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Wednesday 13 July 2016

An Ode To My Lighthouse




When I closed my eyes
And tried to push her away
Far into the blackness of memory
I saw for the first time
Why her I had chosen
She was infinite
Vastness was her name
And she was all over the heavens
She twinkled bright
Against my endless void
Like a sunrise past
A deafening storm
A lighthouse to my soul adrift
A hope that kept me afloat
She made me learn
Why at all men fall in love
And why from it they never return
In sickness or health
In pleasures or in sorrow
She may not be and
The world may not know of her
But she will be my mark
Even long after I'm gone
And my memory will never exist
Without her name in it
I opened my eyes and realized
There are somethings you can't outrun
Your love and your soulmate
And your vain dreams
Are often most of them

Monday 11 July 2016

Amaranthine





I love you when your scarlet lips pray                       
And your feather feet turn the fate of my way,
I love you when you carry the sky in your eyes
And bind the oceans in seraphic smile,
You're the moonlit verse which heavens wear
An ageless song that clouds shower.

I love you for amaranthine is your loveliness
Your arms a fragile haven for my slowing self
I love you when you kneel with kindness
And touch my barren soul's emptiness.








Friday 8 July 2016

A Letter She Can Never Send



Dear D..,   

Whoever you are, however you are, you have become important to me and you have found a way to reach my heart and prayers. There is no social attachment that binds you and me. There is no religious or physiological bond between us as well. What I’m writing is something that would flow as a river, free from needs, wishes, desires and expectations. This is a river that is bound to connect our ends. You know why? Let me tell you.
 
You have been indeed lucky to find yourself the way to come into A's life. If his name makes you smile (as it made me while typing it) you are lucky. God has chosen you to love him, to be with him. Chances are that this letter may annoy you and you may get irritated as why I am writing to you. But when I explain the connection to you, things would perhaps be clearer. And I hope forgiveness would be unnecessary. I hope you’d see beyond the things people may have us blinded with.

To me loving A is a faith beyond the set norms of the world. In worldly eyes he and I have nothing in common, nothing at all. We are two separate individuals, but connected somehow by a powerful thread that makes me feel proud that I have been able to feel this way at all for anyone. Now, before you think anything or anything wrong at all, I want to clarify somethings. You are his life partner, his life in a way; I am his shadow that doesn't abandon him, even in darkness. I’m there naturally. And even if this shadow may appear formidable to you, as shadows are sometimes meant to, know that all shadows are harmless. They are just there because they can’t escape their source.

You on the other hand are real for him. You have the right to sit beside him, hold his hands, look into his eyes, caress his hair and love him, I lie like the cushion behind his back, soles under his feet to comfort him while he is loved by you. You make the morning tea for him, and I make sure the temperature is just right for his lips. You walk beside him, leaning on his shoulders, I run ahead of you both to remove any pebble or thorns that might stop your romantic walk together. When you make his bed for him, I would make sure he has peace in his eyes to enjoy it. I am not here to erect any walls between you and him, rather, my only wish is to see that he is happy and peaceful.

Believe me when I say that you are equally important to me as he is. We have a very delicate relation to handle because he cannot live without his love and his life; we have to make sure he has both to live normally. You are very lucky because with you he chose to share his life and happiness; on the other hand I am happy to share his pain and sorrows. Now you can also share his sorrows and pain, and it’s something a life partner does but I want you to be always cheerful and happy and smiling, so that his world is always happy and bright. I don’t think that is much to ask for when we both love and want the same thing, A's happiness. I know it’s difficult to understand. You may hate me and my bold statement that I am in your husband's life. But believe me, I am not in his life. Truth is that I lay just inside his mind as a small tiny part that makes things beautiful for him. Yes, I have an individual life as well, one that is made beautiful by his presence. I do not ask for his time, his love, his money or anything else. Just a tiny little corner in his subconscious. I would live like I do not exist for both of you; all I need is the permission to love him. Because the day I stop loving him I am certain I'd perish . I beg this of you to consider. Let me be dirt under your feet, but let me be there so that with you I touch A. As you are in his life like a support, like a backbone, I am relaxed and not much worried about how he would eat, work, write and take care of himself. Because I know you are capable in making him comfortable. He deserves to be treated with love, and believe me; he deserves so much love that only both of us can fulfill it. With all our differences and individual approaches, we make a perfect love and life for him to live. I hope you understand what my heart seeks. Maybe it’s too much to ask. Maybe it’s impossible to fulfill. But if you love him like loving is meant to be done then please allow me what I seek. Having lived with him for this long you must have felt that things are not going to be easy. But then they never are meant to be with someone like our A. He is a dreamer, he wants too many things and wants to make everyone and everything alright  and he has a heart of a child. Which is why we have a difficult task at hand. Let's make a promise to each other and live like we are not two but one person who cares deeply for the same man. A would be the happiest when we can achieve this.

