simply... walk along...

I have always wanted to write a story… an absolute tale trapeze-ing through the unpredictable(s) and emerging as a vibrant lil something that would impress upon the mindscape of readers. Word power- in joys, in pains… bewilderments. A story that would stitch the plots and sub-plots, dramatize, alternate between the dreamy and the dreary acts drenched in the tides of time! I badly wanted to write a story…

And the mitosis of thoughts somehow nucleated around this concept called ‘Love’. This thing called love- an emotion somehow has amazing ductility. Being tensile, it would spring back into empty hearts, dejected gabardines and deserted souls. It defies the probability theorem; it questions the relativity theory and Newton’s third law? The equal action-reaction mantra goes for a six as dejected lovelorn souls string fancy poetry or melodramatic acts of despair. Love is a fluid concept. But my story... of love, of way back into love, of maladies in love, of love’s labor lost- never really did germinate. Do you really have to be in love to write about it? Do imaginations, executions and extrapolation principles fail to strike love? Or is it something- beyond words, beyond lines? Huh…I guess I didn’t pay homage to Cupid.

It had rained hard last night and shallow puddles rested along the pavements. Flower petals, leaves and broken branches floated on its surface like life-less ornaments. Rains wash away so much of life with a steadfast fury but still… as it resides, environs seem like a newly wed stepping into the threshold, scripting another chapter of wondrous emotional hara-kiri!
In that early morning light, I saw an old man, ragged, dirty, bending over the pavement and scooping up a cup of water from the puddle of the potholes near. It was a Styrofoam ice cream cup tossed around by someone and he had picked that up from road- to use as a container… a glass of water analogy as it might be called? I saw him drink the contents, stoop down and have a re-fill. I don’t know his story. Do I even want to? Would the world know his story?

My friend was waiting for an auto. He had to meet another chum and team up for a movie. But time was running out and there were no vehicles agreeing for the destination. He had vocally shouted aloud to the rolling three wheelers but nothing seemed to be working.
‘Do you want a ride till Forum?’, there was this girl shouting as she was boarding her auto. ‘Come on, I’ll drop you there; I am going just a few blocks up the road there.’
He didn’t know how to thank her! Perfect strangers and a girl extending such a courtesy- or have we really forgotten the simple acts of life? My friend rode along- they discussed movies, music and peripheral information concerning jobs, educations et all. They did a Dutch with the fare and parted ways without any thread that might conspire another meeting for these individuals. Acquaintances would you call them? Passers-by? Or just characters enacting a ‘filler’, a commercial break between the acts and scenes of life? They shook hands, smiled and parted- names were exchanged… the names to stay on the radar of thoughts… and then we sew together the dreams, the mad imageries and the nuances of real life to frame ‘our’ stories. Stories, untold, unexpressed, nonetheless evoking myriad emotions deep in the silence of our souls…

When I was a kid, in ‘half-pants’, I would steal 20 paisa or 50 or even a rupee and with my friends buy rubber balls for our afternoon cricket. I would take it from the glass pen stand which had small change which was never counted! We would also pool in our booties and buy small prizes for our weekly tournaments. A comic book, a use and throw pen in purple ink or even a 5-star chocolate! Everything to play for!! There was a strange kind of friendship in which fairy tales were fabricated- spin-a-yarn together joining our lives together, forever! The curious eyes capturing the shifting frames of life, wish I could return to the innocence…
I have lost those faces, forgotten names- with the shifts of time; geographic distance has disturbed the umbilicus of friendship. It remains lost within the pages turned, the cells dead and new cytoplasm born! Do we have any story now? We, who had scripted so many of them in the realms of time, would we ever look back to run through the sinusoids that had driven our past?

Its only love, is it? The life line in the melodramas of life. Or is it a vision of life without love… demanding love! What is it really that stories are made of? Am still searching… for a story, for a love, for this dichotomy that generates the undercurrents in all walks of life.

This is my story. In confused, simple words… this is a story of an effort to walk along… walk along. I smell a story in the air (pun intended:))!!