Paper Hearts

It's 2'o clock in the morning; too late to hit the bed, and too early to rise. Outside, water from tonight's downpour drums the aluminum awning of my balcony, jarring my weakened ears.
There was a time when I spent the wakeful hours of my night watching the rains from across the balcony; now, I liked staying in bed, even if I was sleepless. Because I feared that if I stood on the rain-wet mosaic tiles, I would probably fall. Old-age had killed small joys.
My neighbour, this ravishing woman, loved the rains more than me. When we were kids, she would knock on our door on rainy evenings and plead and beg mother to allow me to come down with her.
“Aunty, aunty...Michael promised to sail paper boats with me. Please let him come,” she'd say
My mother agreed, though reluctantly. She knew that I would catch a fever soon after, but “if the rains bring you both closer” she'd tell me, “let the fever be the sacrifice.”
“Someday Tracey and you will get married and I will be a happy woman,” she'd joke.
“Lady, stop messing with my son's head,” my father would butt-in, “The D'lima queen wouldn't allow such a union...over her dead body.” My mother always ignored him.
You see, Tracey was “aspirational”. Her father, Dr Ralph D'lima, was a renowned doctor during my parent's time; one of those, just short of having a street named after him. His stories of bravado and kind-heartedness were told to children as bed-time stories. The local hero, he was most remembered for saving scores of dying men during the plague that hit Bombay in 1897.
Mother never spared a day reminding me how Dr D'lima had once made room for plague-ridden patients in his own house – much to the disapproval of his wife Linda – when there was a shortage of beds in the hospital. Mother's brother David was one of those who had found refuge in the D'lima home. He died soon after, nestled in the arms of Dr D'lima – it was a good death, she claimed.
His wife Linda, on the other hand, was the local anti-hero. One belonging to the crème de la crème of the Goan society, and boasting of lineage to a mayor in the city, she kept to herself and never once indulged in empty conversations with her neighbours. 
The only time she spoke to mother was to reprimand her, when she thought I had kissed her six-year-old daughter.
“Keep his filthy lips off my daughter's,” she had warned mother, after she had seen Tracey scribble something in her Math book. “Michael + Tracey = Kiss,” she had written.
“Is this what you teach your son Mrs Coutinho?,” Linda had asked mother.
My mother was unaffected. In fact, she considered it a personal victory and later, gifted me a chocolate bar for hastening her plans of seeing me as a D'lima son-in-law. “But I didn't kiss her,” I clarified.
“Son, let Linda believe that you did,” she said.
Though after that incident, I really saw very little of Tracey. Except during the monsoons, when her devil mother escaped for a break to her hometown in Calangute. That's when her father allowed her to play with me. 
As far as I remember, monsoon is the only memory I have of Tracey. We sailed paper boats, and Tracey almost, always won. My boat would drown somewhere, mid-way, causing her to break into peals of laughter.
“Loser!” she yelled. I wouldn't say anything in retort. All I did was to muster a smile, which I knew, kept her from teasing me further. But she got so nervous that she'd quickly add, “Stop smiling will you...I hate your smile.” That girl couldn't even lie with a straight face.
Post monsoons, Tracey and I would behave like we didn't know each other. When our eyes locked briefly at church during Sunday service, she'd put her head down immediately. Whom were we appeasing? Linda, I presume.
Then, in the summer of 1909, Linda suddenly vanished with 12-year-old Tracey. Nobody knew what happened. A rumour doing the rounds was that Linda had found love again, in a local Goan musician, and the couple had eloped to England fearing wrath from family. Dr D'Lima never denied or confirmed the rumour. “It could be true,” he casually told me once, when I innocently asked him, while trying to fish for information on Tracey's whereabouts.

Nine years later, when Dr D'Lima died of a cardiac arrest, Tracey surprisingly returned home. This time with a young man Luis and an infant. She had been married for two years. I smiled when I saw her. She didn't react. Since then, Tracey has been living next door. We never smiled, we rarely spoke.

