“So tell me...” says Rachana in a smile mixed of curiosity and tease “...when are you going to get married?”
“Have you been talking with my mother?” A chuckling laugh erupts, making some of the passengers seated within hearing range wonder what the joke was about. Keep in mind that the bus is now only partially lit with a dimness that may suggest a time more appropriate for a nap.
“Don’t you have a sweetheart?”
“Had one.” His smile is the kind that says he has faced his share of tribulations in love and romance.
Love. Perhaps the most elusive of human states of emotion that defies finality in definition. Love; that which is impossible to know until you’re in it. And inexplicable, thereafter. Miles and miles away from all that he knows to be home and the world that acknowledges him as being part of it, Jaliya finds this query about his past on this most bitter sweet of topics to be an opening for him to relive a story more meaningfully. To give his own past a newer rendition.
“She left. It was a couple of year ago. It wasn’t anything to do between us but what prevailed in a more forceful way, making her whole family migrate…”
This story has Rachana drawn into a moment that has very effectively closed off the sounds and sensations that the world around her would otherwise touch her senses and encroach her thoughts. The cough of the pan chewing woman next to her wasn’t heard. The thrust of a hand on the back of her seat’s headrest wasn’t really felt. His words were transporting her to a scene that she feels very empathetically for.
“…Politics is an ugly thing Rachana, no doubt you’ll agree…Her father after all couldn’t do anything so corrupt, and had refused to give in…The threats continued, it became that bad…She herself felt very worried about what could happen, and was even having sleepless nights…Her elder sister was of course married by that time, but her younger sister was still schooling…Her parents felt it was best to leave…They had got sick of living in Sri Lanka with all that harassment… ”
“She was willing to leave you?”
“She wanted me to leave with her.”
When we speak of an episode from our past that haunts us with some regret, it is possible that we seek some vindication. Some form of self sought penance to punish us so that it may heal the wounds by undoing the sin of some foolishness that always beleaguers the soul of youth in that sweetly oppressive trial called ‘first love’. Jaliya was once told by a girl of his own age that she would one day write a book collected of stories from people she knows, about their experience of the most unforgettable love of their lives. It would be ‘in homage to love’ she had told Jaliya looking deep into his eyes, intently, as they sipped coffee. She said she believed every person has one great love story in their lives etched in their memory’s ‘eternity’ as solidly as their physical existence. And that story, she had said is what every person would treat as being definitive of love, and how love can be illustrated in their experience. She would be a collector of such stories she had said, to give them an enduring form and place in the annals of literature written in Sri Lanka. Her own? When Jaliya asked her, was told ‘it is yet to happen’, and then a sip of coffee followed through her mischievously smiling lips; her eyes resting on his.
“But then Jaliya, didn’t you want to marry her?”
“Yes, but not to migrate. And the thing was that was what she thought we should do…”
Love is about compromise. It is always such greatly willing compromises that one will find one does when in love. And marriage is probably the ultimate test of that path of compromises done in the name of love, for that happiness only love brings. But marriage is a contract to continue compromises, unlike the voluntariness of lovers not bound by the institution of matrimony. Marriage as a ‘willing compromise’ may ensure a path of togetherness. But a path of ‘compelled compromise’ forged on impulsions of youthfulness could lead to a very different outcome. And it was such an outcome that Jaliya had feared as a twenty one year old.
“…To leave the world I know and everyone, well…the thing is, I never planned to live my life in another country.”
“Wasn’t that a compromise you were willing to do for her?”
“…It would probably make me lose her altogether…that’s how I felt about it.”
“How is that?”
“I believe love does not happen in a vacuum…The world we met in and the one where we built our past holds much of the reasons that kept us together…And what if I had married her and found myself hating the new life in a foreign country? I’d be miserable and at some point I am sure I might begin blaming her for it…I would have by then lost both the world I knew, and the girl I loved.”
The prospect of living in a foreign land and building a life in marriage, away from all that you know to be home and the ‘world’, is a matter that faces Rachana very compellingly.
“So you let yourself lose her for the fear of losing her?”
All Jaliya can offer in response is a smile that says almost apologetically ‘perhaps’. And so now Jaliya feels he must tell Rachana how his last sight of her, that moment of goodbye was such that it proved how he lived very deeply in the poetic impulsions propelled by love. He tells Rachana of how he rushed to the airport in the very last minute and took her hands in his and asked one last time to rethink her decision to leave. Rachana listens, enchanted by the moment she is being taken to by his words... He tells her, looking deep into the eyes of the one he loves and loves so truly that he will not risk allowing that love to be sullied someday. The gaze of two very caring parents falls on two young lovers who tenderly hold and kiss each other for the last time. No one disturbs them in that moment of parting which begs to be allowed rebellion against time. The feel of her breath draws away from his face. Her touch slips out of his hands as gently as water. Her eyes growing misty become distant. And the departure happens. He looks on as she walks past the emigration counter. He looks on as her hand wipes away the tears. He looks on as she turns back her head one last time and holds the sight of him as though that moment was meant to be their one eternity…
Rachana looks on at this articulate stranger and the world he had taken her to –his past. She gazes at that emotional moment from his past sketched by his words from a time and space unknown to the two lovers who have now taken abode in her mind...
