Broken Hug

Emptiness

PART TWO

The Five Years After Bangkok 

And Rohan returned to an empty house. Dad and Mom no more…

Dad was on the arm chair, facing the window; eyes on the neem tree, breeze coming from some distance, waving the leaves here and there; his hand resting on the arm of the chair, and his hand lightly holding the flute.

Mom was leaning against his bookshelf, hands folded in front, head angled, face turned towards her son. Her eyes had that similar look as every morning, sitting on the edge of his bed, a quiet smile on her face and the soft language in her eyes telling him, “Won’t you wake up, son? It’s already seven.”

Mother I know you are all around. Your son hasn’t forgotten you.

She was still there.

Close to three weeks had passed; and though dad and mom flitted in and out of his thoughts, their presence was all over. In the room. In the trees. In the light of the fireflies. And…

Fai too appeared, sharing his bed, her fingers running through his hair, kohl-black eyes searching his heart. 

A notification sound and Raj’s name blinked on the screen.

Raj: Hi man. At home? We are coming over.

            Rohan: Meet me at the park, near the crossing.

*

Rohan was already leaning against the railing when they came up in some minutes.

“You are still brooding over Fai, I know Rohan.” Raj said.

Max nodded.

They were trying their best to cheer him up.

“No I’m not.” That was a soft lie he threw out.

“If I were you,” Max continued, “I would have thrown myself on all the dance floors of the city. And when walking on the road, I would have ogled at all the beauties; and when sitting at The Café at Gol Park and looking at the menu, my eyes falling on the illustration of the lady smiling at the Black Forest pastries would have transported me to the Dhakuria Lakes and at the ladies jogging; and watch their buttocks wiggling…”

“Please stop, Raj, will you?” Rohan said, raising his voice but blending it with a soft smile.

Max looked at him.

“Look at that,” he said, landing a friendly punch on his arm. If I were in your place, Ro, I would have watched steamy romance movies. But now since you are still writing poems, your mind is actually trapped in the bathtub called Fai.”

“Anyway,” Raj said. “Aankhi wants to meet us. So, let’s meet today evening.”

“Let’s see amigo. Will definitely try.”

“No trying-fying, pal.” Max’s words pounced at Rohan. “A couple of hours won’t bring the sky down on you.”

Rohan smiled.   

*

Back home Rohan opened his e-mails. There was one from a content writing company and a few from the online writing community. But nothing from Fai. A deep sigh escaped from his lips. He looked at his watch. 6.34 pm.

Locking the door he turned to the pavement, and began to saunter aimlessly in vagabond fashion. He had already told Raj and Max that he was not interested to meet the others for an evening of dance and drinks. “That can be done some other day.

He walked for nearly thirty minutes till the four crossing appeared and he turned to Pablo’s Cafe across the massive park. This greenery was the city’s only lung, and he inhaled and exhaled its fresh breeze.  

Pushing the glass door, he went to his favourite corner, the left corner of the double cane couch facing the road. Fai always sat to my right. And here he kept the right side vacant, though he wondered if she would ever reply. But love is love, followed by a strong recollection, like the strong aroma of roasted coffee floating inside the cafe.

Rohan loved this part of the time in the café. His freedom tingled within him when the students vacated the college campus. Teaching for the day is over, Rohan, eyes closed, he told himself. And now this silence and solitude inside is my sole world.    

The cool atmosphere soaked his mind and he could see Fai sitting on his right as it had been in the food court in Bangkok. Those were the best three weeks of his life. Sighing, he opened his eyes and turned the pages of the book, settling his mind to the out-of-body experience the strange man was already experiencing in the pharaoh’s tomb.

He had barely finished the first two paragraphs when his eyes began to turn heavy and his eyes closed. He was not aware that some moments had gone by, but some movements forced his eyes open. The glass on the table was stuttering on the wooden surface. His eyes further opened and fell on the double cane couch across, and his heart jumped to his Adam’s apple.

Covered in columns of mist and smoke were a man and woman. The man’s flat cheeks, a medium-sized nose and soft ash-coloured eyes stood out in prominence. His smooth hair, closely cropped, with a few streaks falling over his forehead in a careless fashion coupled with his light-bronze complexion gave him an air of a macho man. A silver stud glinted from his left lobe. 

The woman, younger, silky and straight-haired, slightly thin, with a small pretty nose, smooth and straight cheeks, and a pair of black eyes, threw Rohan a clam look. All in all, her face was sweetly innocent, and covered all over with Mongoloid skin texture. The two-inch ear-rings spray-painted into a gun-metal colour with the emblem of a scorpion, embossed, dangled from her lobes. A gun-metal choker loosely clamped to her throat with an embossed scorpion flung a dull gleam.

Though Rohan shook his head to ward off the vision his mind had tricked him into seeing, he still found the pair sitting across. Holding some playing cards in their hands, the misty man threw a card. The woman looked at the fallen card, ran her eyes over the cards in her hand, and picked one before throwing it on the table. A game of Matching Symbols and Colours.

They stopped in the middle of their game and the man, picking up the video camera from the table focused it on Rohan and the girl looked up at him, both from their smoky covering.

“You are a professor of English at the Kingston International College,” the lady said, her eyes continuing to throw the soft look.

“You make the guitar talk. And you sing well.” The slow and husky voice of the man gently pressed Rohan’s brain. 

Rohan’s eyes widened, his mouth opened and froze.  

“You compose poems,” the lady continued.

“You maintain a journal.”

“You are on your own.”

“You will fall in love…”

“…with your student.”

The atmosphere in the cafe froze.

“Who are you, and from where…?” The open book slowly slipped out from Rohan’s hand and fell on the table.

But before he could complete his queries the misty beings joined together, melting into oneness and finally thinned into the air.

Rohan jolted out from his day dream; a daze had hit him. How could a pair of cloudy beings appear in this modern age, and that too sit across a table and rattle about his past and predict something inane about his future? Don’t they know it’s only Fai who occupies my mind?

His face turned sudorific, the canned air from the air-conditioner fell short in cooling him. Bats swirled in mad-fashion style inside his head, spitting out high-frequency soundless sounds.

The vision. And the voices. All nonsense. Fai is whom I know.

Rohan took out his notebook and with the pen Fai had given, he went deep into the recess of his mind and very soon was in the middle of a long tour of a blank verse on the subject of his narrator’s star-crossed love life where smoky beings entered his mind and conversed with him. By the time he had finished, his eyes fell on the table and he smiled. Have I had had two more cups of coffee and a black forest? And I had been here for almost three and a half hours.  

*  

Once home, Rohan placed a slice of cold ham in two slices of brown bread and masticated his dinner. Very soon he switched off the light.

And then it happened. It appeared again – in the same sequence – beginning with a cupboard, a pair of jeans and ending with fungi. All this took place in a small room, and in a moment which stretched into countless minutes. 

First of all his eyes fell on the entire cupboard, brown, with a maroon tinge that appeared in straight but irregular lines to a slight degree. The cupboard, six feet high, stood on extra wooden legs making it seven feet in height. The right door opened, followed by its left; and inside in the bottom-most shelf, where trousers – especially butter-jeans, black, and military green and the various shades of white – were kept, the edges of his new pair of navy blue jeans peeped out.

And in the midst of this, a pair of shorts. Female shorts.