The buzzing crowd along the length of the front verandah didn't help drown the pulsing drone of his heart. It was not a trait he had noticed in him before, albeit the uncertainty was only reasonable given the situation. But he refused to give heed to the self-doubt and turned his expectant eyes towards the entrance. The morning traffic from the highway had settled red smut on the low wall that bordered the office from the muddy parking lot. Dusting off the soot from the surface and again off his hands, he picked himself up, resting his weight on his splayed palms and perched atop the frail wall. There was no doubt it would hold him up for the time he would wait there, but he didn't entirely count the hearth of worry he was carrying inside him. Mindless of the anxiety that was coursing his body, he had crumbled the papers he was clutching in his hand. He straightened the papers and stiffened it around the corners when his gaze caught the neatly typed letters. The corner of his lips twisted up slightly reading her name. As he traced it across, with his index finger over the crusted typewriter ink...Geet, he wondered how the spirit of her was contained in only the four letters that made up her name.
Coming to think of it, there was nothing fancy about her. She didn't go to an uppity school nor did she use snotty language. There was no wealth or family name that had backed her and it wasn't the capturing looks that had drawn him to her. Seemingly he had known her all his life and over the turn of time he had fallen in love with her spell binding charm and comely beauty. Being in denial had only intensified his feelings for her and when it had kept him awake three nights in a row, he walked straight to her house in the middle of the night.
They lived in Jamuna nagar colony and she lived three doors away from his house, in the same housing complex. Although he dreaded gaining the distance of few tens of feet between their doors, he was driven to a raging desperation to do so those dark hours. At first she had dismissed it as a frivolous joke on his part, when he had knocked her door around 1.00 AM and uttered 'I love you Geet'. But when he had continued to hold his ground at the doorway, she had felt a crazed chill spread across her body. It had taken her a thrilling 10 minutes to make another sound and even then, she had only parted her lips in appalling horror and confusion.
Ever since that day, she avoided him like the plague. She didn't let him drop her off at the school she taught, nor did she go out with him again. Her avoidance had ruffled his anger initially. However the cognizance of the intense affections he had for her and the acceptance to name it began to drown the little of the ill temper, which occasionally built inside him. Since he had not for one moment contemplated on the outcome of the revelation, he was not taken back by the rift that had crept between them. Instead he started welcoming the few seconds of piercing glare she would shoot at him and stride away swiftly, in the chance encounters he got to cross her at the peak morning hours. He faltered to stop and persuade her to treat him as the same person she had all those years, prior to that night. But little did he know she was anticipating it every waking hour of the day.
At nights she would lie down on her bed and stare at the full-blown night that sprawled outside her window. Listening to the movement in the passageway that connected the houses in their floor, she often awaited for his footsteps before she could catch shuteye. In those doleful days that she kept away from him, it was the only reminder he was still in her life. That and her thoughts of him...not leaving behind the awareness that sprung within her, ever since she heard him admit his feelings for her.
Her hours of reasoning did not help her. The increasing sensations that arose in her body, once she caught sight of him watching her from the railings, irritated her. Perhaps it was not his vision that had changed, but her own perspective, she sometimes argued. And when all the nervousness and the tingles, that had started a couple of years ago, were beginning to dawn on her, that it was not just her faulty nerves, it sounded like madness to assent to a relationship with him...Maan.
She had moved in with her aunt in Bombay at a tender age of five after her parents expired. He had been her first everything, including her first kiss. However she had received it on her cheeks when he had been eight and she had been six. Now twenty years had gone by and he was asking to take her hand in his forever and the inhibition she had not known for the entire time she had known him had come up from nowhere. Without much thought she was keeping away from him and slowly when she started missing their chai time and Friday night movies together, she was resenting her own ruling.
It took her a while to realize that she had always regarded him with highest esteem. Ever so reticent and rioting good looks made her gape at him in disbelief often. Yet she was unable to give in and couldn't approve the alarming attraction as anything more than her disarrayed hormones. Repeatedly she would examine her wrist where his tight clutches had landed to yank her to him, pondering how her skin there had a memory of its own...his touch never did fail to connect with beyond the layers of her skin which so favorably wound up the emotions that surged inside her at those times. The days were getting longer and the nights dismal when she ran from him out of plain stubbornness. Her shortcoming...her physical disability to never spell the same three words out to him from that night...the one that left her in boundless tranquil was the irreparable insecurity that kept her from crossing over.
Besides the fifty feet between them, the growing distance was not something the ogling, nosy neighbors would continue to regard as one of their infamous quarrels, he concluded. Two months, he thought was a good length of time to make up her mind about him and so he had confronted her outside her school. After she had heard all of what he had to tell her, in unyielding silence, she had left him there without an answer. The parting words had done its job, he had mused and she felt it was unfair to be forced to make a decision. There was little value to stretch the matter any longer, she had decided. For he had told her he was leaving to Delhi permanently in hopes of a better job and pay at a construction company.
