Nameless

Perhaps the toughest part of creating an article is not embedded in creating it, but in naming it. Oddly enough this fact has never bothered me until now. Of all the pieces I have written, of all the poems I have weaved, I have always begun with the name, always. As if the name in my mind gave the image of what I was about to reflect in words. The title in bold gave me a sense of strength, a wave of confidence which made me believe that I was capable of doing what I have just started, that my words will sit together in mellifluous harmony to paint a picture never seen before. Today, standing at a clueless juncture that separates today from tomorrow, as I begin to bring together few aimless words wandering before my vision on paper I wonder how eloquent the irony of life can be.

Four weeks before this night, as the last hues of crimson sunk beneath that unknown place where it travels every day, my friend died. My friend died with the dolorous rays of the sinking sun that evening, departing from life in the most unsaid manner, much like the sunrays which die every day. Certain changes I believe never take place. Sandip’s death seemed like one of that kind. As preposterous as this thought might sound, the idea of his not being here, alive, appears the same to me. Nobody said that the sense of an ending will always be an accomplishment. As much as we rush to end certain things, others like the last day of school, last chapter of a great book, a handful of childhood dissolved in our mature self never really end, never really bid us adieu! For three years, Sandip and I sat together, everyday, and tried to define a better tomorrow for ourselves. Beneath books of algebra we passed mindless jokes and trivial secrets. We blinked our eyes as the teacher would hush us for disrupting an air full of decorum and silence. Often I would discuss boys with him while he would seek advices to woo few of my friends. Sandip and I went away in different directions, much like two birds that lived and chirped on the same tree and one morning, one fine morning chose to migrate away, in different directions. Years later as that fateful evening came with no wind, no sun, no birds around us, Sandip got hit, by a bus and left our hearts, bare and barren. Like the numb sun and silent sky which give no hint. And now he keeps me waiting, for a closure I suppose, to the chapter I started writing with him. It had my friend who loved him a lot, who gave him her entire heart for real, once and for all. He keeps her waiting too, I know it for sure.

Of late I have let myself indulge into periods of prolonged contemplation. I would have used the word introspection but that gives the promise of a consequent conclusion, one that makes us realise where it went wrong and often seeks another lateral promise of making corrections. This entire process of pondering does not provide a befitting panacea to all my woes. The times are (surely) a changing. So much that Dylan and Cohen and Young have to keep alive in me that one silent hope which I had gathered after being abandoned like a waif by the other types. Hope is a fleeting device, one needs to tie it by one’s bedpost, talk to it every day, smile at it every morning and stroke it to sleep every night. Otherwise it mingles into nowhere without a clue, like the most ruthless irony if there was ever one. Or maybe it is just me who has been gifted with such ephemeral forms of faith of late. For years I have waited for things to reveals themselves to me, through books, through music, through lessons, through love, through loss I waited with an endless, insatiable desire for one epiphany that would perhaps put an end to everything that is now grimly holding me back. Well as I have read Virginia Woolf I could correct this act of folly soon enough----- “the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.” Honestly, one knows this truth all along. Things do not open up themselves, light never shines in the night sky. If there was one thing that life had to reveal, it was this fact that there never was a thing to be revealed. We need to find our own playthings, make our own happiness and eliminate our own sorrows. Yet one needs to rely on such divine intervention and wait for it. Otherwise the little illuminations of everyday that, though faintly, gives the hint of it, goes unnoticed.

A life without waiting is a life without aim or such is what I would like to believe. A life that waits is the one that tries to reduce the meters in order to diminish the wait. It is the life which tends to move through unaccustomed recesses and find new ways, the life which dares to come out of its own for a make-belief or a possible dream. Perhaps it was in those dark corners of mind where these thoughts were etched, that my love for travel began. When I was younger summers used to be reserved for travel. With time my summers grew shorter, summers were no longer the time to see faraway lands, summers ceased to take me to my grandfather’s house. Summers for me became as wilted as they were for anybody else. What was sadder, it became indiscernible from autumn, winter, rain, the other seasons of school and work and games of no fun. My ideas of travel and all that was romantic about it became like a secret lover, one with which I had a certain illicit commitment, to be revealed only in the arcane scripts of my notebooks. The postcards and pictures I would pin up there became yellow and broken in time. The snow-caps of Peling or the orchards of Missouri looked alike, stained and almost unidentifiable, like the old chapters of once an interesting time. The lesser I crossed the roads the more I wandered in my mind, the more determinate my dream of going to a foreign land became. Travel brings its own perils, especially this stagnant kind of mind-travelling where you walk in the velocity of lightyears in spite of staying put. Perhaps it is a kind of unimaginable fantasy I indulged into, the one that poured out of my insanity to proclaim a kind of hegemony on my other saner half, the one that went to school, did her lessons through the many seasons of love and loss.

Between love and loss I wonder what can bewilder man the most, especially a peripatetic man. A wayfarer loves his ways and he leaves one in search of another. I am no traveller, yet I have had my share of this game. Of the many loves I have known or the many losses I have felt it is hard to sort out which one has debilitated me the most, which one was so empowering that in its vigour it penetrated a numbness into all my senses. The greater was the love in a thing the more shredded I was in the pain of losing it. The louder the wail was after losing those precious threads, one for an avuncular tie, one for a brother, one for a friend or one for the child I was, the more I wept after every tiring night, a deeper, desolate meadow of absolute hopeless tranquillity followed it. Yet I fell in love again with the little success and surprises of life, with the new friends I made, with myself now so adult. And why this endless desire of risking the heart all over again? The fine line that exists between courage and foolhardy is the one along which we row our oars.

In the end I know what I am looking for, a room of my own. A room to live and breathe in, a room for journeys and a room for the author who will liberate the stories I like, the ones that have a dead brother, a lovely friend, a weeping girl and a magic rabbit, the ones which need to be told for my sake.