Storywallah

by Neelesh Misra

  There was something about her, something that made her different from the rest of us. ‘Vishakha Somvanshi!’ a voice called from inside the room and she went in.

  I decided right then that after the admissions process was over, I would extend a hand of friendship to Vishakha. Sometimes the effect of our wishes is so strong that God himself thinks, Okay, let’s do this and see what happens. My wish was granted and Vishakha and I got admission in the same college.

  To tell you the truth, it was easier to be friends with Vishakha than I had anticipated. She was one of those people who took a little while to open up but once they did, they were the light of the party. We started out as members of the same group of friends but slowly, the two of us became good friends. We would often sing old songs as we ate noodles in the college canteen. We would choose old songs that were bound to make our friends laugh. Especially when we sang ‘Ramaiyya Vastavaiyya’, even Khan Chacha who ran the canteen would smile.

  I had noticed that Vishakha had a special fascination for the colour yellow. One day as we roamed the college campus I asked her, ‘What is this fascination with yellow? Yellow bag, yellow handkerchief, yellow pen, why?’ ‘I like it; it’s the colour of friendship. That’s all,’ she had replied. I elbowed her as I said, ‘So now in the canteen will you sing about the yellow, yellow sky?’ We both laughed. She had grimaced and said, ‘Bad joke number 44.’

  Vishakha had a great sense of humour. In those days, unlike now, I wasn’t boring and uninteresting. Maybe that’s why it didn’t take long for us to get really close to one another. We went from being friends to more than friends.

  As we drew closer, our friends began to tease us as a couple. Vishakha didn’t seem to mind at all and I would pretend to be embarrassed and they would tease us more.

  The important thing about time is that be it good or bad, it passes. We didn’t even know when the three years of college finished. In those three years we had become so close that we had decided that we would live and die together. We both got jobs in Shimla. On weekends we would meet at Jakhoo Hill or Anadale or sometimes the Tara Devi Temple. We would laugh a lot when we were together, often clutching our sides as we made our way home because we were laughing so hard.

  I remember that afternoon on Valentine’s Day. I had told her to meet me outside the Shimla State Museum. I was wearing the striped muffler she had gifted me earlier. As she approached me I held out a bouquet of yellow roses and said, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day, Vishakha; will you marry me?’ ‘Have you taken a look in the mirror?’ she asked archly. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘You don’t want to marry a good-looking guy?’ We both laughed. The sun was shining on the mountains in front of us as we held hands and set off on a journey that wasn’t going to be as easy as it seemed.

  Often in life while we are winning a certain battle, we are losing others. My parents hadn’t been so taken with Vishakha and her family but they knew love. They had had a love marriage in their day. Babuji was the accountant in the college that Ma taught at. They understood love and they understood how we felt. Despite their reservations, they began preparations for the wedding with fervour and fanfare. Both houses were busy and full of hustle-bustle and finally, on the 27th of September that very year, in the beautiful mountains of Shimla we were married.

  ‘The wedding is complete, you are now husband and wife.’ With these words from the priest we were bound together in marriage. We were happy, very happy. We felt we were touching new limits of happiness; we didn’t know then that life was going to throw at us all sorts of new challenges. In those days we felt as if the spreading valleys and the endless sky were all a part of our happiness. We travelled a lot. We fought and made up. We teased each other. When I was upset she would sing funny songs to make me laugh and when she was angry I would bring her yellow roses to make her happy. We were best friends. Then, I don’t know if we got busy, or if it was the decision of time, but something began to change between us.

  Three months after the wedding, Vishakha got a job in a bigger company. She became an assistant manager. Her responsibilities increased and she became immersed in her work.

  It was time for the Annual Conclave in her office, and she was working day and night. She would leave before I awoke and come back very late every night.

  Once when she was particularly late coming home I said angrily, ‘Where were you for so long? You could have called at least!’ She hadn’t answered and had gone swiftly to the bedroom instead. She hadn’t liked the way I had spoken and the anger was the reason behind her silence that had come between us for a few days.

  We had gone from being strangers to friends, and from friends to lovers, and from lovers to husband and wife. Many people climb these same steps in their relationships without realizing that as you take each new step, the previous step disappears. When Vishakha and I became friends, we weren’t strangers any more, and when we became lovers, we were no longer friends, and when we got married we stopped being lovers.

  ‘I’m sorry, Vishakha,’ I messaged Vishakha a few days later. The silence was annoying me. But I got no reply from her and my anger began to grow. I was angry but I wanted this fight to stop.

  When she came back I handed her a bouquet. But this time I wanted to prove my right over her. I wanted to be her husband more than her friend. This time the bouquet had red roses.

  As time went by it wasn’t only the colour of flowers that changed. My relationship with Vishakha changed a little every day. Every day we became more and more like a husband and wife and less and less like friends.

  ‘What’s going on in office?’ I asked one Sunday as she held out a cup of tea for me, ‘How is your project going?’ She replied very seriously, ‘It’s 75 per cent done. If everything goes well hopefully it should finish before time. Oh and don’t forget to take out the laundry bill today.’ She picked up a newspaper from the table and began to read it.

