By Prerna Munshi
He lay by her side on the grasses and looked up at the twilight sky. He held her wrist close to his face. Her fairness lent her a sickly pallor. He traced the emerald greens that ran beneath her translucent skin. With his thumb, he pressed her skin and searched for a pulse. He changed his thumb’s positions, placing them at several points on her wrist. He couldn’t find her pulse. After a little more work, he found a faint pulsation beneath his thumb, the whisper of her Life.
She was petite having an atomic elementariness about her. Every time he tried filling her in his arms, she would find a gap to wriggle her body out. And every time, she would laugh at his futile endeavors to hold her.
He, on the other hand, could never have enough of her. She always left him famished.
So today, while he laid on the green, eyeing the sky, mapping her pulse, he thought how fragile she was. Like a love bird. He could see how his thumb left indentations on her skin. How her veins were so prominent.
He saw her slender throat and gauged its size. He opened his palm and thought her throat could fit in his fist and that it wouldn’t require him much of an effort to strangulate her. It was miserably easy. He sighed at her vulnerability.
The next moment, he chastised himself for harboring such thoughts. But, who has ever had control over thoughts? Thoughts are barbaric. Thoughts invade. They don’t ask for permission. He felt himself overwhelmed with a sudden desire to be her patron, to be her protector. Her very vulnerability stirred the father in him. ‘She is so meek. I will take care of her’, reiterated he, in his mind. He was enwrapped in an overwhelming kindness. A compassion of an unbearable degree. The kind that makes you feel sorry for someone.
‘Why am I with her? Is it because I love her or is it because of her meekness that makes me happy to exercise my strength? Is it not her very vulnerability that bloats my ego, exaggerates my strength, extrapolates my potency? Don’t I enjoy her fragility?’ His thoughts gnarled like the roots of a tree.
Thoughts are immortal. Each individual thinks, no matter how much he denies, no matter how much he doesn’t wish to. Each individual is caught in the vortex of his own thoughts.
The wind was piercingly cold and an overcast sky sprawled before his eyes. He thought how she could still sleep. Wasn’t she feeling cold? He wondered where her soul was. Was it in that little body or someplace else wandering in the sylvan? He was curious to trace it. The sky thundered. A streak of lightning electrocuted it,
charred it to a darker black. He felt his insides trembling and there she still slept on her verdant cushion. How he wanted to wake her up but couldn’t. Something prevented him from doing so.
He was a beautiful glass vase suspended in air, held by two equally opposing forces. The minute, a force exceeds the other, the vase shatters to pieces.
Why did he want to wake her up? Was it not because he no longer wished to stay suspended?
Why couldn’t he wake her up? He knew the minute he would, she would know that he is a suspended glass vase, fragile and defenseless.
What would he be if she were not there? Would it have made a difference? What was she but a happy coincidence in his life, a fellow stranded traveler who had missed her way home and instead crashed into his ways? Had she found her way home, she wouldn’t have met him and the duly safeguarded hollow would still have boasted its hollowness.
He studied her open palms, the hieroglyphs of her destiny to see what made her cross his ways, to see what line he was on her palms. Amidst the traffic of curves and zig zags, he saw himself in there, and his lips inadvertently followed a little streak. She kept him enfolded in the warmth of her palms, in the hearth of her crisscrossed destiny.
Yes, his life would have been different had she not forgotten her way home. He would have remained behind the shut doors of
reticence and self-infliction. Forever in vacuum, condemned to an anaerobic exile. Diffidently, he had approached her, opened the doors to his inaccessible soul and offered himself to her, to his share of air.
She was his living diary, safeguarding his rumination in the sheets of her soul. Even while she was asleep, she recorded his thoughts. He saw her heaving chest, the deep comfortable breathings and he held his cheek close to her nostrils. Each exhale was a lyric unsung, a warm moist of thoughts deep contemplated, a minutia of an abundance inside, a little by little revelation of a guarded secret.
He remembered his first glass of Anisette, his first encounter with his losing senses, his first buoyant feeling when he felt himself untied to the earth, levitated. Her breath infused in him the memories of his first Anisette.
It took him sometime to understand that he was the stranded traveler with just one half of the map in his hands while she was always the one who knew her way home and was following him to hand over the other half.
The thought that he was her home, inflated him with a gaseous pride. How satisfying it was to be a roof on her head, to be the four walls around her, to be the floor beneath her. He reveled in the idea of sheltering her. The roof meant that he was her maximum limit which she couldn’t transcend. The walls meant the spatial framework squeezing her. Even in his intellectual planes, he wished to barricade her, to confine her within his fences. He wanted to keep her fixed, to meet that little gap, which she always wriggled her
body out from. The floor beneath meant his unparalleled support, his stead-fast balance system, and also the point, she could go no deeper beyond. He felt a sadistic pleasure in circumscribing her, to have all her being under his surveillance, to keep her thoughts in check, to record the frequencies of his appearance in her thoughts.
He failed to realize that he was in fact a mausoleum and it was she, who made him livable. And while she made him livable, she was smart enough to reengineer the dimensions as per her size so that nobody else could ever befit. She was the brick that rendered him the tenacity and the moment she would leave, he would collapse like a doll house, crumple into an irredeemable heap.
‘It wouldn’t rain, it wouldn’t rain’, he consoled his heart. ‘Hold your anguish sky. Stay’, a verse flew off the nest of his imaginations to the horizon. A second later, he saw a skylark flying across the black sky with its meteoric pace, embodying his verse, waving a truce to the belligerent sky. He mumbled-
‘Higher still and higher From the earth….’
The skylark fused with the black sky, leaving not a trace of its trail. He thought, in that brief moment, he loved the skylark more than he loved her. The skylark had the potency to fill him with the seeds of infidelity.
She opened her eyes and they were stargazing. As if, her eyes knew what they were aimed to look at. As if, her eyes were the two shot
stars caught in her orbits, always enlivened with the hope to join their former brigade up in the galaxy.
Now, that she had woken up, he wished she hadn’t. ‘I wish I could turn back the clock.’, he thought. He had begun to adore the vortex he had subjected himself to.
‘I have been sleeping for a little too long. What were you doing all the while?’, she veiled her foreknowledge of his doings with a shallow question.
‘You know already, don’t you?’, he firmly replied. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
‘You know that too.’
She was supine and looking straight into the eyes of the sky. ‘It won’t rain’, she said with a conviction as if the sky had broken into her the news, as if her two eyes held the sky, shared its weight and prevented it from breaking down.
‘I know it can’t.’, he said, understanding what she was doing to the sky.
She turned towards him, their faces almost an inch away. He saw her kitten eyes and thought that her iris changed colors all the while. He couldn’t remember what color he saw them in. Once blue, then black, hazel, grey, green, and in a lot other shades.
They peeped into his soul with their incandescence, thawed his frozen within, and lightened up his insides. He was no longer a glass vase in suspension.
‘What did you do all the while you slept?’, he asked her.
She placed her hands on his chest. Warm and soft. He felt resuscitated.
‘There were too many conflicts herein. I resolved them one by one. I showed a stranded child his way back home.’
By Prerna Munshi