Ek Mohabbat Sau Afsane - A Collaborative Anthology

mohabbat ke baad mohabbat mumkin hai faraz
par toot ke chahna ek baar hota hai

They're empty shells.

Their faces, lingering ghosts of people they used to be. Their laughter hollow and eyes, dim, dry and stretched too wide by impossible dreams that never realised.

They're burnt out and damaged with broken spirits and fractured tomorrows.

But across from each other, they fall back into the past lives. Wistful and whole for a few stolen moment, they reverse the hands of time. Teetering on the edge of consciousness, they almost fall prey to the words they invent, the worlds they create, the lives they visualise. Whispered in reverent tones and self-deceiving conviction.

They become muses and mystics, philosophers and psychologists. They let loose their tightly bolted memories and watch them wreak havoc, revel in the bloodbath of too much, not enough, almost, not quite and just if.

Together they drown in their yesterdays before each other's eyes and feel themselves brought back to life.

--

'There are 80 words for love in Farsi, and I have lived 62 of them,' she tells him when they meet the first time, the last two patrons in a hole-in-the-wall bar around closing time.

'There are 96 words for love in Sanskrit,' he replies emptying her glass, and I'm ready to discover the 89^th.'

--

He's haunted by visions of a man he can't see, one he can't remember ever being complete. A vague memory that's both familiar and foreign all at once. He tries and fails again and again, can't recall any of the men he was before. He was someone before Her, he believes. Had to be. Until he wasn't. When he became someone new, someone She'd need. Until she didn't.

Those men have disappeared with time, he doesn't remember them anymore. He doesn't remember anything except the shame, humiliation and agony. He doesn't remember anything except exhilaration, floating and burning. The illusions of being complete, the fleeting happiness of being bigger than himself, the desolation of being nothing.

He's none of them anymore. He's no one anymore.

But sometimes, in the quietness, in the dark, in the absolute solitude all he craves is the stillness, the calm, the serenity. Anything that would pronounce the echoes of his essence. Something he's never known, something he never might.

He craves to be just himself for once in his life.

--

She's razor sharp inside.

Jagged broken edges covered in too much skin that are constantly cutting, bruising and scrapping like glass shards with every breath she takes.

Some nights she wakes up clawing at her chest, on others she covers herself trying to keep it all in.

She finds herself chanting His name, a talisman to bring her peace and lets herself remember the person she had been. Then she's repeats hers after His, to remind herself of the person she could never be, should never be, must never be again.

Sometimes she feels wonders if it would all end if she could just let herself forget His name, then perhaps she'd also forget the way she had been, the things she had done, the person she'd become.

But then she wakes up choking and suffocating with His name in her mouth and her fingers curled up in fists and realises He flows in her veins and she'll never be free unless she cuts herself open and remove every fragment of His being from within her piece by piece.

--

In another lifetime, they were Shireen and Farhad, perhaps even Sahiba and Mirza. He would have been Qais a long ago; she likes to tell him, screaming her name across scorching barren lands, only her name was Heer then.

--

'What is the measure of love?' she asks him one night.

He looks up at her. She was late today. Later than usual. And he tries hard to not let the relief of her turning up show up on his face.

'Sacrifice?' He says as she takes a seat across from him and motions to the bartender.

'You'd think that right? But no.'

He wonders why she'd say that. Instead he asks, 'Can you even measure love?'

'Of course you can,' There's a twinkle in her eye and half a smile. Like she's solved the mystery of life.

'What then?' He asks, like he knows she wants him to, like she expects him to.

'Pain' She says and grins triumphantly. And he clinks his glass with hers in acknowledgement.

He spends the rest of the night wondering who's love was deeper, his or hers, but never asks. He won't give in twice. This time, she'll have to concede.

--

Sometimes, he wonders if she's a magician, a storyteller or just plain deranged.

Sometimes, she wonders if he's just an ordinary man who never discovered the giant hidden inside.

