Her departure

Her departure (small fiction)

 

It got to a point where he wanted nothing complicated should happen… even in those TV serials.. the ones you know, set in small towns in places like Vermont or Narkanda or Harsil, mountains and streams flowing from them, a few shops and a bar (or equivalent) and lots of gossips. Strangers attracted to each other in the town. The “background-plot-situation-resolvement” theme of drama life replicating real life.. no, no – he did not want strangers to meet. Or let them meet but let the mountains snow, let streams be not devoid of fishes or changing to ice slabs jostling in winter for a stream of flowing, liquid winter sun in their veins. Let the Bar signs flicker the same way, let the radiators not work for days when there is a winter powerline snap. Something should not change, he muttered, as he lay in the bed. The plot of changes in life no longer cut it for him. She gone like meander of cranes that graced this open land and lake each summer.

 

Must be three days in a row – not being out of the bed – sun crumbling through the white curtains, down disappointed each eve. The smell of the air never lies. It is chilly; from experience (and a bit of intuition), he knows that the Apple trees should be out blossoming, the last bus from Uttarkashi to Gangotri would be gone, only a newspaper fan, its driver Sulaimaan, would be out (due in an hour) picking sims and bartering cigarettes for JCOs posted in remote mountains that his van swings through.

 

If the day would just end  and no one calls or notices his being or passage. Let the glass sills freeze, and birds return disappointed from other side of the glass, having lusted for the sweet nectar of flower by his bed. He does occasionally get up and stumbles to get his coffee. This morning, he wanted to hear some violin (may be “Autumn from the four seasons”), smoke a cigarette (its red wedges burning slowly towards him, a phoenix leaving ashes on its wake), may be sit alone watching the lake glimmering to morning sun. They had this thing and now he has it, but it is never the same, is it, once someone departs? Why do things change, and can’t continue without plots and twists?

He wonders will sheep still gather by winter dusk in the evening in the long banks of Bhagirathi flowing in trickles this winter? He is warm in his place, and he is crying this heart out, but he has not forgotten the herders, their coat stitched-half stitched and worn-out- and dirty from yesterday’s rain fury, alighting a beedi with a wet match, their guttural sound calling sheep to bank, their shouts of greetings to other fellas.

Tomorrow, there will be a small time in the evening when they will celebrate Karthigai Deepam in his beloved Tiruvannamalai (the mountain is the flame, as Ramana said), but today, he is just surviving…