March 26, 2008

The Unnamed Story... Part 3...

“We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words” - Kahlil Gibran


I was holding her note in my hand. I had read the content many times over, but still it had not sunk in yet, the note, the message, her absence, everything seemed like a dream, a dreadful dream, and I was hoping that any second now I will wake up and find her sleeping beside me, in my bed, in our bed, sleeping like a princess, looking beautiful and radiant even when she had dark circles under her eyes from reading the detective novels she used to read, even when her hair was a mess, even when she used to snore, ever so softly, in a way only she could. She never understood why I could never picture her as anything but beautiful. To me she was perfect. Maybe it was love, maybe I was blind. But I loved every minute of this blindness, and wished and prayed that I be blind for the rest of my life only to she her as nothing but beautiful.

They say it happens to everyone, first you are blind in love, you think she is perfect, you do not notice any imperfections, any faults in her, but slowly you the initial euphoria tends to wear off, and then you see the real person behind the mask of perfection, that you thought she was wearing, then you notice her imperfections, the small but significant faults in her personality. But it was different for me. I saw her imperfections, but I loved these imperfections more than her perfections and the sum total of these small but significant faults, as they call it, which was her personality, signified to me perfection, a perfection far more beautiful than the ideal perfection in which there is no fault, and her imperfections become perfections in my eyes. For me she could do no wrong.

I looked again at the note. Those seven words, written on the back of the restaurant bill, written with her favourite green pen, written in her charming yet tired handwriting, seemed to me like an accusation, something akin to the seven deadly sins, which I might have committed, when I drove her away. Why did she write only seven words? She was an expressive person, terseness never appealed to her. She always used to say that words are meant to be spoken; language is a gift to be used. I never understood this fuss about communication, I used my quota of my words to write, to write short stories, to create magic with words, to go away to distant places where life was different, where everyday was an adventure, where you could save the world and die honourably, where you could kill someone and walk away, where you could make new friends, where you could be popular, where you could have the whole world at your feet as your slave, where you could slay a dragon and rescue a princess, where you could go to distant galaxies and live with aliens, where you could speak Chinese fluently, where you could love and be loved. Maybe because I used up all my words in my stories, I was not left with enough words for her. Maybe she decided to punish me for my terseness with her laconic message.

But why seven words? Did the number seven signify something? Did she hint at the seven deadly sins? Of all the sins, maybe sloth is the only thing I could have committed. I am a failed writer living in a desolate quarter in a forsaken neighbourhood, surely I have no pride. I am too undernourished to be accused of gluttony. I am a loner; I have no one to envy or to unleash my wrath at, even greed does not touch me, I am a man of few needs, and as such lust is not one of them. But that takes me back to the original question. Why seven? Maybe the seven colours of the rainbow, the seven spots on a ladybug, the number of bones in my neck, the seven saints in the sky, a phone number, the seven logic gates, the seven hills of Rome, the seven wonders of the world, the seven virtues, the number of heavens and earths, yang, the number of steps Buddha took at his birth, sa re ga ma pa dha ni, the seven rounds of the holy fire in a marriage, the number of islands of Atlantis. And like Atlantis, she left me without a trace, what good was a seven word message to me, when there was no key to read the message.

But maybe it was not the number of words, but the words themselves. The words that she wrote, formed a code, a complex cryptic code that she wanted me to break to get to her. She was always fond of riddles and puzzles. Once she hid my birthday gift somewhere in the house, and then gave me a treasure map, along with subtle hints to read the map and find the treasure, which was to be my birthday gift, a gift I would learn to treasure, a gift more valuable than all that the pirate’s could muster, more valuable than all the gold in the world, more valuable than all the breaths that I now take without her. Of course, I could not solve the puzzle, I moved around in my house for the whole day, going one way then the other, looking into every conceivable nook and corner, turning the whole house upside down and I was nowhere close to finding out my treasure and my house was in a mess. After a few hours of back breaking and positively enervating search for my treasure, I did what all pirates used to do when they did not find the treasure they were looking for, I gave up, I raised my white flag, meaning to surrender and wishing to communicate with the victor, and there she was, standing in front of me, smiling as only a conqueror can smile, a conqueror of hearts. She said that she was the treasure that I was supposed to find and in view of my unconditional surrender, she had won the right of unconditional love from me and that from that day on, I shall become her hostage, her captive, her prisoner-of-love. With my head held high, I accepted my sentence, and just as Heer had done so many centuries ago when Ranjha played his flute, I agreed to love.

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