond books making people nothing but bookworms. I knew that she kind of missed me but I tried my best to spend the maximum possible time with her. In fact I also missed her very much especially her pearly voice. But with time and the heftiness of the academics, our trysts decreased in frequency. And somewhere it stopped. She would’ve felt bad as I was the only one for her in this whole world. I knew this, but I was helpless. And now when she is not around, I feel the emptiness engraving my mind.
It happened on a midnight, two weeks back, while I was reading something on my computer. She was near my desk looking at what I was doing on my computer. She used to do that whenever I work late night; that is everyday. I had a glance at her. It seemed she got used to the dodging from me and I continued with what I was doing. I was surprised when I heard some crackling from the side. I couldn’t understand from where it was coming. Initially the noises where less frequent but it increased with time. Then I heard some sharp breaking sounds piercing through the air and my ears. Six in a row; one followed by another. It was the kind of sound when something which is under great tension breaks apart to relieve the strain. After that I heard a big cracking sound. Don’t know why, but what I felt was that somewhere someone’s heart had broken down into pieces. And then I saw her lying on the floor frozen, relieved from the entire trauma she had undergone.
It was difficult for me to believe that. But reality stared back at me. I lost her. I can’t listen to her beautiful voice any more. I feel alone.
My guitar is no more...
Thanks Tarni, Silverine, Quills and Divya for inviting me to do this wonderful tag where in I have to write 8 points about my perfect love.
Before I start,
Patni, where I worked, had a library and I happened to read this book borrowed from there whose title I don’t remember now. In the book, the author asks a lady her expectations about her lover. She says a lot of things like; he should be intelligent, smart, handsome, caring, tall, fair, rich and much more. When she was over with the long list, the author asked her a question. ‘Consider that you got a guy with all these qualities you have mentioned, what all will you give him in return?’ And she was answerless. I believe this is the same with men as well. I can’t expect anything from my lover which I can’t give back to her. Coz I know that I have limitations. Hence any of the following 8 points about my perfect lover is not sacrosanct.
1. She is simple in every aspects, be it in her dressing, be it in her talking, be it in her behavior or what ever it be.
2. When I look at her and see her smile, hear her speak, feel her touch, my entire stress, tension etc. come to an end.
3. She is dim-witted when I pull her legs, she is a mentor when I seek her advice and she is a solacer when I look for consolation.
4. I love the food she makes, not because she cooks it well, but because she serves it with love.
5. Every night, she tells me whatever little things happened in her day and I being more of a listener can thus do away with my talking.
6. She doesn’t stop me from anything I do because she believes in me and knows that I won’t do anything off beam.
7. She is candid and disparages me when I do wrong and encourages me when I do right. Her worries are my worries, her secrets are my secrets, her happiness is my happiness and she is mine.
8. Thinking about her reassures me that I have someone in this world for me that I can say anywhere with pride.
Chaos is off the hook and I can’t help myself from blustering a bit about Paheli, the online puzzle which I made for Chaos Moksha 2006, our annual cultural fest. With 9821 (7125 unique) page loads in just 17 days; average of 577 (419 unique) page loads per day; 1389 (888 unique) being the maximum page loads on any particular day; more than 1600 comments on the blog that discusses clues which is after deleting 200 odd comments that contained more-than-explanatory hints or offensive words; threads in different discussion sites like Pagalguy, Orkut etc; a few blogs dedicated to clues, Paheli was an unexpected success; it rocked and is still ON!
The concept of the game was taken from Notpron of deathball.net and Klueless of IIM Indore and was duly acknowledged. I had to do a lot of simplification in the game concept from the above sites as the people we expected to play Paheli weren’t geeks who go through a source code check and URL renaming for cracking a level.
While designing the game, I had to keep in mind that each and every level has to be more challenging than the previous one, with an increasing level of toughness. It shouldn’t be that easy to drive people away subsequent to a cake-walk feeling about the game and in addition, it shouldn’t be that tough to kill their interest out of frustration. One of the levels had a flaw in it, which was corrected at a later stage. Except for this I think Paheli performed well. DD helped me when I ran out of ideas for new levels.
Spanned over an exigent ** levels (I am not disclosing the total number of levels as it may kill the spirit of the game), Paheli is enough and more to set one’s gray cells on fire, till he/she finishes it and preparing such a battle field was one of the challenging errands I have done off late. I didn’t know php coding before I started Paheli and our server supported only php. So I had to learn it with the help of Google, design the game and implement it with so less time in hand. A few nerds of my institute put me through tough interludes while the game progressed as they cracked levels before I added more, which resulted in a lot of night outs conceiving new levels. But yeah, at the end of the day, I have to agree that it was fun making Paheli.
We plan to keep Paheli online for a while. If you haven’t tried it yet, this is done exclusively for you. :-)
It is almost an hour now and I am still staring at the screen in front of me which has an opened MS Outlook in it, yearning to type in a few words. It was not so long that I heard from one of my friends that Neena is going to get married tomorrow. When we met the last time, I had decided not to attend such a function of hers for any reasons whatsoever. Nevertheless, I had this continuing thought in my mind to send her at least an email that I ended up with this freaking mail window staring back at me. After all we were together for a year and we enjoyed a great time being together though we broke up almost two years back.
