In a typically chirpy gift shop somewhere near the centre of the city, on an afternoon that habitually celebrated the dullness of a middle-aged sun, was a lady who looked to be anything but in a hurry. Her body, combating against the extra fat that time had been forcing upon it; her mascara, covering the sour truth of age that had climbed up to her face; and her walk - that perfectly aimless walk of a wanderer – suggested that she was a woman evidently uncomfortable with being in her mid-thirties.
The shop was crowded with youngsters, typically teenagers, for it was the Valentine’s Day of the year. Yes, that dubious day of life when the frustration of being single in more than half the youth and that of being otherwise in the rest are both emphatically pronounced, rather cruelly invoked from deep within, by a plethora of gifts and greeting cards that are exchanged in an attempt to celebrate the most abstruse and abused word in the English language – love. The young energies were enviable nonetheless; and their excitement, which had its roots in their characteristic immaturity, had furnished the place, although momentarily, with a lively buzz that only youth could produce.
Through the ranges of the racks, where the greeting cards were placed, was walking at her own pace the woman. She journeyed through the greeting cards, not caring the least she could for them. Love you forever, Without you I am nothing, You and I are a world in its own, You are the kiss of my heart were some of the lines on the greeting cards that most uselessly portrayed affection. All the gifts - the coffee mugs, the perfumes, and most poignantly the greeting cards - that she once received in bundles were conspiring to send her on a sordid nostalgic journey that she refused to embark on. What remained with her after a bit of angst and a personal rebellion of the most ordinary kind, however, was the pain which happened to be the truest part of the afternoon.
She would be an attractive woman back in the day. Her beauty was acknowledged by the opposite sex as frequently as the sunrise, if not more. She had become a festival in herself – one that many attend. An ego was the most natural byproduct of this process, and she had developed one as big as the size of Jupiter. Men were like visitors to her. For as long as she remained at the peak of her beauty, she attached no permanence with her relationships. Some of her relationships lasted shorter than what it takes for a lousy song to get on your nerves; some others were longer but as placid in essence as the water in a lake. She slept with many men, flirted with even more. Attention was an addictive drug that she kept craving for. Nothing did she love as much as her body, not even herself for that matter, and everything that she did remained skin-deep for almost a decade.
Yes, she had had her time. Days as bright as the sun itself and nights as mystifying as mystery could be – she had had her time. But all that after all was the past. She was now in her mid-thirties; the number of men in her life had been on the decline. Her age was an incongruity in the gift shop like the Christmas card that was being sold on the Valentine’s Day. She was walking around the place to battle the subtle threat of being alone on a Valentine’s Day for the first time in the last fifteen years.
However, she remained collected through the implicit yet caustic attack of memory as if having developed a robust internal resistance that only failures could equip you with. But the moment she saw that greeting card – the faint green card with a message that read “Some things are better left unsaid” – she was taken aback. She stared at it for a couple of minutes, then reached out to it, and then picked it up from the shelf as if it were always hers.
“How much would this cost?” She asked the attendant.
“50 rupees, madam”
“Could you gift-pack it for me?” asked the woman.
“Sure madam. In a moment. That would cost you 10 rupees more.”
“Not an issue. Please do it.” She said.
“We also have other cards, madam. The blue one is particularly lovely. And the red, heart-shaped one is the latest arrival.”
“No, thank you. I am good.” She said quickly, picked up the greeting card, and went home, leaving the world behind and alone on the Valentine’s Day.
She reached home and went straight to the gallery with some coffee and the greeting card, expressionless like a stone. It was a quaint Shivaji Park house. The gallery faced a plethora of people. Apart from upwards, wherever she looked, all she could see was people. It was around 5 O’clock by then. And she preferred the sky to look into to the bundles of people she would find nothing in common with. The taming sun and the woman shared something intimate for a while. Coffee was a constant indulgence to her. Cigarettes were accompaniments. A soliloquy or a conversation with the sun, whatever it was, took some time on her. And then, sudden as an epiphany, came out the tears that wet her cheeks. Maybe she opened up. To herself, that is, but she did and delivered the result of an introspection that she was pregnant with for years and years together.
The greeting card was open and wet by now. She got up and went hurriedly to the store-room where among broken tubs, old tables, and deteriorated chairs was a drawer that seemed to have only a past. Although a metallic rod peeled her skin off once or twice, her search stopped only at a letter and a photograph which were buried under thick layers of dust that only incessant negligence could create.
Some things are better left unsaid, read the letter. The picture showed two faces – happy, young, and innocent. She dwelled on them for a while and reached the telephone. The number she had dialed was unavailable. She tried again. Unavailable still. She dialed another number.
