Bombay weather, books and nothingness provokes the not so good elements in me. After mulling for a while, I concluded -'what the hell? It happens to almost everyone!' So here I go... "We had been careful, you had not left anything behind" - Hema, Going Ashore. Unaccustomed Earth.
All you now remain is a name. Just a name, a name that does not even look like you. A name that sounds fundamentalist, a name with a beard and blood-shot eyes.*You had mahogany eyes.
A name without a face. We never took a picture in those two and a half years; it surprises me now that we didn't! *We weren't even the shy, unfriendly types, then how come I don't have an image of us or you?
A name without a face or a location. You left B'bay for Padua, then moved to Vancouver, then to New York - it took you 4 years to come back and ask about me. When V met in a stray street relishing his beer - he wanted to know if I had a word for you... I knew, once he had spoken with you, you would've been ready to move again. *However, fate refuses me to budge from this constant catharsis of a city.
A name without a face, a location or a number. There is little I can complain about not being in touch, not taking your number from S when she urged me to. *S, being the idiot she is, didn't leave it on my desk - things never strike her! I have no way to call you. Would I have called you, if I had your number? I am unsure.
All that is available is a mail id that came with your last mail months ago; reading "this is the deepest secret that no one knows... I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)" *Quoting Cummings, I thought was very sick trick.
You'd always known what to say and do, all that I would avoid confronting; saying things that I knew but never wanted to hear. I have never had the will to press 'reply to sender'. Hunting for your whereabouts will take more courage than I claim to have.
I am never sure if you are awake or asleep or working when I am thinking of you; like now. I wonder whether you get hiccups? And do you, like me, recall everyone only to await my name and then the hiccups magically go away. Do you, like me, relish that moment, knowing that I could too suffer that bitterness of silence?
I yearn for what we so actively absolved, not realising then, the curse of long-term-memory. *I have become forgetful in an attempt to forget those moments. Silly me, I fictionalise, birthing them in ways less obvious - it's the cheapest attempt to keep them alive.
Sometimes I look for signs. I could see them like glaring errors when I walked into Regal or in Leo's, or on the Town Hall steps or at the NCPA corner or in the University's library .... I almost relived our Sartre-Beauvoir fight. Btw: the glass lamp shades haven't been changed, just as you vouched. Nonetheless, for a while now, I have been quietly thankful for not unconsciously finding those signs...
I live around these cluttered memories, while you, after a long time, have successfully vanished....
We had been careful to not leave a proof of us.
