A Boy’s Death

The pain was numb at first. It did not exist, nothing existed. The phone emitted a dull moan as the dial tone went on droning and it took some time to realise this. Things seemed to attain a new perspective as he looked around his office. The framed certificates, the affiliation license, the awful Rajasthani prints which he always hated, his large steel and wood desk, littered as always with the wreckage of paperwork and worse, his old bakelite phone whose zero needed to be pushed extra hard, his cigarettes and matches…the debris of a life lived without actually knowing it was lived, there was never enough time.

The phone was back on its hook and the words were hanging in the air, it seemed. He wondered at the feeling of loss and how akin it was to having grass…grass in a rock concert…she was there too, as were the rest of his gang, sitting on his bike, head-banging to some god-awful Indian band trying to play covers…the music, the lights….her….always HER.

Four…no, wait, it was almost five…five years of a note of music shimmering in the air, ethereal and yet alive….she had called him a poet in denial. Law school often produced weirdo’s, nothing new with that. Five years since passing out, the maxim still held true.

The phone rang…..

He reached for it….and stopped. He did not need another phone call, he needed booze, alcohol, needed lots of it. It had worked in college, it worked after college, it would work now.

But it did not…

Booze was like the law, a fickle mistress giving only as much as was taken, leaving one in the end with a sour taste and a thick head and memories.

It was late afternoon to judge by the slanting sunlight as it lit up his chamber. He had loved the sun, always had, loved its warmth and the feel of brightness and clarity. She had called him nairun, a child of the sun, god only knew where she would get her nonsense from, but it was the kind of nonsense more easily missed than most sense.

She was gone….

Everything in place, all the pieces in order and just like that, the whole board had been upset, the pieces flying, the board skittering, the players stuck dumb and still by an event unconsidered and un-envisaged.

“Its over…I am not coming to Guwahati. All the best with your NGO and your life”

He had tried to reason…. by the gods, he was a reasonable man, always had been…. reasonable only when he could not play his way, bulldoze his way in, break down and disrupt every possible bit of resistance…yes he was reasonable then, was reason not his ally then and had he not broken down stiffer opposition.

And so he used reason now, because nothing seemed to work now……but reason failed.

She was always stubborn…regardless of her stand or position.

So, it came down to this….a phone call that terminated. Maybe he should call his phone the terminator….sick jokes, bad jokes, pathetic jokes, he was always making jokes and only she got them all and also got the fact that he was joking because reality scared the hell out of him.

Five years and another five, he was in college, unfocusedly focused, just another idiot who believed that the law was like water or the air, to be moulded and illusions to be created out of, with words and craft. That’s it….he used to call it the craft, just like witchcraft. Pull off the trick and you are a magician and people are calling for encores. That’s what he liked, the looks of stupefaction and surprise when he pulled off scam after scam, be it the courts of law or the college canteen.

And then she had come along ….. and had seen through the scams.

He had seen her sitting quietly with a friend in the hostel parking lot, while he was coming along with his bunch of guys, his gang, you could call it. He had seen her and though he had poor eyesight, he could see her eyes, so he walked over.

“Do you know the colour of your eyes?”

Eyes snapping up at him, like a startled doe, a wide brow and long, oh so long raven tresses.

He asked again “Do you know the colour of your eyes?”

“No, I don’t.” Eyes down, all he can see is a crown of glorious long dark hair.

“It’s the colour of wild honey”

“Oh really?”

Of such humble beginnings are epics written and fought over….

The words, the beliefs, the years, the dreams, the views…..all seen in the haze of golden sunlight stretching through a long summer’s afternoon.

The phone rang….he let it ring.

They had built a castle out of smoke and she was the mirror for his illusions of reality and yet the castle was real, it was seen by the world and marveled at for its ingenuity and approach.

They had believed in doing something beyond what was possible and they had done it. The long years of separation and the huge phone bills were just a down payment on their dreams and hopes.

They were about to enter the castle when the doors closed down on him and she raised up the gates.

He knew why, he understood the how, the what, the when, and the who…..

Oh yes, he understood, he was good at that……

The castle was his and the walls were cold. It was now night and the bottles on the desk and the floor were just another part of the scenery. The feeling of numbness was now reached, nothing mattered and yet responsibility was a bitch who never let go.

He did not remember locking up, did not remember reaching home….perhaps he never did.

A boy, full of dreams and hopes and beliefs had left home…..he did not return, perhaps he never did.

Just another line, just another life…….