On rusty evenings

I was sixteen, so was the porch where I and Jeremy Goodman had been sitting every evening in those years. Jeremy Goodman, the septuagenarian companion of my slow, indulgent years of teenage brought the perfect ambience for those evenings. After Independence, Democracy had just become the latest commodity. We had commemorated heroics of Binoy-Badal-Dinesh-Kshudiram-Bose-Gandhi-Nehru again and closed the chapters for good. As their valour had solved pressing issues and wiped away most of the colonial masters, our job had been gracefully done. For those who had the bliss to take birth a decade later, it was our time to recline.
The ancient smell of Goodman’s soiled carpets, white teacups, and solitary existence of sugar cubes make my teenage appear like a figment of yesteryear’s imagination, an imagination itself too old to put up with the tensile forces of memories trying to fetch it about twenty years thereafter. I sat with Goodman, the erstwhile English merchant and discussed the words creaking beneath his gramophone.
Ghalib, Faiz, Farhaz with couplets counting the layers beneath my heart….
 Iqbal Bano and her desert of solitude…
My debates with him on how overrated love actually was
and pithy phrases of Urdu in between teaspoons of Namkeen…
provided sufficient lyrical contribution to the vines of bougainvillea and money plant behind us. Did we notice the colour of sky? Did we notice migratory birds that our very trivial town liked boasting about during every winter? I know not.
Goodman believed in trivial things. Trivial things, he liked saying, led to trivial failures and ushered disappointments that one could hardly be sad about. His sadness hovered between the verses of extinct poets. ‘Vasl ki raat’ heard Goodman, and started deriving meanings for it--- allegorical, symbolic, metaphorical, ironical. Yet some of them were left to reach out for. This saddened Goodman.
I left him behind. I sought eyes for wilder rumpus. My tarot card read change and so I did.
“Aaj jaane ki zid na karo!”, the Gramophone implored, though not for me. We have talked about it, Goodman and I. We believed the best farewell was no farewell at all. That there were no departures. And if there were no departures there was no distending our hearts, no pulling it over dry, desert-like ages to the extent that it aches. The heart remains spread out in open ended chapters, in little pieces of one that have been invested all throughout. Journey seemed less impossible that way and the love we tend to exchange at each of its stops, far less futile.
Goodman died shortly after I had left my old town for college. Twenty years later, his records lay in some dark corner of his rusted inheritance.