The Meeting

When she saw the paintings first, she could never even explain to herself what she felt. It had been so long but her world stood before her again. A world she had left behind twenty years ago. A world on the street and a world she shared with him. The same streets, the same fort and the same people.
She suddenly knew that he was there. In the same room. So many times she had imagined seeing him in the crowd, on the streets, in her dreams. But she always imagined the ten-year-old boy she had known. In a flash the realization came to her that he too had grown up in the past twenty years. He would look different now, talk different, and behave different. Would he recognize her? Would they ever be as close as they had been? Was he there right now looking at her?

When he saw her that day, nothing else seemed clear. It was just her face in the crowd. A crowd of people seeing his paintings, analyzing them. They all had something to say about them. They all had their judgments. She was the only one who spoke to them.
As he stood in the corner, watching her, he heard her conversations. It was like she understood them. She didn’t need to analyze. She knew them. She had always known them. Them and the hands that created them. He watched her every move. As her pallu slithered over one of the vases in the corner, and as her hand reached behind her ear to tuck a disobedient lock of hair.
It was only a few moments before he recognized her. The eyes that had haunted him for years. The thick messy hair that he had reached out to in his dreams. The voice he had waited for so long to hear. And there she was. Two steps away from him, too far away. He was about to turn away. He still doesn’t know why.
He was afraid maybe, even awkward. He had expected this moment for the past twenty years. But now as it stood there, staring him in the face, he wanted to run away. He wanted to be away from her. He knew he was pulled towards it and he couldn’t stop.
As he stood before her, he was scared. Scared that she wouldn’t recognize him, scared that too much time had passed. Reality kissed him on his cheek, like a butterfly, and the truth stung. He was a painter, in his shabby kurta and unkempt hair. She was a socialite, Married to a businessman, Living in a sprawling house. She attended parties and featured on page three. He, at thirty, was still struggling to pay rent. For a moment he didn’t want her to recognize him.
Life had a way of causing him pain when he had thought that it couldn’t get worse. She did recognize him. Almost as soon as she saw him. Almost like she had expected him to be there.

They now stood before each other as the rest of the room spun like a whirlpool. Everyone disappeared. It was only them. They had known each other so well and so long ago. After all this time, they didn’t find words to talk to each other. Curled up under the railway bridge stairs, the two children had shared their fears and dreams. Today, even the handshake was awkward.

They spoke for a while about random things. Things that didn’t matter. The real questions lay hidden. He knew all about her, at least all that the media said and wrote about her. She somehow knew that. It had been years since then but she could still read his mind.
She stayed with him the whole day. After the exhibition got over, they went to the beach. Still talking. They were the two urchins again. Now with twenty years of baggage. He told her about his fragmented life on the street after she left; his unnecessary schooling and his messy life after that.
She told him her adventures in the past twenty years. Her perfect teenage, her perfect family, her perfect marriage and her perfect life. Perfectly incomplete. Perfectly unhappy. But she didn’t tell him that. He already knew. As they sat watching the waves jump up to swallow the sun, they spoke about a lot of things and read all that was unsaid.
As he saw her sit in the taxi, she looked at him with those same eyes as she had so long ago. She smiled at him and he tried to smile back. As the taxi drove off, she looked at him from the window. Just as she had before, but only this time, he saw the sindoor above those two eyes, and smiled to himself. Something told him they would meet again. They hadn’t exchanged numbers, but he knew he would find her again. Just as he had now, he only didn’t know how much later ‘again’ would be.

Standstill…

There are times what everything stands still. A stillness that is so quiet, so threatening, it screams from the insides of the heart, tearing its way out, splitting open every inhibition, every restriction in its way. And it is still. The calm so untamed, so wild and so wanted. And you are still.
She sat by the window, staring at the road below. It was after sunset. Could have been six, seven or even eight o’clock. She didn’t care. She didn’t notice. The cup of coffee before her cooled in the evening air as a deep brown film formed on the top. The street below was crowded. Cars, buses, taxis, rickshaws, motorbikes, carts, pedestrians, dogs, hawkers and salesmen; were hooting, yelling, running, walking, barking, honking, scooting and flowing on the street. So many people who didn’t care about her, about each other and about a world beyond themselves.
She sat there, in a pool of her violent, raging calm staring at the obscenely orange street light that fell on the road. There was nothing soft, subtle or sophisticated about it. No attempt to mask what was real. Just the strong light.
Then, suddenly, as if someone had shaken her, she dropped the blank expression and turned to her coffee. As she sat on the window sill sipping on the cold, tasteless coffee, she tried to do all she could to dissolve the calm at the bottom of her stomach. She wanted to be busy. So busy that she could forget all that had happened that day…
He was lying on a hammock, hands loosely thrown on either side. He stared at the mesh of coconut leaves on the sky and the half moon sifting through the net. An incomplete moon, for incomplete lives and their incomplete stories. He pretended not to think for a while. He liked to believe that he was stoic. He knew he wasn’t. He was thinking, faster, louder, stronger than ever before. A million thoughts rushed through his mind. It was all noise, chaos, confusion. Yet it all seemed to fit in, like a symphony. A symphony of noise. He felt a strange sort of calm through the storming thoughts. The more he felt the noise, the more he enjoyed the peace.
In the moonlight he saw where he was, as if almost suddenly conscious of his own presence. The resort shone white. He realized that he had been hiding from his reality, a reality so extraordinary that it almost seemed like a novel, one that lonely people read in lazy afternoons. The resort was just his physical hideout. He had switched himself off from the world he knew in the city. But he slowly accepted that this remote beach only kept him away physically. He still didn’t stop thinking about her. All the time he kept thinking what she would be doing, and more importantly, did she think of him as often as he thought of her?
It was like he was nine years old again, sitting on Marine Drive, crying for the only friend he had, for the only purest love he had known. He wanted to cry again. But it was too late. For the fifteen years since that day, his world had conditioned him not to cry. Tears had dried somewhere deep inside, and he looked for them desperately.
Both of them, so far away, separated by space and a very long time felt a nearness to each other. She, in her calm, held a raging storm, he, in his storming thoughts, felt more at peace than ever before. It was like they fitted in like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. It was just that all of the other pieces were lost, over the past fifteen years, leaving them incomplete, and together.

That night…

That night…
They stood on the water’s edge, together, alone, staring at the steel surface of the river. A sliver of the moon in the canvas above shone just enough for them to see each other although that wasn’t necessary.

That night…
The fire was dying out slowly, till only charred wood glowed steadily. A few last flames breathed their last. He diverted his attention from the still water to the restless flames. She watched him as he rekindled the fire. Within moments it was alive again. Now they both sat with each other, the fire between them.

That night…
The stars shined, smiled, as if whispering a little secret to the trees below. Neither of them spoke, yet volumes were said. Shadows danced on the barks of trees as they both stared at each other through moments of awkwardness. A comfortable awkwardness, a comfortable silence. All that had happened between them in the years before, all that was to happen in the future seemed insignificant. They forgot why they were in the middle of this forest, in the dead of the night, together, alone. That they were lost did not matter. They had found each other.

That night…
An insect innocently clambered up her foot and rested on her anklet. He watched, with a smile, as she toyed with it till it disappeared into the darkness and they were alone again.

That night…
All the jungle sounds seemed distant, muffled, unimportant. They could hear each other breathe.
It didn’t matter that they couldn’t see what lurked in the darkness beyond. They could see themselves in each other’s eyes.
They couldn’t feel the gravel of the river bed. They could feel each other’s presence.

All mysteries were solved. All questions answered, that night.