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.