I’ve seen you. And the way he describes you, I feel at peace because he has someone like you.


You won't lose anything to me, ever.

I Promise.


Wednesday 6 July 2016

Yesterday

It is just the memory of how you were 
That I miss so much
That I'm in love with
One which you seem incapable
To ever again be
Let me hence pack the clock
And stay at where we said
'tomorrow will be better'
So that I may hold your hand again
And not face the misery of
Watching your face turn 
To things mere and small
So that I no more live
This terrible wait



The Price of Absolution




Whenever I hear or read about forgiving or being forgiven, I recollect a story that never fails to probe the limits of the act. You may find its events controversial or you may consider those justifiable, holding equal potential to evoke revulsion and compassion. Personally, I've found it hard to judge or pass any opinion about it because I have never lived inside the souls of its characters, never known the size of the shoes they had to walk in and because my own life is riddled with a long list of terrible choices. But I prefer not to judge mainly because I believe that some choices in life so inevitably lead to struggles and sufferings that their making cannot be weighed in the everyday one-dimensional scale of right or wrong. 

A friend of mine fell in love with a married woman. He was himself married for three years. They had come to know of each other in the virtual recesses of expressions, drifting from their own loveless unions, waiting for something they were not even sure of at the time. And right from the moment of their first exchange of emails something clicked too perfectly between them. There was no introspection, there wasn’t the usual delay and weighing of the sides – none of those things; they hurtled themselves at each other with the accumulated velocity of too old and too strong a desire. Having wandered for years in search of what they’d finally found, my friend and this woman had an understandably intense affair, filling the long looming void in each other’s existence. They fit into their mutual needs like pieces of puzzle. It was as if their union bore cosmic proportions, and they came into it showering endless affection and passion. She flew across two continents to meet him. And they spent three memorable days fulfilling every void, every corner of darkness in their hearts with the light of love. I was there when he saw her off. Who’d have known then that the kiss she blew across from the far end of the boarding gate while disappearing into the conveyance bus would be the last one in their story.

All this time I’ve been hearing from my friend me why there never will be another woman like her, why he’d give up everything to relive those three days. She was beautiful, smart, sensitive, kind and she loved my friend with all her heart. Often when I ask myself as to what could have propelled them so irreversibly at each other I realize that apart from deep, binding and overwhelming love there could be no other reason.

It was the perfect kind of love. Except that the only imperfection in their story made all the difference. Distance. What initially helped them fight the separation of a thousand miles was their mutual longing for love and a shared proclivity to express it. They proclaimed what they felt through endless trade of words. But in the end their story set itself for a sad realization that love can fight off many things yet its own demons sometimes conquer it. Living away gradually began to choke them. The apparent jealousy, the blank spaces in time when neither could be certain of the other’s state, the demands of their respective families began to surround the innocence of their affections. She was the first one who sensed it and immediately voiced the hope of a home.

She knew that their relationship needed to be given a formal foundation. She was confident that it was too real to be denied the dignity of recognition it deserved. But my friend couldn’t summon the will to suspend the people concerned, the families involved, in misery. He felt it would be betrayal. I remember once asking him ‘Why don’t you choose? It’s terrible to see you like this. Dying for a woman who is ready to live with you but cannot since you’re not able to leave your wife for whom you nurture no feeling at all’ All he said was ‘I owe it to her family. They never came asking for the marriage. It was mine which had gone seeking her hand. I can’t do this.’
‘But this suffering? This is too much. How long will you be able to last like this?’
‘I can’t trample upon the happiness of others for finding mine’.
‘What about her happiness? The woman you pledge your devotion to?’
‘Not being able to be with her is death for me. But it is a death I cannot avoid. For the choices I’ve made in my life mandate my bondage’

When you feel so strongly for a person but cannot love her the way your heart longs to, it wrenches the life out of your soul. What followed was a haunting ordeal. She tried to take her life, stayed at the hospital for three days. The effects of that act had the most tragic consequence for her health. She had to give up something precious to every woman. These were powerful wounds. Powerful enough to devastate to shreds the most sacred ties of affection. They separated. She took a call. She had to. He forced her to by his denial to hold her hand before the world.

