It was a rainy day, just like today. The raindrops, fresh and clear fell on the window pane and slid off into a muddy heap where the window met the sill. I had nothing to do, so I sat and watched the drops take that curious downward crooked path to join their inevitable destiny. You used to come almost every day, and then every other day, till your presence trickled from a gushing torrent to the thin trickle line of raindrops. I pictured you on the road, perhaps sidestepping a puddle and getting splattered next minute by a passing vehicle. The anger was starkly visible on your face- the beautiful anger. Beautiful, for when it dissipated your face would be the sun breaking through the clouds. And I would wait always, cajoling and teasing till you smiled at me.
So let me think of yesterday while I look at today unseeingly. Rain does this to me. I am oblivious to the twenty four hours of today as I look back at that yawning gap called yesterday, engulfing months, years, decades, almost till the time I became aware of cohesive thinking. To a time when I used to know you, or did I really know you? Sometimes it seems to have been just a sham- that shared camaraderie, that warm glow across the room. Yet it was good till it lasted. Was it good for you too? As good as it was for me? But then I will never know for soon you will appear to me as a stranger. If I couldn’t ask you then, what will I ask of the stranger?
When was it that you started slipping away from me? When was it that my confident self faltered to a watered down gratefulness that you had at least come? When was it that the spontaneity went and left behind a constriction in the throat, a hesitancy that weighed words before I spoke them? I need to go back further when things were fine, really fine and not just illusorily fine, when we faced the world together and not from two continents. Yes, you went away for some ostensible reason and you slipped out of my world. I had only the length of my arms to encircle you; how could I hold the whole globe? Your calls came, then your letters and then picture postcards with small messages, followed by postcards with just the name of the place, and then nothing at all. Temerity stopped me from probing what was going wrong; insecurity justified the voice in my head that said you were the busy one; it was but natural.
You left my domain. You found new things to do that did not include me, new places to see without me, new friends who welcomed you as an individual entity and not the two that we had always been. There was no one to blame, no melodrama, or even drama. How can you fight a nothingness? I fought with myself instead, berated my sweet self as stupid, judged it as incapable, and hanged it as useless. I brought myself to a state that even if you stood in front of me I would have seen just the chasm between us, one step and I would be falling.
And then you came back.
Or rather, I heard you had come back. I alternated between self pride and self pity, waiting, oscillating between taking that first step, and waiting for you to take that first step. Neither happened but I did meet you. Was it very shortly? Such was the grip of emotions on me, that I am unable to recall-was it in days or months that we came across each other? I saw you across a roomful of people, head tipped back, laughing with her. Perhaps you felt my eyes on you, for you turned your head in a smooth motion. What did I expect to see-guilt, being shaken off guard? Sadly, that is reserved for fiction. You just smiled, waved, held up a finger to signal a minute and went back to what you were doing. There was no warm glow, just an icicle in my heart. I left before that minute could come up, but then it could have been ten minutes, half an hour, never?
Today you are coming to meet me. You are going to come over, you said on the phone. The rain has turned into a deluge. You are coming to tell me of your undying love for me; you are coming to tell me that the truth has dawned on you at last. My heart knows but rejects what you are coming to tell me. Yet I will smile, congratulate you and declare to myself, “See? He came.” And like the raindrops that are now drying up, the tears that have caressed my cheeks will also be dry by then. With the deluge over, my still heart will greet you, attempt inconsequential conversation, and maybe even make you laugh? I will laugh with you. If I touch your arm, if I move that errant lock from your forehead, would it tear into your complacence, give rise to questions? I will never know, for it is written that I am not going to. I could have asked you if I had known you, but then, did I ever really know you?
