IN SILENCE LIKE A CIGARETTE

Let me begin this post with a quote from Woody Allen’s movie, ‘Vicky Christina Barcelona’.

                                          ‘Only unfilled love can be romantic.’

This quote has been made effective by the phenomenal chain- you love someone, but that someone does not acknowledge it. Someone loves you, but you cannot acknowledge that feeling.

So the story begins,

Once upon a time, there was a man who fell in love with his friend who was a writer, only he did not know how to win her heart. She had a world of her own, which did not fall under any categorical explanation. Romance was not her cup of tea. Love, she doubted all kinds of love including agape. He read the literature she was fond of, shared on his wall the stuff she wrote, ethically stalked her. She was more into American literature, she found American writers comparatively more honest and less ludicrous with words, like when they wrote of sex, it meant sex. He objected to the views she held. He introduced her to several Indian writers which she had never heard of, Amrita Pritam was one. Told her of the unrequited love Amrita had for Sahir Ludhianvi, the poet who never felt the same way as she did. He narrated her stories of how irretrievably infatuated Amrita was with Sahir that she would collect the discarded cigarette buds of Sahir and relight them and smoke to feel the touch of the poet. He read out one of the Amrita’s poems which he thought aptly suited the poet’s feelings,

There was a grief I smoked

in silence, like a cigarette

only a few poems fell

out of the ash I flicked from it…

‘What a pity!’ were her words. He believed pity had nothing to do with the love life of the writer he so adored. Thus, he narrated the beautiful and everlasting companionship she found in her seven years younger partner Imroz.

One evening like an unusual delight, they went for a walk. Quite unconventional, she walked him to his door. Then it rained, he invited her to his room. Dirty mess it was, just like her empty shoe-box which she used for storing old letters. She loved lemonade, he knew it. While slicing the lemon, he cut his palm, it was deep, blood was red. He requested her to pull the drawer; she obeyed. Band-Aids were not to be found, but she found her used pens including her three Milan P1 Touch pens which she had thrown on the trashcan. She looked at him, he felt naked and creepy. In silence, she tied his palm with her handkerchief. In silence, he made the lemonade.  In silence, they drank. In silence, she hugged him. When it was time to leave, she broke her silence and said, ‘so I am your Sahir.’ He replied, ‘and will be someone’s Imroz’.

She gently closed the door behind, looked at the now cleared sky and whispered, ‘indeed it is okay to stumble sometimes for the world spins, no fault of yours.’