Immortal - I - The Tale of Ananya's Love

Dear Readers,

Separated by seven seas, countless hurdles Ananya and her beloved have still lived together five months hand in hand. In these five months they have faced unspeakable agony and resistance from all corners. Yet bound by their innate longing for true love, to hold on no matter what, to never let go, they have stuck together even in the face of unimaginable impediments.

They haven't seen each other in person, neither they have the bliss of each other's touch or warmth. All that has kept them afloat is the faith that they are soulmates, their words, their letters to each other. Doubts creep in, darkness surround often, they struggle, they hurt in that struggle, yet they stand firm together in the end. They have come to the brink of breaking away and returned, only with renewed zeal to love and cherish each other more than ever. Struggling through natural desires in love due to the near impossibility of their fulfillment, fighting all kind of darkness that distance and obscurity can cause, walking, falling, strengthening each other, getting up and walking again, Ananya and her companion go on, through lights and fears, hoping, believing that there is a place beyond all mortal confines and norms where they can be what they want to be, together forever.

Below is one such exchange between both, where they are apparently consumed by feelings of uncertainty and indecision. What is remarkably noticeable is Ananya's strength when everything around them is discouraging, her resolve to make things work when nothing seems redeemable. They are helpless. They are bound by their own life circumstances as strongly as they are bound to each other by their love. The intricacy emerges from the fact that both circumstances tend not to co exist. So they drown in a sea of separation pitted against immense love and longing.

 Ananya's words have inspired me beyond telling. They always do. Her expressions are now my strength to believe in love and cherish her aspirations.

I have not the slightest doubt that they will move you too.

Pray for them, 

Pray for love. .............

Ananya's letter:

 (she explains the vast extents of her love)

 He asked her “Ananya, What are we?”

You are the sun and I the Earth moving around you.

Your rage burns me but without you nothing blooms on me too.

He asked her “Where do we belong?”

We belong beyond time and this world,

When lovers like us are born, they cannot belong anywhere but to each other!

What is our path?

There is no path, no destiny, no end, and no start. It’s just a journey of two inseparable souls.

Where do we unite?

Unison in this world is temporary, we unite when I look at you, we unite when you touch me, and in all gestures of love we unite beyond mortals.

Would we stay?

She smiled, teary eyed, can the wave stop coming back to the shore?

Every time I search you, look for you and call you and every time you say, when did I ever go, my hand is still in yours Ananya…we stay!

 The reply to Ananya's letter:

Ananya,

I may be the sun but once I was a shooting star. Hurled by destiny away into dark voids to end and burn away into darkness. On way I saw you and in that moment I stopped. Since then I have stopped. Not moved. Nor will ever. You say that you move around me. I say I am stable because you move around me, encircle me with life and glory. You say I burn you. Yes I do, because I am burning myself all the time because no matter how strongly we are held together, we are still separated by eternal command. You say I give you bloom. I learnt giving bloom because of you. I never knew how to before. You make me give you bloom. I have dried up oceans near me with my fire, nothing could fan me, yet you who is far from me, is the only being who holds the power to cool me with breeze from your depths. My rage is servile only to your calm.

You say we belong to each other and nowhere else. I say we were created by God, scattered, lured to believe that you or me did not exist, because there was no chance that we would have known about each other and I wouldn’t have moved heaven and earth to make you mine. It took us three decades, half life of mistakes and truck load of wasted emotions to reach each other’s arms. Now that we have, it’s time we stayed there, in each other. Forever.

Yes it is a journey. No end is known, no beginning defined, no places of stoppage determined. All that we know is that as long we are voyaging we are together. We ll see, hear, learn and adapt as we walk on. There will be moments when fatigue, self doubt, illusions will detract, but I know for a fact that if I have your hands in mine I will not stop.

It takes a certain immortality to understand how love can be fulfilled beyond life, how love can be sustained in absence of any gratification when love is apparently dependant on senses. Our love is free from dependence on wordly ways. It has a mind unique, a purpose divine and a destination beyond time and world. Our union is difficult in this world yet achieved before we came to this world and will remain so beyond our lifetimes here.

When you smiled teary eyed and said that we are wave and shore, I held your face and kissed your tears and wiping them I tell you that like the waves, I will endlessly keep coming for you. Defying time’s command never to be with you, I will hold on to my faith born out of your love’s strength, and I will keep driving myself in one and only direction, the direction of your arms. Time and destiny will never be able to rob me of my faith that I shall be yours and only yours and make you only mine.

As the song of a lover

Giving peace to heart

You bring to me shelter

And settle this wanderer

As the bloom of autumn

And the sunshine of winters

You give me hope and

Sprinkle loveliness with your hand

Like a stable shore to

A drifting vessel

You gave me purpose

Caused end of my aimless search

As a dazzling star

In the sky of nights

You shine and brighten

My dark and lonely life

Like a hopeful morning

Like a cause of faith

You drove all pain

Reminded me to live

Like a solace on wounds

And balm on burns

You made me heal

And made me yours forever

...

Their love strengthened vastly after the letters.

                                                                                                                              to be told further.....

The Life and Death of Afreen

Today, at 11 A.M., Afreen finally succumbed to the bites, blows and burns caused by her father. The report said that she suffered multiple convulsions and ultimately died of cardiac arrest.  Three months was the duration of the life she lived or let's say suffered. She was brought to the hospital three days ago with burn marks and multiple dislocations in her neck. I'm looking at an old clip which shows her delicate and small structure tubed all over, her chest rapidly rising and falling, while she is unconscious, lying on a hospital bed about twenty times her size. Her mother has put her head near her daughter's legs. She hasn't left. I had almost begun to pray for her recovery, when I realized that the clip is from yesterday. I pull myself back to reality,  to today, where she is dead.

