A... Part 4...

The unnamed story has a name now... it is called A... after the narrator whose name is A...

But that was a different day, in a different time, I did not have a note that day, a note which was not just a note but a death sentence, and each look at the note sent a shiver down my spine and I could feel life ebbing away with every reading of those cruel seven words.

“Find yourself and you will find me”, that’s what she wrote in the note. How was I supposed to find something which was not lost? How was I supposed to know if I was lost or not and if I did not know if I was lost, how was I supposed to find myself? What did it mean to find oneself, was I supposed to know myself better, was I supposed to find out what someone else thought of me to find myself, was I supposed to accost every acquaintance that I have with questions about myself, trying to get them to find myself for me. That is bound to be funny, trying to get others to find myself, when I am standing right in front of them. Or did she mean I was supposed to find my inner self, that inner self which she loved when she loved me, that part of my soul which was madly in love with her, which saw her as perfect, which made love to her with an voracious urgency as if the world was about to end the next day, that part of my soul which used to worship her. But when did I lose that part, I know that everything was not right these last few months, but I still loved her, I still loved her as truly as I ever did. So why did she resort to all this trickery, did she not see that my love for her had not waned, did she not feel the passion burning deep inside me like molten magma inside the bowels of the earth, did she not feel my insatiable hunger for her touch, her smell, her presence. When did I lose the ability to get through to her?

She once told me that I was the only person in the world who used to understand her and that was why she was in love with me. I remember asking her about what would happen when I stop understanding her. She did not say a thing, only rebuked me by asking me to never repeat such a thing. She said that with my words I was committing sacrilege against the God of love, against Kamadeva himself, and if decided to walk away with his bow made of sugarcane having a string of honeybees and his arrows adorned with five kinds of fragrant flowers, then there will be no love left in my life. I would be left with only sorrow, loneliness, a persistent intolerable pain in my heart from the want of love, a wretchedness which would consume me slowly like the winter fog slowly encircling and then devouring the lovely and lonely forest. I would be like the moon, which was forsaken by the stars and now stares down at us with its mournful melancholic face, thinking of long lost loves, of that one star that he used to love before Kamadeva decided to forsake him.

This chain of thoughts made me more desperate. But I did not know how to start about solving the riddle. She once told me that the key to solving any problem was information, any random information, it might not seem useful at first, but then the solution was always hidden inside all the information, we just had to look hard enough. So I decided to collect all the information about this puzzle, which meant I had to collect all known information about myself. I remembered that long ago I had written an essay about myself. It was a few weeks after my first story was published. My editor called me and told me that my stories had generated a lot of interest among his readers, and he wanted me to write a piece introducing myself to the readers. So I wrote an essay aptly titled “A Short Essay about Myself”. It was before I met her. I was a different person then. But at least it was a starting point for me in my quest to reclaim what has been lost.

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.