Four more days to the New Year and my inbox was already snowed under New Year greetings from my friends. Purns, she worked with me and was kind of a mentor to me, sends emails regularly; better call it forwards. I hardly replied to her and sometimes didn’t even open those forwards. I was not like this before. But like my other friends Purns also knew that I was busy here in London looking after a particular account of my company and I usually didn’t get time to reply to the emails from my friends. But due to some unknown instinct, I opened the latest email from her. New Year resolutions, it read. What does Purns had to advice me on a New Year? I wondered because I knew Purns knows that advices usually face a rebuff from me.
Seven things you should do on a New Year! That’s its heading. Holy Crap! I hate such forwards. But still, it’s a New Year. I gave a skim read to that forward. A particular line in it caught my attention. It’s not because that line was so great. It’s because that line had something to do with what I have been thinking for the past one hour. It read “Call someone whom you didn’t talk to for a long time”. And the first person that came to my mind was her, Neena. Was that a spur; a stimulus to call her on her marriage!
I still remember the day on which I met Neena for the first time. It was the day on which I got a confirmation letter from my company saying that my one year probationary period has come to an end and now I am a wholly owned fraction of the company. You can’t forget dates like that. They become a part of your life due to their sheer importance. I couldn’t forget my first meeting with Neena due to the coincidence of our tryst with that date. The one year rotational policy of my company marked the end of my tenure in my first project and re-implanted me into another project on the same day. That’s where I met her where we happened to get close.
Well, time has its own way to change things. Things happened in succession and it changed our relationship so drastically that it took a turn from a point where it was so difficult for us to not see each other and to not talk with each other to a point where thinking about each other was the most painful thing in our lives. The umpteen missed calls that traveled to and from our cell phones, which reminded us that we thought of each other whenever we got that, eventually stopped! And then it came to a formal end, at the jogger’s park in Vashi, on the old wooden bench by the side of the track. We went there past office hours and we both were in a hurry to somehow end it and go to our flats. I left the place, didn’t turn back, got into a metro which took me to the station near my flat. I didn’t know how she felt that time. I didn’t feel sad because I was in a haze. I didn’t realize what was happening to me, to her, to us. I never went to that park after that.
Two years can change many things. The gigantic green tree near the bus stand died off leaving a big blue hole in its place. All of my friends left to different places, more scattered than before; across the globe. My office changed from a congested cubicle in Thane to this cabin in the 45th floor of Skyline Plaza, London. And here I am, thinking about my first love on the previous day of her marriage, about which I came to know only an hour back.
So I am going to call her today. Yes I think I should call her. After all, once I loved her more than anyone else in this world and her smallest worries were my largest concerns. I closed the mail window and took my cell phone and went outside to call her. I still store all the telephone numbers associated with her. Her own, her residence number, her dads’ and her moms’. I wanted to delete it all from my phone to stop myself from thinking about her but somehow I kept it till now. Did I still love her? Can I expect a miracle when I call her? That she will come back to me. What the fuck! What all am I thinking? It’s her marriage tomorrow.
A gentle breeze caressed the balcony while I stood near the parapet with my cell phone. I pressed the number key 3 for quite sometime. Shit! Though years passed, my thumb still remembers the shortcut I made to her number! The phone on the other end kept on ringing for some time before it was taken, as was the norm with her and then I heard a voice.
“Hello!”
“Hello, this is Hari here. Am I talking to Neena?” I replied while I was trying to recognize her voice after a long time.
After a brief silence, she replied. “Hari… Yes it is me!”
“How are you, Neena?”
“I am fine, how are you?”
“I am fine too. It’s after a long time that we are talking to each other”
“Yeah”
“What is his name?”
“Amit”
“Oh”
“So Hari, have you married?”
“No I haven’t”. My mind took me back time, to the table at the corner in our office canteen where Neena was asking me this.
“What will you do if we can’t get married to each other and I got married to someone else?”
“Hmm… difficult question; I’ll leave the country and won’t come back to this soil then” my reply was as careless as it could be.
“Oh I’m sorry.” Her reply brought me back to the present.
“Sorry? Why? I am outside the country now” I replied all of a sudden.
She was silent. Was she remembering our conversation at the canteen?
“Neena?”
“Yes”
“I called you to wish you a happy married life. I came to know that tomorrow is your marriage”
“Thank you, Hari. But my marriage happened three weeks back”
“What” I was in a shock.
“But still, the wishes hold” I didn’t realize what I was saying. I was in a haze. The same haze I was in, two years back at the park in Vashi.
“Ok then, Bye”
“Bye”. And she kept the phone down.
And that’s it. There was no office or balcony around but this demented flat in the Mumbai suburbs. I finished my story which my friend, my editor, Rohit has been asking me for more than a week to be published in his evening tabloid. Tomorrow it will go to the press and will come out as those murky lifeless printed alphabets which lack the power to convey feelings. After all who wants to read it with that passion? The four pegs of Bacardi are still active in my stomach. And its heat added with my emotions put me in to a bizarre state where there was only me. And at a distance I saw a disappearing shadow.
