The sun scorned down, insensitively and blatantly, like an angry lover reveling in his revenge. The rain was scarce, coming and going in flashes of wet cold pleasure. Like as if it was afraid of the sun’s scorching wrath. And despite this tumultuous weather, there were so many places to be. Villas and apartments, restaurants and shady tea stalls; balconies and bathrooms, highways and terraces. She and her indecisiveness. Whether to go to the terrace with the blooming bougainvilleas and the slight humming of the desert cooler in the distance; or to choose the restaurant that had the quiet corner seat always reserved for her, so she could eat her plate of pasta staring at the colourful prayer flags adorned on the opposite wall. There were just too many things to chose from, and just not that many legitimate choices. Because of all the social burden we bear, we must confine ourself from the limitlessness of our own lives, she thinks. Life has become this never ending cycle of the similar kind of things happening again and again, just deceivingly different externally. Like when cheap locally produced Himachali peach flavored wine is being handed to you since years and years, in bottles of La Crema, Cotes-du-Rhone, Pinot Grigorio and Solaz Tempranillo Cabernet. And going through the same thing over and over and over again causes a kind of stagnancy in motion that she started demanding from life. This done and done, run of the mill story of her life seemed positively normal and she began to crave that pathetic feeling of being common. Like the invisible man in the crowd, coded and decoded over decades of social autocracies and reformist agendas. As long as there was nothing new, there was safety. Hiding from every prospect where she would have to break some kind of infallible psychological barrier in her own mind, and jump to the possibly slippery side, she found solace in the barren lands of the cloudless minds. But this was something different, and something she feared was wrong. But wrong never actually mattered in her life, because this loss of freedom to decide between the apparent wrong and right had been stolen from her while she was just little. That innocent passage of time, where you learn about the many evils and angels had been ripped from her life with a blunt traumatic force and pasted on some far away child’s materialistically inferior life. Taken away from her, by force. And the day she met him, she knew that the collision of energies that they would someday have would be so forceful and so brutal, that whether it succeeded or preceded bliss, neither would survive from the sheer force of their extreme velocities exploding into each other. He was by far, something that she would never chose to explore if she kept the target of being an invisible man. He didn’t have the physical structure that nights and nights of watching Channing Tatum movies had imprinted in her mind. Nor did he have the vicious charm in his voice and actions, that her mother and sisters were always warning her about. But he had that something, that difference that made it all fall in place. She would sneak out from her comfort zone when she was with him, and creep slowly inside the territory of no forgiveness. Sometimes, when the car was fast, and the hair was tangled, she would look at him in the driver’s seat and marvel at his imperfection in her life. She was like the crack in the marble staircase. The crack that corrodes the beauty and sanctity of the staircase, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot pass it by without walking over it and then bathing in the feeling of it not collapsing underneath you. He was her cleft, her crevice, her fissure, her rift, her fracture, her interstice. But most exquisitely, when they were together, physically, he was only hers. And the best thing about it was that she was never his, never did he ask for more, never did he ask for less. He just sat in the boat she parked beside the harbour and sailed with her to the depths of this sticky, bloating and blocked. He followed her willingly and sanctimoniously into the ever detonating mine field of juxtaposed feelings and random emotions that she dwelled in. His mouth would sometimes open to ask questions, but she could shut him up with one look of her eye and he would stay numb again. The looks they shared. So meaningless, their holiness lost in this confusing jumble of complicated situations and dynamic interpersonal relationships. Sometimes, they would stare into each other’s eyes for a long time and it would mean nothing, because on a spiritual plane; she would be thinking about the priority of going back to getting beaten up by her monotonous but moderately ecstatic life and he would be thinking about the girl with the hair that smelled like apples. But sometimes, when the whole house was filled with the giddy smell of old whisky and girls on the floor, passed out with Molly, in their daisy dukes, she would take him by the hem of his Pink Floyd tee shirt and escort him to the other room. The room that everybody abandoned because of the missing passing joint. And she would curl up beside him, despite the fact that he smelled like rusting tractor parts and car accidents. And he knew she kept him hidden from her real life, and he accepted the Hannibal in her. Because the time that they had, was maybe the most painfully sweet sin he would ever commit and he, unlike her, knew its value. They would lie there, for hours, occasionally talking or cuddling but it never crossed that. The dangerously thin boundary between solitary chemistry, and sexual gratification never showed face. And in this kaleidoscopic carousel of unsaid words, and uncircumcised decisions and few fleeting moments of feeling like a complete, whole person, she drew her rapture. In things that are wrong, and traditionally looked down upon and just, plain destructive in a magnanimous and outrageous way. Instead of being a prisoner of her catatonic flat-lined life, she rather derive those anguish filled and inhuman segments of utter emotional disturbance, either from agony and affliction or torture and torment. Do the wrong things now. Things that were wrong for him, for him too and for.