A couple of years have flown by. I do not know what happened with the wonderful lady but I see my friend trying to perfect the pretense of living a normal life, in his home with his family, and relatives, doing his job. I see him celebrating festivals and laughing loudly and greeting neighbors. The world sees it too. But as his close companion I alone am privy to the nights he wanders away from sanity carrying the weight of emptiness, trying to beat his solitude with whatever he can grab, the unhelpful company of friends he can't relate to or some pointless indulgence here and there, searching for a semblance of meaning and purpose to his existence, scanning the shallowness of his being in the shadows of the dark. I quietly watch the reckless things he does as though there is this secret endeavor he is making to reach a point of no return. I observe the loss of aspiration that he suffers bit by bit, adding up, readying him for a final withdrawal. The very mention of the woman’s name makes him tremble like a child under the influence of something stunning.

He knows he cannot ever make good for what the woman lost.  He can never give her back those days, those moments she gave away from her life. That is why I hope she moves on. Maybe, as I write this memoir, she has already approached that tipping point. I know my friend would want the same thing. Even though it would break his heart, I know he’d wish her to settle down. Find a man and make a home with him. He knows how dearly she dreams of those simple joys.  

As for my friend, I admit, it devastates me to see him long hopelessly for her, who is one simple choice away, the choice of following his heart. A choice, I know too well he won’t make. I know the chains that tie him cannot be broken. For there is no one who can break those but him. And he won’t ever lift the axe.

Sometimes it occurs to me that he shouldn’t have married without love. If he did then he shouldn’t have had the affair. And if he had it then he should have seen it through. For all the immeasurable pain he inflicted on her by being unable to marry her, I pray that she is happy again, in real. She is a kind woman. She is loyal. She is truthful and brave. I know that she craves real love. Therefore I pray that she finds the love that she deserves, that she is made for.

And one day, when all this is over, when she is finally gone to a home, to another comforting pair of arms, to another path to her dreams; when all this is a memory, will then my friend be able to forgive himself? For not standing up when it would have made a difference? For not respecting the longings of his soul and failing it? From whom else should my friend seek forgiveness? From the woman he loved, the one whom he wronged by not taking their momentous love story to its logical end, or from his wife whom he is going to keep inside a smokescreen for the rest of their lives pretending to be in her need? And what price must he pay for absolution, if at all there would be any, given all the things he took away from the woman and the terribleness of the sufferings he let her undergo and the excruciating anguish he immersed his own poor soul in by giving it a temporary taste of what should only have been forever.

As for me. Well, I grudge time. It should have never let the two of them meet in the first place. It knew all too well how their souls are and what inescapable levels of attraction they would wield on each other once their paths crossed. Time knew that their future was not under one roof. Therefore, for the sake of love and the falling it took in the story, must not time remain unforgivable?

As I said at the start I won't judge anyone. Who am I to judge? All I can think of today, after living with their story for so long (June marked two years of the kiss she blew at the terminal) is that man cannot be created for such suffering, such disenchantment. Not unless some sort of a divine reprisal is the reason behind all of it. Maybe therefore, before anyone else, my friend and the woman of his dreams need forgiveness, for whatever wrong in whichever timeline of whichever birth they may have committed, the one that happens to foster the origins of their agony. As a helpless bystander I can only offer my prayers seeking that forgiveness for them and hope that the price of their absolution is no more dearer than it already has been.



Saturday 2 July 2016

Art of Love




And she asked 'What's love?'
'What's abiding, unaltering love?'
'Have you seen it?'
The waves then went back rolling from where we stood
And when they returned I said
'This. Waves show it to us.
Fated never to hold it                                                                
They keep coming for the shore
Tirelessly, timelessly
How the most valuable art of love
These waves teach'
           

Painting An Embrace




I wish to hold you when you're anxious            
And tell you that there isn't a thing
I wouldn't do to see you smile
But you're so far away
Farther even
Than the farthest dream
 
And the faintest star on the night's starry face
I'm not made that powerful
To travel so far
But my care may
It can gently lull you
When you're sleepless
Tell me hence
When your brow sweats
And your heart sinks
It's for such moments
That I exist
 
It's to hold you when you're anxious
That I now live