Is this story true? The moments of beguiling romanticism, its beauty of the tragic? It has Rachana dwelling deeper into a world that takes her far away from the ruggedness around her. She does not ask for its truthfulness. And Jaliya is the keeper and crafter of his own story as any other. It is words narrating moments such as the one told her that makes her fly to a place of contemplation, to secretly reflect on her own life, and the love she let go…
“Rachana?”
“You are so lucky.” Her smile is only partly visible. The lighting in the bus isn’t at its full capacity.
“How is that?”
“You had that moment to say goodbye to her.”
His eyebrows arch to himself and a quiet sigh follows. He smiles to her appreciatively. It is not a response he can do with words. And what about her? Jaliya knows that deep in her own quiet thoughts is some distant love that no longer walks beside her arm in arm. He can read her face.
“This woman sitting next to me asked me where I am travelling with my brother.” She grins and at the same time there is a hint of having being irked.
“Your brother?”
“That’s who she thought you were.”
His eyebrows knot and he squints at the woman next to Rachana in the dim light.
“What did you say to her?”
“I asked ‘what brother?’ Then she said ‘the one sitting on the other side’.”
“So who am I exactly?” Jaliya is curious in his tone which has a bit of mischievousness to it as Rachana detects.
“I told her you’re my friend.”
“And?”
“She was a bit s
hocked I think.”
“Why was that?”
“That a girl would be so bold to be talking with a boy on the bus who isn’t her brother!” She laughs in a way that says of some inner sense of heroism. And this makes Jaliya chuckle.
“So, do you always talk to a boy travelling on the Sunday night bus to Chennai?” It is a tease well disguised in a neutral tone as a perfectly logical question from a person who is asking for information. For a moment she looks at him bemused. Catching onto the words of this jovial teaser she retorts in good humour.
“Only if they don’t speak Telegu. And completely helpless without my assistance.”
“Like I said before, the gods have been kind to me.”
Will she tell him? Of her own lost love. The one she thinks of every now and then, whenever a moment of solitariness makes her wonder what it would be like to have his companionship again. The barriers of caste had prevented her from going with him on that journey of marriage. Her last meeting with him had not been allowed the tenderness of a parting as in Jaliya’s story.
She remembers the look. He had been bitter, and his face taut with a hidden rage. How could he not be, after having been humiliated by her father and uncles at his own doorstep. For the sin of being born lowly. And yet all the apologies she had to profess with the urging of a gushing river were not going to be heard. He had no want for them he had said, and declared that to forgive her for the wrong done to his family’s dignity by her kin, would make him truly lowly. Debased beyond all self worth. There are certain things that cannot be forgiven was all he had said, looking at her with an apology of his own that can never be uttered as words but may only be said from his eyes to hers.
“…we met in the evening, after sundown, it was dark…”
Her words have Jaliya going deeper into the beauty of a tenderness of a moment sanctified by the right of young lovers to defy the world. He now sees Rachana in her expression of part worry and fuller relief as her sweetheart calls to her from the darkness of a small lane into which the spray of light off the street lamp does not fall far. She peers into the darkness with a racing heartbeat. His face appears and their hands rush to clasp together, feeling the warmth of the other’s touch. A faint beady sweat rising between their palms, fearing the unknown. A union readying to defy all odds. The journey they had vowed to embark on.
“I cried and begged my father…he was with his two brothers, my uncles…”
They catch hold of Rachana and rip asunder the young lovers. The grip, the young hands have on each other, is not strong enough to resist the pulls of paternity. A forceful shove sends the young man tumbling to the cement floor of the bus station. She appeals in tears to her father and uncles. The menace in the very look of the men speaks of the promise of physical harm if he dares come closer. She is in her rightful place. The custody of her father. No lover unapproved may ever touch her again.
“We were only fifteen…Seems like a lifetime ago, like from another life…” Her smile is one suppressing a ruefulness as much as it suggests of how she feels it seems surreal, looking at it from where she relates it now.
“Where were you two going to go?”
“Anywhere at all…We had no real destination. Just the idea of running away. The journey was the only thing we had in mind…So long as it took us away.”
“Does he still live in your hometown?”
“About a week later, his parents sent him to live at his uncle’s place in Maharashtra.”