  At that moment I realized how serious our conversations had become. We had lost the mischief, the talking for no reason. And in their place we had laundry bills, ration lists and other seemingly important things.

  Sometimes when I looked at her at the dinner table, as we ate in silence, I would wonder if she was the same girl with the yellow handbag who could talk about nothing for hours. The same girl who hugged me and said ‘I love you’ to me every morning before getting out of bed and every night before we slept. It had been an age since she had said anything like that to me.

  One night while we ate she asked casually as she passed me the salad, ‘So how is your job going?’ ‘Fine,’ I replied disinterestedly and then asked, ‘And yours?’ ‘Hmm, last minutes now . . . Oh, yes! I might have to go to Chennai next week for the project submission.’

  I didn’t say anything to her or even look at her. I was upset that she wasn’t going to be home the next week, because it was my birthday on the fifth.

  As I lay in bed that night I thought to myself that I had heard of people changing, but never an instance of anyone changing the way Vishakha had. She used to start preparing for my birthday a week in advance. She would send me gifts, record songs and what not. She would do so much to make me feel special . . . And now? She was not even going to be around on my birthday.

  I wasn’t interested in birthday celebrations but I was hurt by the changes in Vishakha. Many small things were now becoming issues and settling in my mind.

  One afternoon I felt feverish at work. I was shivering. I took a cab and went home. I wanted to message Vishakha and tell her to come home but then I didn’t. I thought she’d come home soon anyway. I waited a long time but she didn’t and then at nine o’clock I got a message saying, ‘Sorry! Will be late tonight.’

  That night was the darkest, loneliest night of my life. I realized how deeply one can sink into loneliness. I only felt anger towards Vishakha. I thought of my mother. Even though I wasn’t up to it, I got up and wrote a note to Vishakha and left it on the table. And then, trembling as I drove, I went to my parents. That sad m
oment had decided that Vishakha didn’t need me and I didn’t need her.

  After driving for a few hours I reached home. I had taken leave from office for a week and come home to my parents. ‘You did a good thing by coming home,’ Ma said as she applied a cold compress to my forehead. I had told them that Vishakha was busy and that’s why I had come home. They believed me.

  The next morning, there were eighteen missed calls from Vishakha on my phone and some messages apologizing and asking me to come home. I remembered the time when we used to roam carefree on the restless roads. Who would have thought our journey together would be so short?

  The next evening, as I stood on the balcony watching children play cricket I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Ma.

  ‘What’s wrong, what’s happened? Tell me,’ she said. I answered hurriedly, ‘Nothing, nothing has happened. Why should anything happen? I was missing you both so I came home.’ She smiled and said, ‘Say what you will, your face is saying something else. Something is wrong. Now tell me. Come on.’

  Tears welled up in my eyes. You can hide things from yourself, but not from your mother. I told her everything, from beginning to end. I only looked at her after I had finished.

  She was smiling. I was shocked! ‘That’s all?’ she asked.

  Gesturing to me to sit on the chair near her she said, ‘Your generation is very confused about love. Actually you learn about love from movies, where every scene is full of action. Maybe that’s why you think that there is love only if something is going on all the time, fighting, singing, joking. Isn’t it?’

  It was as if Ma’s words had opened a skylight in my mind. I found a new way to think. She told me how everything changes with time, even the ways in which we show love. Our behaviour, the way we talk, maybe we hesitate to show love. But that doesn’t mean there is no love. It just means there is no noise in love, there is deepness. That night Ma’s words were like hammer blows in my head. The next morning I watched Ma and Babuji sitting on a cot in the garden. Ma was reading the paper and Babuji was shelling peas. They weren’t talking, but they were connected, there was love—the same love as when they had got married. I thought they mustn’t have always been like this; they must have laughed and teased each other once. The expression of their love may have changed but it was still love, wasn’t it?

  Maybe I was worrying about the changes in Vishakha needlessly? Maybe our relationship was deepening and not becoming lifeless as I was imagining? I had found my answers. We had drifted apart because our friendship had drifted. I had become just a husband. Earlier, if she had been out late I would have been worried, not angry. If she had had too much work I would have helped her, not criticized her. I realized neither of us was wrong. Only time had changed. Something was breaking inside my mind.

  ‘Ma! I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘I’ll come again next week.’ They both smiled as I left; they knew I had understood.

  I wept on the drive back at the way I had treated her. I berated myself. I knew she would have left for Chennai but I wanted to reach home, call her from the landline and say, ‘I’ve come home. Please forgive me.’ I was angry with myself.

  But there was a surprise waiting for me at home. The door wasn’t locked. When I went in, Vishakha was there. She looked at me with shocked, tear-filled eyes. Before she could say anything I said, ‘I’m sorry, Vishakha.’

  In the way that the longest journeys start with the smallest step, sometimes the smallest step can bridge the widest distances. I had taken that step and as we held each close we knew that no misunderstanding could drive a wedge between us.

  We realized that we both had complaints against each other. We both had looked at things from only our individual perspectives. I discovered that Vishakha had lied about going to Chennai; she had been planning a surprise for my birthday. We still had place for mischief, just of a different kind.