 I don't want to see it. Its so painful. Yet I see it. "Baby Afreen is no more". The headline goes on & on & on... I feel a hole growing inside my guts. I helplessly fight my brain,  and try not to imagine scenes of her and her father.  She was his daughter. An incarnation of his, maybe a female, but his continuation nevertheless. 

I am angry , I am helpless, I am burning & I'm welling up. Fictitious visions of a beautiful life that Afreen could have lived, torment me beyond tolerance.

Hello world, my name was Afreen,

I was born to love and hatred akin

I did not know pain, 

But then I was bit and beaten

I did not know smile

I could never do it for a while

Life started and ended before I breathed

Like some numbness it prevailed

Faint voices of my mother

Crying to fight my torture

The man who brought me here 

Was the same who banished me forever

I was created by him

Somehow I never got to see him

His hands were all so unkind

How could he kill his daughter's body & mind

They hated me from the day I cried

They hated me for the body I carried

I could not even know why I was born

Some evil in some past I must've done

I was greeted with frowns,

They thought I would let them drown,

Never gave me a chance

Never wanted me to keep balance

I could not know your Earth

Its green and its past

I could not make friends

I wasn't afforded that much sense

I will know not what is a hug

A pleasure I was supposed to get a lot

I will know not the birds, the seas, the skies,

My world started and ended with cries

I could not kiss my mother

My lips were shut forever

Before my hair could learn to curl

They were dragged to satiate some call

Teeth were sunk in

When kisses were to be left on my skin

I was welcomed by pain

Unfair ! I underwent it in vain

It all became too much

One day to a ward I was rushed

Tubes galore were slided

Though silently I chided

My mother sat there looking & praying

She often stopped to fancy me playing

I knew my mother's pain

She too swallowed it in vain

I did't even know how to pray,

The hands that hated me night and day ,

Were the ones that ought to have taught ,

A beam of mercy desperately I sought

My mother, I worried what would happen to her

I knew I was nearing to say 'adieu' & come back never 

Ever believing, ever hoping to revive and take me back

I'm so sorry ! I wish we could have run more than this small track

I had to go, the angels could wait no more,

I wish I could tell my mother, its a better place that I'm travelling for

God must know what he does and what he says,

I've heard He works in mysterious ways

My body was broken in places

A new life, Yet counted were my days

But my heart broke then

When the healers rushed in

They must have noticed I was leaving

Broke mid way my mother's praying

She howled and held and kissed and prayed

She begged, I know not who, but onto her prayers she held

I was growing cold, she must have known

She held me close with her tears rolling down

Those arms where up I had woken

Now held me again when I was being taken

Then...it snapped, that chord that tied

Me and her, My life was over, in her arms I died.

                                                                              -  Afreen

A SPARROW SONG

(This is the story of the family of four sparrows that lived outside my room's window, when i was a kid. I saw them everyday. They were a part of my life. I had seen them in joy and sadness alike.  One day I found that one of them fell down and died. I was a little shocked thinking why it didn't try to fly when it fell. But it took me years to understand that there was something else, something man made that killed it. It was supported by the fact that the rest had flown away too. It was unbearable for me to see their deserted nest. But no one else seemed to notice.)

Just couldn't get that thought out of my head, hence here's a song I wrote for the Sparrow:-

Before I could go to sleep again, it chirped and chirped,
Now I sat wide awake on my bed so disturbed;
Threw the pillow, pushed the quilt with a frown
Rushed to the window and looked up and down


When I looked to my left
I saw a cozy nest
Was I fuming seconds ago ?
My face was now a beaming logo


There it stood , it jumped & hopped,
All around the place 
It was so difficult to catch its face
Then came another and a twig it dropped;


I watched them talk
I watched them dance
To the tunes of their folk
Oblivious I was there, they moved in trance


They blinked so fast
They chirped so quick
So sure so pristine 
They went on adding


And then they flew
Far from it
Knowing they'll return
To my chores I moved on


In days ahead there came two more
This time they were too small
To even climb out of the wall
Their mother guarded them from a fall


In the best of days and worse too
I'll come to them
I ll exchange my joy and 
Speak to them of my pain


I grew up and so did the Sparrows
Till one day I found one on the narrows
Fearing it'll fall 
I sped through the hall


But fall it did
And chirped its last
It was gone too soon
Where it could breathe at last


The rest too had vanished
There lay but the nest so famished - 
For joys and warmth
That the Sparrows gave it


Years have gone
Many moons and suns too
I hold on to the memory 
And I feel so sorry


I know not what happened
But the birds' elation was easily sacrificed 
Was it so great a burden
On a choice so mundane
                                                                                                  Anupam P.

Friends,

Did you know that "World Sparrows Day" was observed on March 20th. To watch a sparrow's chirpy and quick movement is a source of tremendous joy. I just read an article which says that sparrows are rapidly declining in number due to loss of their habitat owing to swift urnbanization. In China they even consider the bird as a pest. Unbelievable !!





                                                                                                       Anupam

The Conversation - I

Avinash asked me

 "Define Love"

 We were at the Puri sea beach and I was marveling at the frothy waves that adorned it.

I replied

" Love is a feeling akin to what the waves have for the shore. They know the "twain shall never meet and stay together, but they keep coming for it nevertheless. Tirelessly, unconditionally, eternally.
Destiny commands them to never hold the shore, yet they come again and again and again for nothing but to hold on to it."

(An excerpt from a long stirring conversation between me and my friend Avinash (name changed) while we were at the Puri sea beach on a Saturday evening.)