“Hello, how are you?” the man asked.
“Good. How about you?” she said. “Sam, I need HIS number. Do you have it?”
“HIS? Whose?” asked Sam.
“Sam, HIS!” she said.
“Oh, I..I’m sorry but I’m not too sure,” he said. “I have not spoken to him in a long time.”
“Oh, all right, Sam,” the woman said. “Thank you anyway. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sure, take care,” he said and hung up.
The woman ran through her telephone diary. Halted at a few names, tried to link them to someone and then kept going ahead. She dialed a number as if she had found something useful.
“Hello?” the voice on the other side said.
“Puja? Hi, how have you been?” said she.
“Hey, I am good. Long time! How have you been?” Puja asked.
“Good good. Listen, I need a favour,” said the woman.
“Yes? Tell me,” said Puja.
“Do you have HIS number or any way to contact HIM?” she asked anxiously.
“Hey! Are you all right? You want to speak to HIM? - Now?” asked Puja.
“Well Puja, yes! I have my reasons. Do you have his number?” said the woman.
“I am really sorry, lady. But I don’t even know if he is in the country. To be honest, I don’t know if he is alive. None of us have heard of him, you know. Not in the last eight years. Not after he left everything behind and went to Italy,” said Puja. “Not once did he come back. Not once did we hear anything about him. I thought you’d be the only person who could find out but you didn’t care enough back then, did you? ” she completed.
A loquacious silence prevailed.
“Bye Puja. I will have to talk to you later,” said the woman.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, sweetheart. It’s just the truth. You asked for it,” said Puja.
“I am sure. I understand. Let me call you back anyway. I need to be alone,” the woman said. “Take care.”
She hung up and looked out the window, dejected. She glanced downstairs from the gallery in an optimistic attempt to spot the man she was looking for in the crowd. He was the only one who understood her. She found many faces familiar. They looked ordinary and bastard-like as all the other men she had dated and flirted and slept with. She wanted to abuse them, blame them for being the bastards they had always been to her, blame them for the state she was in at that time. “Skin-hungry vultures!” she screamed to nobody’s bother and broke down under the temperate sun. She felt used, forsaken and trivialized. She thought as if a fifteen-year old vacation was over and she had come back home. This was her home. Shivaji Park. The crowd. This is where she grew up. This is where she established an identity. The faint memories of being a lovely, caring girl were reflected by the sun light on the old tapestries that were tattooed over the walls. The only man she did not – could not – think negatively of was HIM. And the guilt of having betrayed him back in the day, ruthlessly walking over his face to a specious lifestyle was enlarged inside her body like a monster sent out to destroy her.
Nonetheless, she did collect herself a while later. After all, she had seen thirty-five summers and none had gone away without teaching her a lesson or two. She did collect herself indeed. Changed her clothes; got all the make-up off her face; left her hair open; did not look into the mirror once before venturing out of her house. Not a fancy purse, not those high-heeled shoes, a greeting card – the greeting card – and some cash were all that she carried.
She took a taxi to Worli. Just off the Haji Ali circle, towards café Noorani, inside a lane was HIS house – a house she had so many memories of togetherness, truth, and comfort in. She sped up to the place as if chasing a twenty-five year-old self. There stood a building.
“How about Shanti Niketan, bhai sahab?” she asked at a shop nearby. “Where is the house?”
“Shanti Niketan, madam? That house was reconstructed. Now it’s a building,” said the shopkeeper pointing towards the structure. “It’s been five-six years to that.”
“Oh,” said the woman, losing whatever tiny bit of hope she was left with. “All right. Thank you.”
She walked towards Haji Ali and stood next to the Haji Ali juice centre. The dargah in the middle of the sea was a distant spectacle.
She stared into it addictively before starting to write on the greeting card.
Hi, I am sorry. I am genuinely sorry. I know I am late – eight years are a little too late for things to be any better – but I have realized that you were my only HIM. Happy Valentine’s Day, my love! You are my Valentine.
She took a taxi to Dadar but stopped somewhere in Worli near a post-box – a post-box HE would drop letters to her at. She dropped the greeting card in it without writing any address on the envelope. She did not know of any, of course. It was her 35th Valentine’s Day. Never before had she been gifted an epiphany; never before had she felt so true to herself; and never before had she spent the following night alone on a Valentine’s Day, bombarding herself with ifs and what-ifs, wiping her cheeks every once in a while standing above a crowd she could never relate to.
