She had walked down this path many times before. The
same pattern, repeated over and over again. The same conversations, but
different men. Different men, who looked alike. Different men who listened to
the same kind of music, wore the same hair, rolled up their sleeves to their
forearms in the same way, and said the same things. She had heard it all
before, but wanted to hear the same things again, and again. She wanted to hear
that she was beautiful, that she looked sexy with her nose pin and eyebrow piercing,
that she had a voice that brought those men to tears, and that her poetry gave those
who read it, visions and moving images. Over the years, from the yahoo chat
room, to google talk, to orkut and facebook, to tinder and hinge, she meandered
looking for a home to settle in. A home, that would have a dog, and a field for
both of them to run freely in, picketed fences, and a swing on which she and
her lover would spend drunken nights. She moved from room to room searching for
a yellow light, for she loved halogen bulbs, but could never find any. She drew
lines with sand and blew them away, crossed the threshold several times in
territories full of carnivorous animals who had tasted human blood. She saw
trees bereft of life and leaves from the windows of these rooms, and snow
mingled with mud, relentless rainfall, and she felt cold.
We don’t know who these men were. Some were very
important to her, some she loved, and some were there, whose names she doesn’t
recall. Somewhere in the quagmire of her memory, they are all one. All faceless
and nameless, their bodies swaying into one another, all calling out her name.
T-shirts and jeans and chappals, cigarettes and guitars, all hazy and
translucent. She must have been dreaming, for we all know that people are made
of flesh and blood and caste and sex and religion. They are not made of love,
and tunes, and words, as she believed. She was very foolish, you see.
Anyway, she walked like the world was a dreamscape
and she the narrator in this dream. Her eyes half closed, she smelt the smell
of cinnamon and bay leaves from her mother’s kitchen and remembered the smell
of her father’s sweat. Everywhere she went, these smells followed. She touched
things with the intention of crushing them in her fist and she looked at them
with a stare that would burn them down. Her dream was a burning furnace and if
you stood too close to it, you would be scathed.
What becomes of her, you ask. Well, we don’t know.
One day while walking in the woods she tried following a sun’s ray all the way
to the middle of earth. They say she blended into the mud and split into small
pebbles that now lie in the pathway of a luxury hotel. Some say she followed
the sun ray right into the sky and became a cloud that wandered without rain,
always thirsty, always crying dry tears. Some say she lives in the roots of an
old peepal tree and she has squirrels and birds for friends. There are many
stories. But just like her, it would be difficult to find which one is quite
the truth.
