Over the years I have heard people saying “its always hard to know a
woman”, the lines with time is rhetorical. Among the men community the
are implied with a single word or action, but it has not always with
women that we attach these lines, Knowing anybody for that matter of
fact has been difficult. There are number of arbitrary steps involved.
Right from getting an introduction with a person to getting close enough
to get personal details and analyzing those details to come to a
conclusion that would act as a benchmark of performance for that person.
If the bars are placed at the right level, we claim to know the person.
The numbers of bars set right determines the degree to which you know
the person.

As there is so much work and time involved we say “ its really hard to
know a person”, though that’s true but when we compare this fact to the
exercise of unknowing a person, the effort seems inconsiderable. Try to
think a person that you know very little, may be about the personality,
few habits or responses and then try to forget those facts that you know
about that person, try not to anticipate the same action from him or
her. Its really hard. Becoming strangers once again, on a true note is
nearly impossible.

We may feel little uncomfortable with a person we meet after years,
whom we knew too well but the fact remain that we know the person and
will anticipate certain responses based on the known facts. Unlike
knowing a person, there isn’t any set methods or ways of un-knowing a
person, to become strangers once again, live the same life a surprises,
the firsts, the pleasure of knowing for the first time. Its really hard,
its really impossible.

This argument of mine may seem out of thought for a moment but if made
possible, it would be a sure shot remedy for may unclaimed, unsettled
feelings that everyone of us carry around. Its not about forgetting a
person, that we do, to a very comfort table level, but unknowing a
person, that is some thing we are never able to do. Its some thing to do
with recreating a spark that existed some time in the past between two
persons and slowly over the period has dimmed out. So we make a bit of
correction in the statement “its really hard to know a woman”…. “its
really hard to know a woman, that’s why they interest so many men”…

Becoming Strangers once again!!

Over the years I have heard people saying “its always hard to know a
woman”, the lines with time is rhetorical. Among the men community the
are implied with a single word or action, but it has not always with
women that we attach these lines, Knowing anybody for that matter of
fact has been difficult. There are number of arbitrary steps involved.
Right from getting an introduction with a person to getting close enough
to get personal details and analyzing those details to come to a
conclusion that would act as a benchmark of performance for that person.
If the bars are placed at the right level, we claim to know the person.
The numbers of bars set right determines the degree to which you know
the person.

As there is so much work and time involved we say “ its really hard to
know a person”, though that’s true but when we compare this fact to the
exercise of unknowing a person, the effort seems inconsiderable. Try to
think a person that you know very little, may be about the personality,
few habits or responses and then try to forget those facts that you know
about that person, try not to anticipate the same action from him or
her. Its really hard. Becoming strangers once again, on a true note is
nearly impossible.

We may feel little uncomfortable with a person we meet after years,
whom we knew too well but the fact remain that we know the person and
will anticipate certain responses based on the known facts. Unlike
knowing a person, there isn’t any set methods or ways of un-knowing a
person, to become strangers once again, live the same life a surprises,
the firsts, the pleasure of knowing for the first time. Its really hard,
its really impossible.

This argument of mine may seem out of thought for a moment but if made
possible, it would be a sure shot remedy for may unclaimed, unsettled
feelings that everyone of us carry around. Its not about forgetting a
person, that we do, to a very comfort table level, but unknowing a
person, that is some thing we are never able to do. Its some thing to do
with recreating a spark that existed some time in the past between two
persons and slowly over the period has dimmed out. So we make a bit of
correction in the statement “its really hard to know a woman”…. “its
really hard to know a woman, that’s why they interest so many men”…

Lost :.:!

The pages scattered before the dawn could break. They flew where ever they could to save themselves from the delight of being discovered, being seen or being read because the hands that wrote upon them never would have wished to. But still there are many choices that we cannot make so those hands could just wish and the pages can only run a distance.

They were discovered, seen and read but there wasn’t delight, there wasn’t tears only the sun set with a pair eyes watching it. The eyes waited till the sunset and the darkness over took its place. It was her eyes, the eyes that he always wanted to stare into, talk to but could never do. She got up and walked into the lights that may fight their way into the thoughts but they couldn’t. They just stared at her and became blurred losing their own identity scattering every where.

She walked in silence to the café across the street. She looked up the lit sign, read it twice in her mind and before she entered she read it once again. She had never been to this place, only passed by whenever she walked to work and that was everyday. There were moments that she never knew just on the other side of the glass, she was always there but never witnessed it. She sat on the sixth table from the door, right where he used to sit, right where she never saw him, right where the pages were written.

A woman somewhere in her 50s came and asked her what she would like to have, she didn’t answer, she didn’t looked at her either. She asked again but she still didn’t answer and kept on looking at the pages. The stood there for a moment then turned to move back but suddenly she turned back again. She went closer to her and looked at the pages carefully and uttered in confusion “these are his pages” and suddenly the girl sitting turned back with so many questions in her eyes that couldn’t be answered even if she wrenched every word written in those pages and word the woman would speak. She owed her life to him and she meant many things to him.