--

He brings a book with him one night. An old edition with pages torn and paragraphs blacked out. There was once a tomb, centuries old just like this one, he tells her. Sacred and revered. An encyclopedia on love with the hows, whens, whys. The inner workings, the symptoms, the rules and conditions. Written in a dead language.'

'What happened to it?', she asks.

'We tried to make sense of it. We measured, reasoned, translated and transliterated it.'

'And?'

'And that's how we killed it.'

--

She drinks to forget. He drinks to remember.

Pretty words and rehearsed reasoning they often use to fill that gaping black void inside.

When really, they just drink to get by. Though they'll never admit to that, still holding on to their last string to pride.

Acceptance is a two-edged sword. Cutting into their fake bravados and deep denials. Acceptance would mean acknowledging the power They still hold over their lives. Admitting they're still haunted, still just as desperately in love. Admitting they haven't healed, admitting they never will.

Admitting they are broken never to be whole again.

--

There is a poignant liberation, a profound freedom in complete surrender that's almost akin to free-falling, diving head first off a cliff and flying. It's exhilarating, its euphoric, its destructive and deadly.

That had been her undoing, her personal brand of love, she tells him. And ironically, she'd always been a wild bird too afraid to fly.

--

It's better to burn out than fade away. She had told him that last time. He's been ebbing away since.

--

She's a wild runaway one night, a silent lover for twelve years on another and just a notch on a player's bedpost the night they decide to meet every weekend.

He was always himself. He hadn't learnt the art of escapism yet.

--

There are nuggets of truth woven into her long tales of the night.

And as he sits across from her, he likes to think he's a crime detective looking for that one small hidden detail, one slip-up, a tiny clue, some loose string that will help unravel the plan, put the entire mystery in plain sight.

He's constantly questioning, guessing, calculating and evaluating. Before long, he finds himself mixing his drinks with the smokey undertones of her accentuated voice. He soaks in in her every word, her body language and finds his entire world shrunk down to the tremors in her voice and the fluttering of her eyes.

But all he ever finds underneath her cloak of lies, in the seven sessions so far, are the same traces of longing, loss and despair that echoes within his own mind.

--

That first night, she tells him how she first saw Him at a cousin's wedding. How she truly came alive the moment His eyes met hers. She talks about fleeting glances and fluttering hearts. Whispered promises and covert encounters. Then she tells him how they swore their undying love to another and she left her opposing family to spend her life with Him.

That's when she discovered that some loves came with expiry dates. Unfortunately, hers didn't.

In the silence that follows, he searches for words to console her. Before he can find them, she laughs.

--

Sometimes, she thinks, moths are just fireflies that never learnt to love right. She's spent years trying to turn into a firefly.

--

He's beginning to look at the world again.

Outside in the stark brightness of a world too numb, he's starting to stare. All the nondescript faces passing by, masks glued tightly in place with a smile and he finds himself hunting for the stories they hide.

A tightened fist, a bruised lip, make up too bright. He'll share all his discoveries and reasoning with her tonight.

After all, it's so much easier than looking inside.

--

'We were returning from our honeymoon,' she tells him as he slides into the seat across from her.

No acknowledgements. No greetings. She begins like he hadn't just arrived, like he'd always been there, like they've been talking for hours, and it felt like they had.

He hadn't realised he'd been looking forward to seeing her the fourth weekend in a row, until he walked through the door and saw her sitting in the shadows, at his regular joint.

--

Their time together flowed in and out of consciousness and blackouts. Long conversations punched by monologues, interrupted by silences and the dull humdrum of everyday life - the meaningless, the mundane, the bizarre, the seemingly insane - that continued to move ahead without them. Often intermingled with a world that had forgotten them, the one they seek to forget when they return to lick their wounds every weekend, inside dark crumbling walls.

--

She never asks him.

And he finds himself feeling grateful for her apathy, finds it more refreshing than the sympathy they dole out, the pity heavy in their gaze, the one they barely hide.

