Thursday, May 14, 2015

A death long ago, a death too fresh, and dying pangs...

I don't pretend to myself. I don't pretend to anybody as such. I don't like to pretend...that's the way I've been made...

So, today, I didn't feel interested towards him. I didn't like him. I didn't seem to love him...

This is not a time when I can love...

I was wallowing in self-pity anyways. I tend to do that at this time of the year. I try to calculate how old he'd have been, whether he'd be stubborn or obedient, whether he'd be brilliant or average, if he'd have the kind of sense of humor I love...I wonder a lot of things...

Eight years, ya, he'd have been that big...and my world would have been that full...bringing him up. I like imagining my son, now that in reality, it is almost certain that I'd never have him, I imagine him all the more...whether he'd be this Capricorn person, measured and calculative, or this Aquarian, calm and soothing...whether he'd really like music, way my best friend had predicted, and if he'd sing Rabindrasangeet with an open voice, and not in a suppressed tone way I do (after all I am not trained, and I can sing only in the medium range, and my scale fluctuates)...

And other things crowd my mind...the various insults that were meted out to me, when I tried to trust in love and truth and goodness of heart...

I also remember that particular time in 2006, I was so contented with life, and so enormously pretty - I realize it now when I see my old photos of that time...I almost felt my life was well-settled, nothing could go wrong from there...

After the well-known actor and the equally famous lady politician got declared innocent (not quite, but almost), a friend commented in FB if the female-starlet who had a "shady" past would be declared a virgin as the next big news, and I started wondering my usual thing, if there is actually anything called a virgin-mother, if that is possible...

As is the case with me, I get tired of grieving...on that day I chose to live, today also, I'd rather like to move on. I don't like to blame anybody, no, I really don't. I allowed people to treat me in the way they did. The truth never changes...

On top of yet another earthquake, and the law and order situation in the state (actually across the world) going to the rots, the blow came in form of another unexpected news - my favorite author died! She simply died, and she'd never again write those heart-touching stories about the regular struggles of a common girl...I just kept on remembering those days of reading কাছের মানুষ as soon as the দেশ would arrive - how long has it been that we haven't subscribed to the magazine? My entire world is falling apart with these deaths, of people who have always been part of my real and virtual life - the way she had described the agony of the person who doesn't even know if he is just the legal father or the biological father too - all he feels is just too fond of and too scared about his missing little girl...that impeccable style of writing prose - a lady who's shunned by her husband and grown up sons finds solace in her writing skills - হেমন্তের পাখি - and above all else, me meeting her face to face during the book fair, and that secret feeling of kinship when I saw her observing people - "that's how we write, don't we?"

I'm just angry. Old friends ignite old memories - and they ask the wrong questions...why did you guys break up? Tell me, how to explain? I still have that photo of the workshop on learned optimism, a time when I was supposedly a blameless girl...standing beside the same friend...she's always been a conservative north Indian girl, I remember changing from my flimsy nightdress to more appropriate clothing, if she'd knock on my door when we slept in adjacent rooms during the workshop...would she ever be able to digest the story of why we broke up, how different the actual "we" were, from the "we" she knew you and me to be? We lacked resolve, everyone of us, you, your parents, my parents, and above all I myself...we, all of us, pathetically lacked resolve, and I feel revolted at the thought...you know why, because, at length, it is I who is the victim, everyone else has moved on in life...I'm perched on that precarious "hate me not" seesaw.

I didn't love him today, but I feel a greater kinship with him than I have ever felt with anyone else...as I was telling her about him, I felt I am telling about someone who's a part of me...in an almost assured tone...I really don't care what you, or others who have pretended to love me, have done to me. I think I have stopped caring about life...it is just a silly go-as-you-like competition for me...where I'm trying to be myself...

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