And no, they did not meet each other again. She tells an empathic Jaliya. There had been no letters from him. Rachana admits she waited in the hope of hearing from him, yet no news ever came. Perhaps any letters sent never got to her she says. Perhaps her parents made sure any such correspondence would never make its way to her. Rachana never got to know where he was. And of course all that had happened in the time before the youth of countries like India and Sri Lanka, immersed their lives in mobile telephony and social media.
Did this story really happen? Is it true? What claims does it have on it from the past lived in reality? But then, like Jaliya, Rachana too is the keeper and crafter of her own story. For each story ever told passionately in this world by a living voice there is someone who truly lives in the enchantment it creates. And it is this truth of feeling that matters to Rachana and Jaliya as they find in the other a sincere listener to the respective stories they live in, and wish to share.
Every person believes they have a story to tell. The first true, real love, the most emotionally benumbing tragedy, a monumental triumph that proves the strengths within, an incomparably courageous feat of selflessness, a sadness untold that begs to be put to rest…But who will listen to these stories? When does one’s life take the form of a moment attractive enough to be embraced by another? It is in the retelling of our lives that we shape it to become the poetry that we feel it deserves to be. Something more than the mundane, something more than what the listener can also claim to have lived. For every time we tell the story of our life, we allow that past to regain breath to relive its cyclical motion. Thus, in this cyclical motion we live, and relive; simply to submerge in the growing beauty of those stories. And the worlds they take us to.
In Michael Ondaatje’s novel Divisadero the character of Anna, compelled to run away from the world of her childhood, finds a life, a voice, a self, that remoulds her in a newness which is silently haunted by the past. The world that divorced her, and was divorced by her. In her words to us, unfolding who she has become in her new life, she expresses her belief that through the telling and retelling of our own stories we tend to slip into a life fixed to the ‘recurrence’ of those stories. And perhaps one may say, even a life is thus founded on the satisfactions of storytelling.
“…Do you think about him?”
“Often…”
Yes, there is a need in just about every one of us, sometimes to be a raconteur. And perhaps through the rights of a storyteller we seek at times to escape the cycle we live in. If our listener may allow us to tell our story the way we wish it had happened, regardless of factuality, perhaps then we may hope to alter the permanency of the stories we are fated to retell. If ever we possess the power to remould our personal pasts to our desires, it would in turn be the truest beauty of our present. For the narrating of that past gives us the chance of living a dream. A dream whose sanctity may rest on the spoken word...
The bus noisily rattles to a stop and there is the commotional shuffling of feet and thrust of bodies towards the door. The woman next to Rachana pushes past her legs with some inconvenience in the rush of things. A string of passengers gets in; their eyes hastily scanning for whatever seats available. Rachana sees how two more women appear at her side bearing the inevitable plan of sitting together in the seat that has fallen empty next to her.
“Shall I come over there?”
“I think you should.”
Jaliya heaves up his backpack with his right hand and goes over. The two women move to the seat just become vacant without thinking twice. The bus is settling down from the sudden burst of passenger boarding. Jaliya now has a window seat on his right. A companion on his left. And there is a feeling of complacence that has set into him. Possibly the proximity to Rachana has made him become more settled in his composure. She is now only a whisper’s breadth away from him.
She settles her head back and smiles as her head turns to him. There is an intentness he feels very strongly in the gesture. The way her head moved gently under the pallid of the dim light.
“I love to travel.” She beams at him, making Jaliya respond with a smile that almost seeks some elucidation of those words spoken sincerely. Trying to speak what belies her.
“You mean like this journey to Chennai?”
“In general, I meant. I love to travel Jaliya, especially night time travel.” Her voice now comes as though there is some distance she reaches for with those very words. A distance which is somehow ver
y much within her. A place of rest perhaps, but not one that has been freely afforded to her.
He feels there is a sense of great calm that has set on them both as they sit next to each other. This makes Jaliya feel a smile come on him as he turns to her.
“There is something very peaceful about travelling at night.” He is now reaching to an inner place of his own. “I rode the bus from Alagada to Nandyal passing those long stretches of fields at dusk, looking into the distances that run to what looked like mountains covered in a misty night at an unreachable distance… And there was something very peaceful in the feeling of that moment...It was the fact that I was travelling that made me feel so at peace, just looking at the scenery passing outside the windows.”
Getting off in Nandyal town, travelling from Alagada, he would be back to the backpacker routine of trudging around making inquiries for an affordable room to lodge for the night. Dodging tactfully the advances of touts. Keeping a straight head about him despite the weariness of body and spirit. Jaliya knew all that awaited him as that rickety bus would come to the bus station of Nandyal. It was a respite he had found from the burdens of thinking of such unpalatable inevitabilities, sitting in that rear bus seat between locals who simply knew him to be an outsider and no more. Gazing into a distance of endless expanses of crop fields under a sky coloured by shades of the setting sun, he had found it afforded him a moment of peace. A peacefulness had seeped into him. Painted in the picture of that scenery, passing outside the windows of an old Indian village bus…