  We had never held each other with the desperation with which we clung to each other that day. Our heartbeats became one. ‘Vishakha, I can’t promise to become a good husband, but I promise you that I will always remain a good friend.’

  Everything became all right after that. That evening, as we ate momos at a small stall along Mall Road, Vishakha held a bouquet of yellow roses.

  Since then I always gifted her a bouquet of yellow roses from that shop on every special occasion. She was a strange girl—the most expensive gift in the world couldn’t light up her eyes the way those yellow roses could.

  After being in Shimla for many years we both moved to Delhi. She is still crazy about yellow roses. We may not drum tables and sing ‘Ramaiyya Vastavaiyya’ any more, or laugh like crazy, but our love is just the way it was.

  Look at the time! I better stop and pick up some roses before the shop closes.

  LETTERS

  Anulata Raj Nair

  The house was strewn with the things unloaded from the truck. It was quite a job unpacking things that had been packed by the packers. Huge wooden crates and cardboard boxes swathed in tape lay everywhere. There was a strange smell in the house. The house didn’t look like home. Nothing was familiar; there was no fragrance of belonging.

  I was trying to put my things in order. Tanvi had gone to sleep, tired. I was tired too, but I didn’t want to sleep without putting away the papers that lay scattered around the room. At least there was the satisfaction of knowing that this would be the last shift. After thirty-five years of government service, I had finally retired at the age of sixty. No more transfers, and no more packing and unpacking.

  I had emptied the contents of two steel trunks on to the floor in the hope that things might get sorted out and thrown away.

  I was wiping the bundles of paper with a duster before putting them away, unread. I knew they weren’t useful, not really. They were just some old letters which I had put away by force of habit.

  It was then that I saw, peeping out from among the papers, a light pink ribbon. I held a corner and pulled.

  Suddenly the wall that separated my past and my present crumbled and fell away. In a second, I had travelled forty years back in time—to the day when the envelope with the pink ribbon had first been in my hand. The postman had been smiling as he had handed me the letter, as if he had understood its contents.

  The pale pink of the envelope had tempted me to smell it to see if it had any fragrance. And it had. The faint heady scent of roses.

  I had hid the letter behind my back immediately because Babuji had heard the postman and had come outside. Timed exactly like the entry of the villain!

  Now forty years later, I held the letter up to my face and inhaled deeply, but the fragrance was gone.

  For some reason my hands shook like those of a man newly in love. I wanted to read those words again as soon as I could. The words I had never been able to forget.

  He said she had gone to sleep and I hid the letter behind my back like I had done all those years ago.

  My heart was beating fast.

  Tanvi and I were happy by all accounts. We were a sensible and sorted couple. It was a different matter that I had hidden the complications of my heart from her for thirty years. Sometimes it had seemed to me as if Tanvi was peering inside my mind, trying to see what I was hiding. But maybe I had imagined it.

  I was thirty when we got married and Tanvi twenty-five. I was a bit old for marriage by the standards of the day. It’s obvious that it was the contents of that pink envelope that were linked to the delay.

  ‘What happened?’ Tanvi’s voice surprised me.

  I hid the pink envelope which was still behind my back in the pages of the autobiography I was writing.

  What a strange dichotomy! This love story from my past was now hiding in my autobiography in which I had been deceitful in not mentioning it at all.

  Maybe I had been deceitful with our relationship as well.

  My heart beat fast, like a teenager stepping into the shining world of love for the first time, and whose first love letter had been caught.

&nb
sp; An old story, a feeling from long ago, had come and snatched away my peace. Maybe this was the essence of love. No matter how much you suppress it, bury it six feet under the ground, it breathes.

  What was happening to me now? And at the age of sixty!

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ Tanvi asked again and I was pulled back into the present.

  Troubled, she came and sat down next to me.

  ‘What’s happened? Are you well?’ She rubbed my chest and began to rummage through the medicine box to find my blood pressure medicine.

  I pulled myself together and drank a glass of cold water. I felt a bit better.

  Then I looked at Tanvi and smiled—an empty, hollow smile. I wanted to convince her that I was well so that she would go back to sleep and I could read once again, after forty years, that pink letter whose fragrance was still fresh in my consciousness. And remember all those things that I had promised to forget . . .

  The wall clock struck twelve. Like the pendulum striking the hour I too was swinging between the past and the present.

  I didn’t sleep that night.

  That day kept coming alive, the day I was the eighteen-year-old boy who had been handed that scented pink envelope.

  It was during the seventies when people used to write letters to stay in touch. Writing and reading letters played a very important part in people’s lives then; it did in mine, at least.

  Maybe that was why I had saved all those letters for so many years: Babuji’s letters filled with advice, Ma’s sad letters, my sister’s rakhi letters filled with love, some letters from relatives and also some pink envelopes that held fragrant letters.

  These letters were my treasure.

  Sometimes in a childish attempt to relive the old days I still write letters to Ma and some old friends.

  It was strange that I had never written to Tanvi. Maybe those pink letters had left a thorn in my heart and that was why I had never told Tanvi about them. Tanvi had never complained and I had convinced myself that she had no interest in writing or receiving letters. I had saved myself with ease.