She lit a candle on the table, switched all the other lights off. Reflected on the walls now, superimposed on a photo-frame, was a picture that the two of them made. The two of them - an ageless mirror-image of an aging woman and the shadow of a photograph that was blank as most love stories in the city were – together celebrated the Valentine’s day.
The shop was crowded with youngsters, typically teenagers, for it was the Valentine’s Day of the year. Yes, that dubious day of life when the frustration of being single in more than half the youth and that of being otherwise in the rest are both emphatically pronounced, rather cruelly invoked from deep within, by a plethora of gifts and greeting cards that are exchanged in an attempt to celebrate the most abstruse and abused word in the English language – love. The young energies were enviable nonetheless; and their excitement, which had its roots in their characteristic immaturity, had furnished the place, although momentarily, with a lively buzz that only youth could produce.
Through the ranges of the racks, where the greeting cards were placed, was walking at her own pace the woman. She journeyed through the greeting cards, not caring the least she could for them. Love you forever, Without you I am nothing, You and I are a world in its own, You are the kiss of my heart were some of the lines on the greeting cards that most uselessly portrayed affection. All the gifts - the coffee mugs, the perfumes, and most poignantly the greeting cards - that she once received in bundles were conspiring to send her on a sordid nostalgic journey that she refused to embark on. What remained with her after a bit of angst and a personal rebellion of the most ordinary kind, however, was the pain which happened to be the truest part of the afternoon.
She would be an attractive woman back in the day. Her beauty was acknowledged by the opposite sex as frequently as the sunrise, if not more. She had become a festival in herself – one that many attend. An ego was the most natural byproduct of this process, and she had developed one as big as the size of Jupiter. Men were like visitors to her. For as long as she remained at the peak of her beauty, she attached no permanence with her relationships. Some of her relationships lasted shorter than what it takes for a lousy song to get on your nerves; some others were longer but as placid in essence as the water in a lake. She slept with many men, flirted with even more. Attention was an addictive drug that she kept craving for. Nothing did she love as much as her body, not even herself for that matter, and everything that she did remained skin-deep for almost a decade.
Yes, she had had her time. Days as bright as the sun itself and nights as mystifying as mystery could be – she had had her time. But all that after all was the past. She was now in her mid-thirties; the number of men in her life had been on the decline. Her age was an incongruity in the gift shop like the Christmas card that was being sold on the Valentine’s Day. She was walking around the place to battle the subtle threat of being alone on a Valentine’s Day for the first time in the last fifteen years.
However, she remained collected through the implicit yet caustic attack of memory as if having developed a robust internal resistance that only failures could equip you with. But the moment she saw that greeting card – the faint green card with a message that read “Some things are better left unsaid” – she was taken aback. She stared at it for a couple of minutes, then reached out to it, and then picked it up from the shelf as if it were always hers.
“How much would this cost?” She asked the attendant.
“50 rupees, madam”
“Could you gift-pack it for me?” asked the woman.
“Sure madam. In a moment. That would cost you 10 rupees more.”
“Not an issue. Please do it.” She said.
“We also have other cards, madam. The blue one is particularly lovely. And the red, heart-shaped one is the latest arrival.”
“No, thank you. I am good.” She said quickly, picked up the greeting card, and went home, leaving the world behind and alone on the Valentine’s Day.
She reached home and went straight to the gallery with some coffee and the greeting card, expressionless like a stone. It was a quaint Shivaji Park house. The gallery faced a plethora of people. Apart from upwards, wherever she looked, all she could see was people. It was around 5 O’clock by then. And she preferred the sky to look into to the bundles of people she would find nothing in common with. The taming sun and the woman shared something intimate for a while. Coffee was a constant indulgence to her. Cigarettes were accompaniments. A soliloquy or a conversation with the sun, whatever it was, took some time on her. And then, sudden as an epiphany, came out the tears that wet her cheeks. Maybe she opened up. To herself, that is, but she did and delivered the result of an introspection that she was pregnant with for years and years together.
The greeting card was open and wet by now. She got up and went hurriedly to the store-room where among broken tubs, old tables, and deteriorated chairs was a drawer that seemed to have only a past. Although a metallic rod peeled her skin off once or twice, her search stopped only at a letter and a photograph which were buried under thick layers of dust that only incessant negligence could create.
Some things are better left unsaid, read the letter. The picture showed two faces – happy, young, and innocent. She dwelled on them for a while and reached the telephone. The number she had dialed was unavailable. She tried again. Unavailable still. She dialed another number.
“Hello, how are you?” the man asked.
“Good. How about you?” she said. “Sam, I need HIS number. Do you have it?”
