The Loved One - I

As I lay on the ground, waiting for the end, with pain having put itself where once were my ligaments, board-like stiffness stepping in for my joints, a confused melee of thoughts coursing through where once the blood ran warm in my veins, and emptiness stepping in for what was once an level head, my hands reached for the tangle of red berries I has seen grow so often by the road. Strangely, while I’d seen it all happen before in my head, its actual fruition into reality was still unnerving. While I lay helpless, with death inching close, it didn’t even occur to try and save myself. My instincts long dead, I did then what I thought was best.

I wondered what I‘d have told myself if I'd have bothered to ask what got me in the position where I was.

As I’d walked though college, shuffling between the library, classes, hostel, I always used to devote considerable thought to myself. Some self-proclaimed friends of mine told me I was self-obsessed. Evidently, my philosophy of life consisting in indulging in self-congratulations when cheerful, resorting to self-deprecation when upset. I also apparently took to wallowing in self-pity and life’s unfairness. I guess it meant I spoke a lot. Nobody would comment like this until they’d heard me say something to that effect; but then again, my institution found itself overflowing with interfering curmudgeons who prided themselves and waxed eloquent on their understanding of human psyche and suffering, and whose obsession with their own-intelligence refused to be thwarted on any occasion whatsoever.

Frankly, I guess I was better off than them; at least I fraternized with my flaws when saddened.

I was bright, but unstable; I’d admit the latter myself. I wanted a lot, and worked a lot, but was never coordinated. It was like in fits, days of discipline and sustained hardwork, filled with exercise, helping juniors, extra-reading, writing poetry, speaking in class. Almost always it’ll be followed by sloth, pointless pontification, ignoring readings, mentally trashing effort, sleeping in class. But I’d manage to pull myself out of that fairly cheerfully. Exams particularly always were a stimulus. I didn’t really care for the grades. I guess my life had just taught me to act that way. But when going strong, I’d always be conscious of what I was doing, and worry so much as to how I can easily muck up my strict routine where I’d seem to be doing everything I seen these super-ability men in my head keep doing, I’d ruin it. Ruin it, get depressed, fall into listlessness, go the other way. Similarly, something like exams, or positive lines in a film would out me the other way. Oh yes, I always liked movies.

Some would say I lived in extremes, with nothing constant; can’t quite say, but seems to fit the bill.

I used to jog: sporadically indeed, like all my activities, but I did do it. As I’d run, I’d always feel better, more relaxed, comfortable with myself, distracted, and even if temporarily, free; there is something in a jog that always gives you a sense of freedom, knowing that however much life might get you down, God had given you two feet and spirit, and the sweat streams, aching muscles and pleasant pounding of the ticker would be sensations that no one could take away. As the jog would clear my head, I’d also seem to appreciate beauty so much better; the purple-violet of the jacaranda in bloom with the stark yellow of the amaltas in contrast, with white mogra showering petals like white clouds pinned by trees not letting them escape, with sometimes the ground below them carpeted white with falling blooms, like a white sea reflecting the clouds above. And I’d always see some red berries growing on the side of the road.

Red berries, growing on the side of the road: a bright, cheery red at that, not a dull, desultory one; I’d often wondered if they were edible.

My roommate told me that these were often found on the side of the road, and were so well-coloured that they raised suspicions. Passers-by would think that they were so juicy and inviting that they must be poisonous. He told me that he wished he could laugh at such people’s foolishness. He said that they were not only non-poisonous, but as sweet as a surfeit of sugar. Children would eat them by the dozens, and so would the locals, who’d been eating them since they were children for generations. But not the ‘educated’ lot, the snooty, proud twits who bowled around thinking they owned the world, and their children, stuck-up, haughty, brattish young pricks, who’d sneer when they saw anyone consuming them. Once, having been on a surfeit of sidecar, minus cointreau and lemon, he himself embarked on how the berries were a classic representation of what meant being happy in life meant; only those close to the earth felt it: the rest just sought excuses, searched doggedly for misery, when it lay out there, within grasp. I questioned him that since he himself was an aficionado of the berries, was happiness a part of his life? He shook his head as if I’d missed the point.

I figured I must have; anyway, I was not happy.

One of these evening I’d sat in the library, mournfully cursing a strange sleeplessness that seemed to overtake me. I didn’t like the way life was going then. I’d never exactly been in love with it, but it seemed particularly loathsome then. I was in neither of my phases: read neither here not there. I was shirking, but not relaxing; I was tired, but couldn’t sleep; I was not well, but not sick; Life seemed to be playing the old irony card with me: nor here nor there. One of those times when you can actually look at your life, realize you have food, clothing, shelter, education, hell, even a social circle, and yet think what a bitch life was. One of those listless, limp, languid, lethargic, enervating and ruefully pointless stages in life when your thoughts dwelt on existentialism and you brooded on what you worked for, and what drove you. It was in that rather disturbed state of mind that I saw Her.

It would not be wrong to say that after I saw her, I saw nothing else; she was beautiful.

She was beautiful, bedazzling; she was so beautiful that my mouth fell open, my mind numbed and my head swam. I felt conscious of a growing swelling in my heart, a sort of rising lump that felt as is would rip me from within and overflow and consume the whole world. I gazed and gazed and gazed. She walked with a straight-backed grace, Her hair long and lustrous, flowing like a river down to her shoulders, blacker than eternity, small rivulets of it having broken away to form two arches over eyes limpid and pellucid like a gazelle’s. Her face was of an angel’s, aglow with softness, dewed with radiance. Her nose was straight, Her lips were red. Oh, and the way she walked, God, her hair streaming behind her and flouncing with every step. Oh, her face, so divine, so blissfully divine. Somewhere, jewellery sparkled, diamonds stuck in a moving halo. She walked by, and I followed, like one enchanted.

It was love at first sight-but not for any of the reasons mentioned above; it was her eyes. Her eyes were what every cliché made eyes to be: a mirror to her personality.