She’d just finished the paperback and laid it down on the bed. The end was uncommonly identifiable. She stared into the openness out of the window, past the swaying curtains and picking up the book hugged it close to her chest. Somehow it was good to feel the pressure. She put it back again. The curtains were now still. It was a suffocating day. The honk of the speeding cars, now choked by traffic added to the claustrophobia. She longed for the sea…thankfully it was a walking distance.
She was a product of the conjugation of the mighty sea and the well endowed river. Her option once was inland, a place that only had a river, that too one which could hardly be called perennial when she had seen it. But the sea, she had never imagined. Yet here she was! Sometimes the tides become bores and one simply cannot swim past.
What was it in the book that had reminded her of a long forgotten smell, touch or grief? What was it, in that book by the unknown author set in the temperate north or arid west that could remotely be similar to the sultry east? They both were dedicated, both had been dismembered and both lived on? It was the Birth of a New Life…unplanned and unexpected. Life had been born, and the umbilical cord had to be cut….and then suddenly the knife had been turned and the rest was cut with a blunt edge. It hurt so much and it bled so much..sometimes in the form of tears.
But she had seen blood. She had been with people who had bled. She had seen bodies numbed by unspoken pain till she too had been a body that bled intermittently…in torrents. She was still ruffled at not being able to find the similarity that was so familiar yet escaped her with playful haunting ness.
She walks through the labyrinths of her memories and strides the straight road, lit with neon lights, towards the sea. Here she had once stood, accompanied. How do people chalk out baroque phrases like “You can’t live with it, and you can't live without it”?
Her tangled thoughts run on. Meaningless yet self explanatory. Was it because both were used to taking care with their rudimentary facilities? They had both been successful in restoring the health somewhat, and then one day the patient had been taken away in search of better facility as the nurse’s provisions were not only deemed inadequate but also injurious to him. But that was only when the frugal existence of the patient had been discovered, that the forces had pounced on him like a plot of disputed land. She had also been patient, in and out of the covers. And she had been left sitting beside a bed covered by a white sheet, the wrinkles of which still bore the shadow of the contours of the patient’s body..... The ground seemed to tremble. It was a story not even set in her era. It spanned the aftermath of the WWII. There was no bombing, yet the ground seemed to sink from under the feet with the shaking, and no one could feel the infinite feeling in the empty house, nestled in the warstruck neighbourhood.
What does “white” stand for? Is it not peace? Then, maybe, the sheets were dramatically symbolic. She nods her head at an angle, quaintly satisfied. There was no war.
The breeze blew again like a comforting feeling against the face, the neck bare under the rolled up hair. There was too much light, that seemed like a stark contrast to the villa, intermittently lit up by flashes of lightening. The kurta, not the frock, clung to the equally fragile frame. She stepped into the comforting murky waters. There was so much kindness, so much compassion and no one to give it to. Everyone had moved on, or so she believed. Even the last pages indicated so. Maybe she could share it all with the sea, which too had so much to give but hardly there were any takers. She smiled unconsciously. The remnants of the waves slithered in between her fingers and toes. A feeling she loved, she loved to share, and then the water receded. The tiny grains of sand went with them and ground beneath her feet sank again. Yet this time she was anticipating, and after all it was a comfort.
