Saturday 3 November 2007

Taking life as it goes…

It’s not an easy job. It’s not an easy job to take life as it goes, to take it easy. It creeps in silence; it advances its army of darkness in your mind. And slowly it engulfs your senses. The expectations fall apart, and suddenly the whole world becomes black and white loosing all its animated colors.

When I grew up, I grew up reading Sarat Chandra, Tagore’s romantic works. My father gave me a book on English poetry’s romantic age. That was an amazing book with small annotations in my father’s unintelligible handwriting on the margin. I read those poems with the eyes of Columbus looking at the new world. The attraction towards the fairer sex became known to me.

I wanted to fall in love like every other adolescent of my age. Romanticism became a way of life for me. I still remember those lively discussions with my mates about the definition of love and how to find them. I thought I knew it, and it’s only a matter of time to find it. I wanted to create something like those poems and I knew it by heart that it’s possible only if you fall, and fall hard in love.

There were these numerous diaries that my dad used to get from different well wishers, and I loved those. Those became the first breeding ground for my poems. I spent sleepless nights in the thoughts of an unknown lady who will make my life more charming, more delightful. Love was all over me and unlike kids of today I didn’t know something so powerful is not something of a child’s play.

All these things at a point became obsession for me. I fell in love almost everyday with the girl sitting next to me, with the girl whom I talked to for one minute to ask a question in my biology tuition, with the girl who on an ashtami was wearing that beautiful sari and that hypnotizing perfume.

And quietly, deep inside my heart I knew I have never known love. I wondered around the city on my bicycle only to see my school mates roaming around with good looking girls on their way back from tuition. I saw a lot of my seniors in school settling down with the girl of they loved. I envied them, as the grass is always greener on the other side.

Later I thought one need not look for love. It is something that should look for you. And someone told me that whatever happens to you is for good. Although the latter one is a cliché and everyone knows about it, at this point I started believing it as it came out of a girl and she let me know this after turning down the first offer I could ever frame up or rather to say could accumulate enough courage to place.

I grew up with all these. Not having love in life was something that demoralized me. I always wanted to have someone to talk to. Someone to share my heart’s content with. With all due respect to my mom, she could not possibly be the one to share a growing up kid’s all the thoughts. She could not become the one. My continuous hunt went on.

When I met her, I was 24. Not really a kid anymore. Living away from my parents had already given me a bit of maturity. All 18 years in a boy’s school had taken its toll and I was never smart enough to talk to girls till this point. Now things were changing. I was no longer desperate and I was no longer single and looking. Rather I was only single.

We had some previous connections to get us introduced. Both of us were aliens in a new city. We didn’t know what to do and how to live out our life in there. We spent time together. Weekends came and passed; days became long and then short again. Our proximity became unmatched to any past time. Suddenly one day I, for the second time in my life, fell again. I asked the question and straight came the answer “NO”.

But this time there was a separate tinge in the answer, a little pickle like taste, a bit of spice and that no remained in my life till date. How sweetly one can say a yes in disguise of a NO! Life changed for me. For the first time I was a proud boyfriend of a nice girl. Things are never this straight in life. Like the countless waves in marina beach, events in life come and go and the only thing they leave behind is the wet sand. Our relation too became sour, sourer and sourest, when we decided to part. Parting was not an easy job at least not for me. She seemed to take it quite easily. I could never learn the trick. Probably the born romantic in me didn’t let me learn it. I broke. I even got determined to win her back. I swore that she will never be happy without me. I cursed the distance between us, I cursed my destiny. But as an end result, I was back to square one, this time more devastated than ever. I don’t know how these events take place. Are there any rules of statistics, probability which govern them? Are there any laws of natural phenomena which can rationalize why people behave as irrationally as I did? As I said in the beginning, it’s never easy to take life as it goes, and it’s harder to take life easy. Loves labor was lost, and so am I.

[A fictitious diary of a broken mind]

2 comments:

ad libber said...

strange, very strange, almost like an autobiography and yet not completely so.
I agree with the flaws of reading as a child. You suddenly expect too much from life.

The Ancient Mariner said...

I would like to reemphasise the word fictitious. :)