She asked the woman “did you know him”, the woman just looked at her carefully and slowly her eyes widened “you are she, I mean you are one about whom he always wrote” and she sat in front of her and asked “where is he” she answered “ I only know these pages and they just say that he ain’t here in this world anymore, he died”. Tears rolled out the woman’s eyes, she asked the girl did you read the pages, the girl said she did. The woman asked did you ever see him, the girl answered “no”, the looked out of the glass and asked “did you ever heard him”, the girl said “no”. the woman got up and went behind the counter, she opened one of the racks and brought a small tape recorder and placed it in front of the girl and said “now you can hear him”. The looked at her with happiness and sadness at the same time. The woman said I once asked him “what would you say if you knew she could hear you and he answered” and she switched on the tape, a soft voice spoke “I do know, I love you, god I miss you and I forgive you”

An Abstract page "And then...once again"

“And then….”…..its an expression that I mostly use, may be you too, but for sure I do it more than you do because I am a kind of story teller. This expression is always about the moment just before it and the moment just after it. If the moment before it hadn’t happened there would not have been an “And then…” and the moment after it would not have been so, amazing, awesome, fearful, crazy, frightening or even once in a life time moment. It would have been just another moment that would have passed by unnoticed.

It was a simple lonely night, though there were people around but still a boy lingered lonely in the corridor of a redbrick building. Some people passed him and he passed some, but the only difference was the people who passed him never tuned around and came back, but the people he passed, he always turned around to have the last glimpse of them leaving. Many left but you didn’t. You strolled around, waiting, like you knew it was going to rain that very night, that very moment. A strong gust of cool wind passed by him “And then …” as he looked out he saw you staring towards the sky, lightening, crackling, turning black with every passing moment. You smiled “And then….” It rained, like it rains rarely. Winds washed away lots after lots, of the tiny, soft droplets, but neither did the rain stopped nor the winds and neither did you.

You walked in rain, some times hopped in rain, may be sometimes sang in the same rain (I couldn’t hear, may be because you were too far), but somehow I wish and somehow I know you did, sing along. Calling it just a moment would be a misnomer, so I would call it an small “eternity”, why? May be because, though he remembers it faintly but still he’ll remember it some times in his walk back to the past, for the years to come.

“And then….” A story was made right there, right then, and nobody knew. This is how stories are made as the moments that pass by the eyes of an unnoticed connoisseur. That boy was me and you were you.

I don’t like to stop writing here, but may be you would like to stop reading here (that I still can’t decipher), So I come back to the present. The moments pass with time they overburdened with so many days of dust that they start fading, even though we don’t wan them to. I just wanted to renew the moment. All this wouldn't make sense because are vague, they appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere, like an “abstract page”

The Rain, the words and they just scattered..

Tonight the clouds came in, it thundered, there was lightening and it poured, but not crystal clear droplets of water but complex words. I read them as they fell, and as I could decipher. Some made sense and some left questions to many answers, others just fell and crashed. An hour passed, there were millions of them lying scattered on the ground. I saw children picking them up, gathering as many of them as they could in their little arms. I knew the next day they would play with them and then some days later they would just be lying enclosed in some boxes, notebooks or just scattered. This is the fate, the end that words meet. People say words live forever, they do, but only because they embrace their death every time somebody has read them, juiced the flavor out of them and left them in search of new, but old ones.

This is what I thought my live can be, could be or would be. I tried to build it around words, so that it can last forever because I won’t live forever. This was just my expectation and sadly it did come true, my life lived up to my expectations and my words, still living. This was a dream many years back. I used to look at the sky when the clouds came pouring in, wait for the rain, and here it was. It wasn’t the beauty of the rains that I waited for in those moments because personally I never thought the rains were beautiful, it was just the moments of joy that followed that grabbed my insignia.

It was that one simple evening; I made my first call ever from my first cell phone ever. I dialed the numbers from my teenage fingers and in that teenage excitement I pressed some unneeded keys and the call landed to some much needed place. A girl picked a phone on the other side. At that time I was confused, was it a woman or was it a girl, but many years from that moment I knew she was a girl. She said hello and answered a hello in return. I asked who is speaking she kept silent, I asked again she still kept silent. I held on to the phone for a while then hung up. I checked the number again; I had dialed a wrong number. I waited for a while and out of curiosity I dialed the same wrong number again. The same voice again answered and said hello, I asked who is speaking and then there was no silence.