My mother, before dying, thanked her stars for not praying too hard for a union between me and “that Linda's girl”. “She turned out to be just like her mom,” my mother said, “She would have left you one day...I swear on Jesus Christ, she would.”
But Tracey wasn't anything like her mother. Why else would she stick around with a drunkard-of-a-husband for 45-long years. Luis died last month. I didn't attend the funeral, so I don't know whether Tracey cried. But word has it that she did. Her daughter, who lives in Australia, hadn't come on the occasion. And poor Tracey grieved alone, I was told.

Why am I telling you all this? No idea.
Because had I known that Tracey would knock on my door a little while later, this would have seemed like a perfect prequel to the end, right?

“Can we sail paper boats?” she asked, when I opened the door of my flat.
“Now! This late in the night?” I was shocked, but could do little to hide the smile.
She looked at me nervously, her hands fiddling with the few lose sheets of paper she had brought along. “I hate that smile of yours.”
“We can go on lying Tracey....we can go on lying.”
“Or,” she interrupted, “...We can sail paper boats.

The inevitability of possibilities

While sipping into my mug of coffee, I wondered how it would be to see you, right now, in front of me, like you used to be, in the world that was five decades younger. I spared a moment to feel how you felt, when my fingers reached out for the strands of your wispy brown hair; I remember then, how your pale skin would redden; but was it blush or an embarrassed glow, you didn't tell.

But then you didn't say a lot of things. I probably, always assumed you said them - often imagining them to be good - because it made “me” happy and “us” seem perfect.

I forgot that every coin has an another side, one that I, out of habit, rarely flipped to see. So when you didn't show up one day, I had to go back to the coin, you once gifted me. "It was a rare one," I remember you telling me. It had a lion's emblem on one side and it just seemed like anything ordinary. That day when you left, I turned it around...It was blank. Only the copper base was slightly roughed up, as if someone had on purpose, hammered the image that had been embossed. It was rare, I joked to myself. And you were so foolish, I wondered.

It's been such a long time since it all happened. So much water has flown under the bridge of time. So much water, so much...that now, you seem like a memory so vague that all I can think of is your brown hair and the white of your skin. I don't know nothing, otherwise; not even when we first met. May be, if I knew when exactly you came into my life, it would have been easier to remember when you walked out. But this "may be" was only a “possibility”, something I had stopped believing in after you went, until she came.

Now, when I see her feed me the last sip from my mug of coffee, I know the inevitability of possibilities. I want to reach out to her hair, but my hands have given in...aah failing nerves. But when she observes the way my waisted hand moves restlessly on the arm-rest, she lifts it for me, cups my fingers in the palm of her hand, and then slowly slides them into her greying strands. They are not as soft as yours...that I know. She does not even redden enough for me to discern. But another miracle happens, and only, I have seen. The wrinkles on her face disappear, and I can tell you, it is out of an odd pleasure. The pleasure of loving and being loved. This is rare, rarer than your battered coin.

The danger of a single story

I love this writer for the sheer simplicity of her arguments; whether it's in her narrative or in her talks, she conveys her point without the artifice or pretense that saddles a good writer. Here she tells us the "danger of listening to/reading a single story." For all those, who are often quick to form opinions, here's something worth your ears.  

When I asked my mom 'why she let me go?'

It is strange how sometimes we want something so bad, and days later, the same thing appears like something we could have done without. Stranger is the yearning for something that you thought you wanted to escape. It is a vicious circle. What you desired, you don't want and what you once didn't, you now want

. 

Sometimes, we fit the pieces of our life's puzzle incorrectly, but when we realise that the puzzle we put together looks rather, imperfect, it hurts. May be, because you always thought you would get it right. Or may be, because you invested a lot of energy into putting it together. Either ways, the end result could let you down.

I'd be honest, leaving my home city was the toughest decision I ever took. After years of cleaning other people's' stories and punctuating their lines to read like grammar dished out of Wren and Martin's rule book, I thought it was time I concentrated on my own story. I hoped that the grammar rules I learnt over the years, could nullify the impact of this bumpy ride. But neither did the commas, nor full stops help. All I have now are exclamation and question marks.

