How could I burn those letters that were fused with fragrance?
How could I burn those letters that were cleansed with love?
I have drowned those letters in the Ganges today.
I have set fire to the flowing waters today.
-- Rajendranath Rahbar
I was talking to my sister on the 13 th of January about things that are happening in our lives. We always do that-- tell each other about what we are doing or planning to do. I was telling her how infinitely fatigued I was after a Ulysses-like journey through the east coast and the south. I was in Oklahoma, warm and comfortable in the company of a wonderful host. My sister told me she saw a picture of Rupok in the newspaper. In remembrance of his memories, his family puts up a little ad twice every year – on his birthday and on the day he died.
It has been seven years!
Memories work in strange ways. I remember so many little things he told me, or places that we have been to together. What I cannot recall is his face. Closing my eyes, I try hard to conjure a mental image of him sometimes. My memories fail me. I have pictures of him elsewhere that I can look at, but I don’t have a picture of him in my head. May be that is God’s revenge on me for not answering so many desperate calls he made to my house when he was alive. I was angry. I was angry and he was gone.
I remember he wanted to be a grass-flower—one always within your reach but one you don’t always notice, one that blooms for its own pleasure and dies under your feet. I wanted to be a grass-flower too. He said everyone was a different flower. I, for example, was a flower of the moonlight. It is the flower that moonlight makes on your floor coming through the carved ventilators of the room. Why, I asked, did I have be that? Because no matter how many times he wanted to hold it, the flower always escaped. It is something you spend all your life trying to conquer. It gets you going.
I remember I went crazy after he died. I didn’t talk to anyone for months. I would freak out every time I heard the siren of an ambulance (If you know me, you know I still have the siren phobia). I had dreams almost every night where Rupok told me everybody was lying and he was not dead. I spent my days curled up in my bed beside the window looking at the cruel sky. I was skipping classes for months. I don’t remember at what point I started going back to school; but what I do remember is that I couldn’t write anything. I spent the entire class hour staring at the blank sheets. At times my sister couldn’t handle it. She couldn’t help crying and telling me “live for me, I love you too”. Probably it is for her that I slowly managed to recover some façade of normalcy.
(to be continued)
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