I heard cracked voice and then tears rolling. The tears didn’t rumble for me to hear them aloud. They were soft, they were painful and they were the last. She told me her name in that cracked voice and then said she going to kill herself in a couple of minutes and lastly she said “these are my last words to a stranger , remember me and find me” she hung up the phone after that before I could even speak. I called her many times after that the same day but it was switched off. I knew I never knew her but I knew what her last words were and I kept them buried but alive inside me in all those years of my life.

That was my first confrontation with words and that made me realize that words matter and they live long, longer than a man can, ever could. Many years after that I could find her and came to knew she died that very evening. She was 28 when she died and I knew she was with me the moment before she died. Some years after that evening; I graduated from the college. I knew I had to get a job but I knew also knew I had many words still living inside me to be written out. I took a miniscule job of a tour guide in a hill station and rented a small place up the hill. I more beside the lake than the touring people around, that ways I made less money and wrote more pages.

Many times I tried writing in rain, right under the rain. I sat beside the lake as the rain poured, just below the open sky and wrote. Drop by drop everything would get washed away and with in minutes the whole paper would be a gluey waste but still I wrote. Those words never stayed but they were the best words I ever wrote. After each such encounter with the rain I would get up all drenched in water and words , bearing a smile with a hint of sadness, over the gain and the loss and dreamed of time where I would have something that wont let the drops take away my words.

Years passed and my health dwindled with my money. My parents called me many times, came to visit me, tried to bring me back, tried to convince me to marry, but I did none of them. I stayed there. They left me money times, many times my mother would stay back for a couple of months till I regained a bit of health but I still continued to live there. It wasn’t that I didn’t fell in love, never touched a women’s lips, I did, many times but none stayed none could stay. It was not because I made them leave it was because I would not leave and most of them were tourists that stayed only a couple of days.

The longest time one ever stayed was for about 5 months, I married her after three months of her stay. For the next two months we stayed married and them one day she vanished. Some where I knew she would. She was also a tourist, I never asked her where she came from and she said its more important that she was with me in that moment. I always believed her for the innocence she carried in her eyes, but how far could she follow, she had to leave one day and she did. It was good for her.

In the years that followed I created a whole room out of my writings, grown a beard out of words I scribbled on small pages. I had money that barely kept me alive, many evenings my lovely neighbors would invite me to supper and in return I would tell their little daughter stories and rain, princess and skies. She would sit hours with me listening to my stories as her parents went to work. Later she started writing small ones herself. One evening a letter arrived, it was from my parents they called me to see them and somehow I decided that I would go.

I was going to leave the hill station for the first time in 18 years after I first came here. I gathered all the money I had and even borrowed some and one fine morning I left for my parent’s home. All the time during the journey I just noticed how much the world has changed since the time I left. It was brighter, livelier. I wrote some more pages while I was in the train. My train reached the city in the evening and I decided to walk to the home, it was just few kilometers away from the station. On my way back, nothing was the same, everything had changed.

I passed a store and in the window display was show cased a laptop below which there were these words “First water proof laptop up to 30 meters “ . I went inside the shop and asked the salesman about it. He said that the laptop was water proof and could be used even in open rain. My words wouldn’t be washed off now. I had to get one but the price was way out of my pocket. I came out of the store and looked up at the sky and the black clouds rolled in. As the first drop touched my face, I knew what I had to do. I went inside the store once again and slowly stole the laptop. I thought for that moment that nobody saw me as it was a big store and nobody was following me.

I ran some distance in the rain and when I felt it was safe enough. I switched it on and as the light glowed on the screen, my pleasure knew no bounds. My mind was filled with words and I kept on transferring them to the screen I pressed the keys. I was so engrossed that I never noticed some people had noticed the laptop missing from the shop and have found me there. All of sudden something received a strong blow on my head and I fell on the ground after that there were many kicks and punches that were hurled into me. But in all that somebody read what I wrote in the rain. That somebody shouted and pulled others away from me and asked me where I lived. I somehow uttered my parents address before I became unconscious. They picked me up and rushed towards the hospital but my low already low health could not take it, I died before they reached hospital. The rains had always given me beautiful words but taken it away at the same moment but this time they left the words and took me instead.

Somehow that some one through my parents reached my home in hill station and took my words to the words. Many of them were published under my name but I wasn’t alive to see them. Sadly my words lived longer than I did.

Thousand Possibilities

There could have been thousand realms of the possibilities that could have existed in the moment that I was. Sitting at the coffee table of a café on the street, the bright rays of sun had just started to pour in through the glass wall and on a mild cold morning, a little warmth was always welcome. The waitress came in poured me another cup of black coffee in the glass cup and headed for another table. I kept on looking outside on the street for a sigh to decide upon something very important in my life, i.e. that day. There was nothing special about that day, it was nearly same as this day but living in the present makes every day more important than the past one and as somebody said “the way you pass your day is the way you lead your life”.