I threw one such question to my mom recently. I asked her “why she let me go?”

Her smile suggested that she knew the answer even before I had posed the question. “How else would you know that the pieces of your puzzle were fit incorrectly. It looked so perfect from where you saw it.”

Did she call?

It was two hours since his eyes had escaped sleep, but it was still too early for dawn. Walking restlessly in the woods that encircled his home, he saw darkness recede slowly. The sky had taken on a deep purple hue, a colour he had never witnessed before, despite having lived here for over 25 years. It was strange, he wondered, how the village opened itself to its people. Here, there was something new everyday; something of which he was yet to see. Now, it was the colour of the sky, tomorrow it could be the manner in which the rains poured from above. He amused himself as he strolled, trying hard to keep his mind away from what was disturbing him. But even as he forced himself to think otherwise, those thoughts kept interrupting him in flashes.

Like that day when it had poured incessantly. His son hadn't taken an umbrella, so he rushed to school on his cycle, caring little about himself. When he arrived 20 minutes later, he was soaked and trembling. His son was dry, having nestled himself under an awning. He ran to him, covered him in a tattered jacket, placed him on the top tube of the cycle and took him back home. That day, he was running a temperature, and a bad one that too. The family doctor had suggested taking him to the hospital, if it got worse, but he recovered a week later. Then, he remembered how his son came to him, hugged him and said innocently, “Dada...when I get rich, I will take you in a car, so that you don't get wet or sick.”

Today, his son was rich and had a car; and though he got drenched a time-too-many, no car had come to his rescue.

“What are you doing out there?” his wife yelled from inside the home.

“Am checking if the mangoes have ripened,” he lied.

“I know exactly what you are up to...come back right away. It's only 5.”

“Not sleepy.”

“Oh...then come, I'll sing you lullaby,” she teased.

He walked back quietly; he knew that she was disturbed too, but was tough as a nutshell to show it.

At breakfast, he finally brought it up.“Will she call?”

“Who?” she asked casually.

“Our son's daughter.”

“I don't know.”

“She should right...after all, we are her grandparents. She should take our blessings.”

“I don't know,” she said again, pouring coffee into his mug. And then as an afterthought said, “Your son never told us about it. Don't expect the call. Don't think about it...please,” she requested.

“She's getting married today. How can I not think about it?”

“We weren't invited.”

“Because, he thought we were too old to make it for the wedding.”

“Don't defend your son,” she said immediately.

“Should we make the call?”

“Don't add salt to injury.”

He rose angrily from his chair, “Don't do this...don't do that...don't...don't..don't...is that all you have to say.”

“Yes, because I am your wife, and I do not want you to be hurt,” she said calmly.

They did not raise the issue again, not until late in the night when they were lying down on their bed, staring vacantly towards the ceiling. Each thought the other was sleeping. But sleep was hard to come by, not today at least.

Why weren't they told? They wondered. What had they done? They had just one child, a son. He may have lived continents away, and never bothered to reach out to them after he left India 20 years ago, but now to learn about his daughter getting married from another relative in the US, tore them. Over the years, they had come to terms with their loneliness, but they had thought little about being neglected. Today, after having been denied this small happiness, they felt lonelier than they had always been. Their eyes welled up, but they tried hard not to whimper lest they stirred the other.

At around 2 in the night, after hours of restlessness finally took its toll and pushed them to sleep, a phone call woke them up. The old man nervously rushed out of bed and went to answer the call...his wife was anxious too, but did her best to contain it.

On the other end, he heard the sound of a man; it was a voice too familiar to forget, a voice that was their only connect to their blood, a voice, which now ached in drunkenness.

“Did she call?” the man on other end inquired, his voice stammering. “Did she call?” he repeated.

“No,” he said, a little perplexed.

“She did not call me either,” he said, sounding equally disturbed.

He looked at his wife who was standing beside him, earnestly waiting for a reaction. His face that had grown paler today, was slowly gaining colour. She saw his lips widen and curve into a wicked smile. 

“Is it her?” she asked.

He handed over the receiver to her. She could here faint sobs on the other end. It was her son.