Broken Hug

Past and Present

Riya is in the first year when I meet her in the college fest. She has liked my husky reading of self-composed poems backed by strumming and plucking the hollow guitar. She comes up back-stage after my rendition, shaking my hand, praising my style. Then our meeting at The Dhakuria Lakes becomes a regular affair. Very soon we meet in my friend’s hostel room, on a Saturday after room-mates leave for their homes. I play a few numbers to ease the atmosphere of the first meet inside the room. The next thing after the songs, we land up naked – in my friend’s single bed – with passion charged up from the songs and the strumming. After the love making, I compose a few lines on her thigh. Next I take a snap of the thigh-poem with her mobile phone. She is so elated with this bonus that she gives an extra fifty buck to the college-gate security for keeping the coast clear at the main gate.

However, during one of our several love-making trips, when she undresses one day, I find a sketch of a small dagger on her thigh. That sketch somehow opposes my unconventional thinking. She never lets go of that pen-sketch. When in bed with her, it always makes me visualize that I am knifing her instead of making love. On some occasions, I pictures she has stored a dagger in her softest part which might make a sudden appearance and injure me.

Successive meetings outside and in the hostel room is supposedly to bloom into a flower garden, but much cannot be expected from a disagreement arising out of a pen-sketch, let alone a tattooed one. A day arrives when I tell her to forget making a dagger sketch on her body – at least when we are in bed. She does come some days without it, but come a fortnight, and the sketch resurfaces. She had off-handedly drawn it, is her explanation. So the relationship becomes a fleeting dusk never to return.

*

But Fai had cast a different shade on the canvas of his heart, and on the canvas of his mind.

She had tattooed a piece of dusk. A permanent dusk. A dusk that will stay in his heart. Unforgotten.

A feeling of tipsiness, a sweet-lazy wave of the sea water at the seashore touched his mind. I asked my love to take a walk/To take a walk, just a little walk/Down the side where the waters flow/Down by the side of the Ohio.

Rohan hummed, his slender fingers curled around the body of the beer can. The beer made him slightly high, made him close his eyes. Fai’s face appeared and there was neither a smile nor firmness around the mouth.

Soon a sound, a tap-tap reached his ears, and a soft voice followed – Sir. A smile. A set of sparkling white teeth. Tear-filled eyes. He switched his computer on, ignored the other half-composed poems, clicked, and a blank page greeted him. Words followed:

LET ME BE ME

            If Picasso smelt the fragrance

            in your hair

            Neruda would write

            his love lines on you

            Escobar drug his pizza

             before dawn. 

            If the poet stirred the earth

            with his poems

            Van Goh would sing

            of your absence…

He read the poem several times. It’s a good piece, Rohan. Cheers! and he raised the beer can, and took a sip.

Let me be me? Yes, it is a goal no doubt, short term and long term goal. But what is my present goal? Fai? Plan for writing a book?

Night had already fallen quite a while ago. And his head gradually fell on the table, in response to the night call.

*

The first thing Rohan did every morning was listening to Buddhist meditational music. This day he switched on to Heart Chakra of Tibetan Sound Bowls. He had especially chosen this to closely understand the language of hearts – how the tingling sound of various-sized bowls merged together, following one goal of remaining true with one another for one purpose, that was, to produce music. He wondered at the capacity of sounds to produce soulful music so that anyone hearing would understand how music is born; and how music listens to the language of the heart; its entanglements; entwinements – language of two creepers rising from the earth with the support of the wall.

He stopped. Why are such thoughts coming in my mind? Yes, Fai.

Charoen-Thip?

I don’t know.

A slice of certain loneliness settled in his mind, like winter fog in the city morning.

*

The simultaneous flavour and pop-up sound from the kitchen announced that the pair of toast had reached a delectable point. Putting the toasts and the small container of mixed fruit jam on a plate and while biting the bread, Rohan’s eyes went through the day’s newspaper. The weather would have a maximum temperature of thirty-two degrees and a minimum of twenty, and the humidity would be between 51 and 56 %. His eyes fell on a headline about the ruling party moving away from its earlier promise to pay farmers a decent amount for their land to start an industry.

Then, as if expected, his eyes fell on a long vertical column with a dark border. The heading, Roads to Avoid, followed by the news: The ruling party supporters will hold a procession on 3rd of April at the Town Square at 1 pm. School and college authorities are requested to run their institutions till 11 am that day to avoid problems to students.

Oh yes, procession also means disruption in teaching, he recalled. Normal flow of traffic could only resume around 5 pm. About one lakh supporters were expected to gather for the meeting.

After a quick shower and slipping into a black trouser and donning a maroon T-shirt, he was on the way to college. Students were generally off on Saturdays but he went to college for two hours to catch up on the week’s pending work. At the gate he met the vice chancellor, they exchanged smiles and greetings. That was all. He disliked talking more than necessary with the people he worked. However, another and firmer and meaningful rule was he liked to constantly churn poetic lines. He called it ‘exercise of the poetic limbs.’

His office was on the first floor to the extreme right edge of the corridor. He liked the placement of the office. It lay detached from the rest of the rooms – the classrooms on the same floor, the library room and the coordinator’s room. Once seated, he instantly and unmindfully visualized the last day’s scene there, inside, with his student beginning with a Tap-tap.

Tap-tap. Eyes closed, he savoured the scene.

Tap-tap. “Sir?”

He started.

He opened his eyes.

“Sir?”

Someone at the door.

From his seated position, sliding the curtain-covered sun-screen door, his heart-beat gathered momentum, raced for something – to get at something. Gathering himself in the wink of an eye, he smiled. Charoen-Thip, in jeans and a white Thai silk top with front buttons, smiled back. Held in her hand were a book and a notebook. He gestured her inside and at the chair across the table. She stepped in, sat, carrying the smile.

“You said you will be guiding me in English, professor,” she said as if responding to an accusation.

“Of course,” and he smiled.

His heart still aflutter, he fished out an old copy of the Paris Review. Going through the contents page, he chose a short story of a writer’s struggling days.

“You may read this, or you may choose from the contents.” He treid to control his breathing. “Initially,” he continued, “simply enjoy the article. Soak yourself into it.”

She took the journal and rested the spine on the edge of the table. Her eyes, like a pair of seagull, glided from one word to another, gently moving above the water peering for treasure.

Rohan took out a register and began digging into his work, soaking himself into it. But the presence of this girl, this young woman, made his concentration fly out the glass window. Smell of fresh water from her yet-wet hair. She was a dew-washed wild white flower that cleaved out from between two rocks, smelling of dew. Of purity. It was absolutely true she must have left home just after a bath.

He had told her to soak herself into the present work. But did he practice what he preached?

What can I do when her beauty has come between me and my concentration. A sweet intruder, the beauty has been. Her beauty has launched a thousand flutters in my heart. I doubt whether a thousand beauties can launch such a flutter.

When he did soak himself, it was in his thoughts where her face made exits and entrances. He looked up at the small shelf on the wall facing him. Looked at the spines of the few displayed books, went up, picked up Robin Cook’s Brain and began reading a randomly-opened page. But still everything flew. Only Charoen’s face appeared in the pages.