Just another random mystery

If you’d ask me for one word about how Rishi and I felt with each other, for being together since so many years now, I would say “AZAAD”. We felt free with each other, without any boundations to entertain each other all the time.

          He’d be sitting in one corner of the room while I would be in another, with NUSRAT filling the space between our comfortable silences, where I’d be packing my bags to leave again and he’d be sitting and browsing through YouTube or busy attending the limitless phone calls. In between we’d stare at each other, smiling and I’d melt. I’d lose all my concentration for few seconds, before regaining myself.

          Rishi would stare outside the window, sometimes the mirror and most of the time his mobile phone that usually fills our surroundings there in Jammu. Whereas, I usually find myself sitting in our room, catching the birds flying back to their nests, orange sun settling behind the far looking hills, stray dogs settling themselves in the cozy corners of the streets and the decreasing number of vehicles on the busy road and sometimes catching hold of his face and holding his palms or hugging him tight in a comfy hug. We are use to spending our days with the routines in our respective places and evening like these when together.

          Remembering a day when we saw that movie together. As he laid down next to me, staring at me and he said,

“If you ever write about me, think of me as a man who was free in his soul, who flew with wind, and yet longed for love. A love that could move the world. Write about me as LOVE.”

          And then today, on the eve of his birthday, I sat down to write about this love that have filled my life with colours, care, charm, calmness and full of memories to hold on to. And the first thing that I could write was about love within me because of him.

          That is the thing about us. Rishi and I are always destined to be together, and we knew it since day one, when he was sitting in the balcony of a calm place somewhere in Jammu and I were standing near the parking lot of the busy south Delhi market and messaging him, just after few days I have met him for the first time.

          We knew that that our companionship won’t be easy like a cake walk and yet we went ahead with it. Loving each other in every moment, for we never knew which moment would have been our last. But we sailed through all the odds and as we were destined to be together, we are together, stronger than ever and to be with each other till our last breath on mother earth.

          With each night I spend in Jammu, with him, feeling his physical presence, smelling his magical fragrance; the morning comes with a beautiful promise. As I watch the sun rising from behind those small looking hills and ironically the bigger looking trees and painting them golden with its rays, and I watch his angel looking face, deep in sleep and Thank the Almighty for every moment of magic that had and have the power to change my life forever.

          I think these are the mornings I fall in love with him again and again for forever and ever again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE

People Die but Memories Don’t

Death moves about at random, without discriminating between the innocent and the evil, the poor and the rich. The only difference is that the poor usually handle it better.

I heard today that the vegetable vendor had died. The old man would always be in the middle of the grocery market of my locality, selling his fresh green vegetables and if not surrounded by the customers then always busy sprinkling water on the green vegetables so that they stay fresh and attract as many customers as possible.

He’d been there for as long as I remember, and he could be seen at almost any hour of the evening or night, until all the stock was sold. Summer or winter, he stayed close to the vegetables and water bottle to sprinkle water on them.

He was probably quite tall, but I never saw him standing up. One judged his height from his long, loose limbs. He was very thin, and the turban always and perfectly fixed on his head was the sign of his experience in life and so about his old age.

His vegetables were always fresh and always the season’s most wanted. They were not only popular with the old ladies who would not be able to bend to choose the best among the available, as all the Indian ladies do while doing grocery shopping. But they were equally popular with the young females, like me, who are actually raw, when it comes to choosing the best vegetables. Actually that man use to treat all of them, rather us, equally and try to give the best of the lot to all of us. And the best part was that no one have ever bargained with him on the price because they were the most reasonable and also fixed. This was rarely the case with any other vendor in the whole grocery market. On winter evenings, or misty monsoon days, or summery sunny evening, there was always a demand for his vegetables.

No one knows his name. No one ever thought of asking him for it. One just took him for granted. He was fixed as a landmark as the clock tower or a Banyan tree that is there near to the bus stop of my locality. The tree is always being lopped; the clock often stopped. But the vegetable vendor seems less perishable than the tree, more dependable than the clock.

I don’t know if he had family or not, but in the way all the locality was his family, because he was in continuous contact with people. And yet he was a remote sort of being; always polite, even to children, but never familiar.

Did he enjoy being alive? I wonder now. He was always smiling, but I doubt if he was a joyful person; but then, neither was he miserable. I should think he was a genuine stoic, one of those who do not attach overmuch importance to themselves, who are emotionally uninvolved, content with their limitations, their dark corners. I wanted to get to know the old man better, to sound him out on the immense questions involved in selling the vegetables all his life; but it’s too late now.

Today his dark corner, which use to be the green and the most crowded corner of the market earlier, was deserted; the old man had vanished. ‘He died in his sleep’ said the neighboring vendor. ‘He was old’. Very old. Sufficient reason to die. May the soul of the stranger, yet so close, rests in peace.

But the corner is very empty, very dark, and I know that whenever I pass it I will be haunted by vision of the old vegetable vendor, troubled by the questions I failed to ask.

That is why, the memories are like the sky full of stars, so beautiful yet unreachable. We can look at them and smile but couldn’t complete the urge to get closer to them. May be that’s what the memories hold. The power to put the heart in craving.