The wait under the asbestos shed was measuring up as eternity when he heard an auto come to a stop directly in front of the entrance he was seated close to. He had expected it to be her, instead a balding man in his sixties walked past him, launching a fresh course of disappointment in him. Would she come? He asked himself for the umpteenth time. Another ten minutes passed and once again an auto showed up within the compound of the government building. But this one rumbled past its way to the other side of the building making him get off the wall and kick the ground in frustration. As he fell apart in dismay, a curious pair of eyes, filled with angst watched him from the end corner of the building, hiding in plain sight.
His words from the last time he had challenged her sentiments in front of her school, came back to her mind. She at once turned away and leaned her head back on the hard wall that offered support only to her trembling body. Closing her eyes, she mentally lived through the assurances he had spoken to her with part indignation and other part yearning.
"I don't understand...Don't I speak enough for the both of us?" She had nodded not in the affirmative at that time. He had not faced her for a minute or two after the impulsive remark. Once he was calmer, with a depressing sigh, he had met her eyes.
"Look Geet" He had cupped her cheeks and she had jerked back, but he held her close.
"I have always been in love with you...with all of you, perhaps even as I saw you dragging that ragged doll across the floor and come home when you were five years old" He had said, lifting her lowered eyes back to meet his gaze. Her vulnerability had duly magnified in the glazing eyes that had reluctantly met his.
"And I always thought this silence was the bond that tied us...when words didn't come to disrupt the meaning of what we shared this was only bound to happen" She had vehemently shook her head, causing the scalding tears to spill and had tried to escape his hold. When she had resisted his advances by trying to walk away, he had only turned obstinate to hold her tighter and closer.
"I want to marry you...please don't deny or forsake me this time" he had implored her, making her look up in shock.
"I will wait for you tomorrow at Churchgate registrar office...take your time..." He had paused a second in hesitation over the duration he was giving her to consider and then added "I can only hope you never make me feel that my words had let me down...that it never fulfilled its purpose of telling you that you will be the only one I wish to gain at the loss of anything" He had said, placing her palm over his chest and then after a moment of taking in her distress, had let her go.
She staggered now on the ground slightly considering the painful piercing silence of a life he would go through if he married her. Her mute sobs, wrecked her body and when the entire living world came closing down on her in encroaching screams, her eyes closed and she stilled for a short while. She turned sharp around the corner and saw him pacing along the side of the entryway frantically.
In a cursory glance to his left, he saw a familiar image tread towards him. The sight was a vision in red with nothing clinquant adorning her glorified features, except her usual jewelry. Her simple appearance threw him in a mounting doubt, if she had come to deny what she had already been in denial of. But her mere presence in the vicinity of the building he had asked her to come, gave him a rush of sedating high. A smile grew from the side of his lips and instantly he moved in her direction. As he felt the first step hit ground, like it was not just a measure of ground he was covering to close the distance between them, but also in life, a deep-seated pool of warmth raced in his body. His mind reeled from all that would come to live in reality... in his life in just a few hours.
Her unsure step wavered just as she realized what she was doing and immediately swiveled around and ran back to the same corner of the building, she had stayed hidden. He followed her closely and held her right when she was steadying the violent tears that were threatening to flow out. Encircling her in a cradling embrace, he studied her gentle features settling in his hold; the nearness being new to them. At the moment it had been instinctive to possess her intimately, but it only seemed natural as he watched her ease and the tears began to disappear. She was shy resting her hands on him and was in awe of how easily she had slipped into their new found closeness. Shaking off the tingles that slowly rose from her waist where she felt his fingers resting, she drew a ragged breath.
She lifted her gaze to him and with the little distance that he allowed between them, she gestured in sign language to stop crushing her. Giving out the same exasperated sigh she often did at times like these, when he vexed her, she signed him that they should talk first. His face lit up with a curious but content smile, and raised a brow in question. She closed her eyes for a second, and then nodded as if she was preparing herself for what she was to say next, and gestured..."I have a few conditions" she gulped hard before she went on and started signing again to add, "if we are getting married..." Before she could finish what she wanted to convey, he had heard what he had waited and thirsted to hear all along. In a snap, he took her lips in his, making her go wide-eyed with surprise. The feeling stirred a thousand flutters deep inside her, curling her toes in quick response. Her thudding arms went limp as the caress of his lips on hers sent a shiver racing through her. And just as he felt her calm under his deepening kiss, he braced to break away from it. She was miffed no doubt at his outrageous act, although her scarlet cheekbones gave him other reasons to believe it was not so.
"I had done it all wrong last time" He said and in a blink his one arm left her waist and pointed it at himself. The next instant, he fisted his hand and brought it to his heart, after which he pointed it back at her. She knew he had just signed her 'I love you' and that he was gearing to propose her marriage in sign language too. As she watched him patiently go through the articulate and animating gestures, her eyes welled up. She blinked momentarily causing the brimming tears to glide down her cheek. In all of the twenty-one years they had known each other he had never seen her attempt what he saw next. With a wishful look and a smile tracing her lips, she opened her mouth and mimed those three words in a hushed whisper...
Only this one reached a deeper place than her signing would have.
You know how I seek change to break my blocks... This is one such attempt. Hopefully this will take care of it and I will update NY times soon as well. Do drop a comment to let me know how you liked it.
Hindi TV Shows
Cricket