So there I was, trying to give some meaning to the day it was going to be. If would have to die the next day or something, I would have been more focused on making that day seem more important to myself, but it wasn’t going that way. Even how hard I tried I felt same like every other day, so I decided to wait for a sign. Just when I was about to sip my coffee for the 10^th time, an asteroid crashed beside the café. It could have been one of the possibilities that could have happened but it didn’t, I sipped my coffee for the 10^th time and every thing was normal. I started yawning from boredom. Just then a two cars collided, not at a very high speed but driver of one of the car seemed injured. I ran out of the café, somehow pulled open the door of the crashed car and pulled out the driver.

He was a man somewhere in his 50s, wearing a rich suit. His head was seriously injured. People started gathering, so before much public could get around, I stopped a cab and took him to the hospital. The hospital authorities asked me the name of the person. I scanned his suit and able to lay hand on his wallet in which there was his license. I handed the license to the authorities and further scanned his wallet and cellphone to get some contact for his relatives. Coincidently his phone started buzzing the same time. I picked up the call.

A girl answered on the other side, “hello, dad don’t forget to pick the dress in the way”, I waited for a while, the again said, “hello, dad”. I said “hello, ma’am I am sorry to tell you but your dad met an accident on the way and I brought him to this hospital on the 8^th avenue, Hudson street”, “what, how did this happen, I would be there as soon as possible” and she hung up the phone. The doctor took the man into the operation theatre, mean while the police was there to take my statement. I told them what ever I saw. I waited for another 15 minutes and suddenly a girl came rushing in. she was trying to enquire every body about somebody. I approached her and asked that was the man in the brown suit is her dad. She replied affirmative. I took her near the operation theatre and told her every thing. She hugged me immediately and thanked me.

After some time the door of the operation theatre opened and the doctor came out, he said that the patient was ok and would come back to senses in an hour, before that nobody could go in. we sat on the chairs outside and I kept on consoling her. After an hour a nurse came to tell that we can visit the patient, we went in the room, the man was awake. He held her daughter’s hand and said “this is the right guy for you, you both should marry” and after some days we both were married and I was handed over a large business and I or we lived happily ever after.

Nothing of this sort happened, there was no car crash, no one was injured and no one giving me large business and his beautiful daughter to marry, but it could have been one of the possibilities. I was sitting in the stupid café sipping over my coffee for the 20^th time since the morning waiting for some sign.

An hour had passed, still, nothing. Out of boredom I took out my sketch book and looked around for something to sketch. Precisely there was nothing so beautiful to be sketched, so I just started sketching the street itself, with random figures in the back ground like a boat, a girl’s face and many other things which appeared as a water mark behind the street. I guess I spent about six hours sketching all this. I don’t know how many times the girl poured coffee for me, and how the sky was filled with black clouds and the sun has vanished . I was busy sketching so much so much that I never noticed that somebody was standing behind my back for the last two hours, until he said, “This is few of the best works that I have ever seen”.

I turned around and looked at him. He was some what in his 50s or 40s can’t say exactly, but had a radiant face, well trimmed beard and combed hairs. I said “thanks for the compliment”. He pulled a chair and sat beside me and said “can I see your sketch book” “sure” I answered. I gave him my sketchbook. He scanned through each of the sketches carefully for about half an hour and than said “I would like to have an art exhibition of yours in my art gallery”. I was shocked for a while, and then said “what, really, that would be great and an honor to me”, he said “ and also I would like to buy this sketch of the street that you just made, this is one of a kind, so how much would you accept for this”. I was in a thought for a while and before I could say any thing he spoke again “would $10,000 suffice”, I literaaly gaped at him and he said “I think that will suffice and rest we can also auction your sketches after the exhibition is over”. He signed a cheque attached it with a business card of his and gave it to me.

Few moments back I was this guy living from hand to mouth and suddenly I have $10,000 at my disposal and may be even more after the auction. It felt so good that I shouted “yess” and everybody was staring at me, because nothing of this sort happened. I know nothing about sketching, had no sketching book nor a pencil even, but that could have been a possibility. The street still looked the same, sun was still visible and I was sipping my coffee for the 30^th time.

I guess this coffee had sort of alcoholic effect in it, so to check I got up and started falling out of dizziness and caught by the waitress, which I never realized was so beautiful.

Well till now you must me wondering that even this happened or not. Well it didn’t but could have been a possibility. I am going to tell you any more of this because till now you would have lost faith between what really happened and what didn’t. Rather I would say nothing is true, there is no sun in the sky, there is no café, there is no glass wall and there is no waitress, beautiful or ugly. But wait, two things are true, first I am having a black coffee, which I just made and I wrote these possibilities, sitting in a closed room of my apartment at 4am in the morning, when there is no sun and my roommate snoring.

Well everything is not that great, but not that ugly either, coz there are thousand possibilities…!!