“HIS? Whose?” asked Sam.
“Sam, HIS!” she said.
“Oh, I..I’m sorry but I’m not too sure,” he said. “I have not spoken to him in a long time.”
“Oh, all right, Sam,” the woman said. “Thank you anyway. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Sure, take care,” he said and hung up.
The woman ran through her telephone diary. Halted at a few names, tried to link them to someone and then kept going ahead. She dialed a number as if she had found something useful.
“Hello?” the voice on the other side said.
“Puja? Hi, how have you been?” said she.
“Hey, I am good. Long time! How have you been?” Puja asked.
“Good good. Listen, I need a favour,” said the woman.
“Yes? Tell me,” said Puja.
“Do you have HIS number or any way to contact HIM?” she asked anxiously.
“Hey! Are you all right? You want to speak to HIM? - Now?” asked Puja.
“Well Puja, yes! I have my reasons. Do you have his number?” said the woman.
“I am really sorry, lady. But I don’t even know if he is in the country. To be honest, I don’t know if he is alive. None of us have heard of him, you know. Not in the last eight years. Not after he left everything behind and went to Italy,” said Puja. “Not once did he come back. Not once did we hear anything about him. I thought you’d be the only person who could find out but you didn’t care enough back then, did you? ” she completed.
A loquacious silence prevailed.
“Bye Puja. I will have to talk to you later,” said the woman.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, sweetheart. It’s just the truth. You asked for it,” said Puja.
“I am sure. I understand. Let me call you back anyway. I need to be alone,” the woman said. “Take care.”
She hung up and looked out the window, dejected. She glanced downstairs from the gallery in an optimistic attempt to spot the man she was looking for in the crowd. He was the only one who understood her. She found many faces familiar. They looked ordinary and bastard-like as all the other men she had dated and flirted and slept with. She wanted to abuse them, blame them for being the bastards they had always been to her, blame them for the state she was in at that time. “Skin-hungry vultures!” she screamed to nobody’s bother and broke down under the temperate sun. She felt used, forsaken and trivialized. She thought as if a fifteen-year old vacation was over and she had come back home. This was her home. Shivaji Park. The crowd. This is where she grew up. This is where she established an identity. The faint memories of being a lovely, caring girl were reflected by the sun light on the old tapestries that were tattooed over the walls. The only man she did not – could not – think negatively of was HIM. And the guilt of having betrayed him back in the day, ruthlessly walking over his face to a specious lifestyle was enlarged inside her body like a monster sent out to destroy her.
Nonetheless, she did collect herself a while later. After all, she had seen thirty-five summers and none had gone away without teaching her a lesson or two. She did collect herself indeed. Changed her clothes; got all the make-up off her face; left her hair open; did not look into the mirror once before venturing out of her house. Not a fancy purse, not those high-heeled shoes, a greeting card – the greeting card – and some cash were all that she carried.
She took a taxi to Worli. Just off the Haji Ali circle, towards café Noorani, inside a lane was HIS house – a house she had so many memories of togetherness, truth, and comfort in. She sped up to the place as if chasing a twenty-five year-old self. There stood a building.
“How about Shanti Niketan, bhai sahab?” she asked at a shop nearby. “Where is the house?”
“Shanti Niketan, madam? That house was reconstructed. Now it’s a building,” said the shopkeeper pointing towards the structure. “It’s been five-six years to that.”
“Oh,” said the woman, losing whatever tiny bit of hope she was left with. “All right. Thank you.”
She walked towards Haji Ali and stood next to the Haji Ali juice centre. The dargah in the middle of the sea was a distant spectacle.
She stared into it addictively before starting to write on the greeting card.
Hi, I am sorry. I am genuinely sorry. I know I am late – eight years are a little too late for things to be any better – but I have realized that you were my only HIM. Happy Valentine’s Day, my love! You are my Valentine.
She took a taxi to Dadar but stopped somewhere in Worli near a post-box – a post-box HE would drop letters to her at. She dropped the greeting card in it without writing any address on the envelope. She did not know of any, of course. It was her 35th Valentine’s Day. Never before had she been gifted an epiphany; never before had she felt so true to herself; and never before had she spent the following night alone on a Valentine’s Day, bombarding herself with ifs and what-ifs, wiping her cheeks every once in a while standing above a crowd she could never relate to.
She lit a candle on the table, switched all the other lights off. Reflected on the walls now, superimposed on a photo-frame, was a picture that the two of them made. The two of them - an ageless mirror-image of an aging woman and the shadow of a photograph that was blank as most love stories in the city were – together celebrated the Valentine’s day.