By the time he's ready to tell her, carefully re-creating the trajectory of his life, he realises that while he had been busy trying to find the right words, he's forgotten some of the small details.

He remembers them being important once, but no matter how hard he tries, he can't recollect them anymore.

It disturbs him that bits and pieces from her stories seem to replace them now.

--

He was enough once.

Or so he thought until he met a girl who was the only thing that was. And that's when he realized that he'd never be, no matter how twisted, stretched, molded and bent.

Squeezing and pushing, moving and adjusting with Her twinkling eyes, alluring words and coy smiles, She had expanded his life until it all fit right. Until She was the seams holding his world tight. Until his entire existence had narrowed down to Her. Until nothing was, never could be, enough except for Her.

Then She left.

--

They don't even realize when words and illusions begin to replace whiskey and wine, when drinking and dreaming collide and longing gets chased away by lingering and silences become more truthful, more comforting than the empty words they use to distract their minds.

They're too busy trying to quieten the thunderstorms inside to hear the faint and erratic rhythm of their recovering heart.

--

Somehow, over the course of the months, their storytelling sessions turns into a game with the same stakes each night.

The nights she wins, he takes care of the tab. On others, he orders the last shots of the night at her expense. But win or lose, they always leave stumbling and staggering over the remnants of their broken hearts with teetering steps.

Ravaged and lightheaded, with shaken souls, brighter eyes and faint smiles, they find themselves looking forward to the next round, planning ahead of time.

--

He wonders how she looked like before. Wonders if she laughed different, if she still carried herself with the same thoughtless grace, had the same carefree voice.

He finds himself trying to divide her into the before and after of her life. Wonders if they even merge and where that point lies. Wonders if He had loved her despite of her swearing and drinking like a sailor or if He had loved her because of it.

He hates wondering about her. It often leads to the whys. So he chooses to look away. Too dangerous.

Untangling her would unfurl his carefully collected life.

--

His life is a series of references. Hers a collection of footnotes. Together, they spent all their time rewriting (rewording, retelling, restructuring) the stories of their faded lives, torn hearts, redecorating their battle scars.

But, no matter what course they take, what choices they make, all roads lead to loneliness and heartache. But what they're too bruised to see, too jaded to realise, is that all their stories always end just the same.

With the two of them shrouded in darkness, stripping all their layers, naked, revealing and brutally honest.

No matter where they start, what journeys they take, all their epilogues contain them, always them, only them.

--

It's feels the same every time.

The first sips, gulps, shots burn down their throats and leave a bitter aftertaste in its wake in their mouths. They grimace and splutter and force themselves to keep it down. An unwelcome intrusion, an invasion of their senses. By the fourth sip, sometimes second, at times the sixth, they get accustomed to the taste. Even start to crave it a little. The longer they drink, the happier they get. Around the second bottle, they're positively giddy. By the end of the night, they're stumbling and struggling to remember the people they are, the lives they lead. The morning after, they wake up with a splitting headache, their body breaking, their throat parched and their insides twisting up in knots, certain they're going to die.

Then they do it all over again. Because that's exactly what love felt like.

--

They share everything with each other.

From bottles to betrayals, snacks to sorrows, time to tragedy. They share their memories and musings, heartache and hopes. They know each other's deepest fears and the most nonsensical thoughts. They know everything except their current lives, careers or backgrounds.

They share everything that makes them who they are. But never share who they actually are.

They reveal their souls to each other yet never even their names.

--

They are devastation and warning signs.

Poster children for love gone wrong and vile.

With haunted dreams and empty eyes,

they're the after-effects of loving too much

without caution or consequences in mind.

They're varying degrees of despair, desire and delirium.

And together, they are love personified.

--

Ishq se log manaa karte hai. Jaise kuch ikhtiyaar hai apna.

As long as I can remember, she has always been around. Always in her irritating, pea-brained way, but always. From the tender age of 6, I can recall that she was always this clumsy, always this useless, always this... just this.

And from the age of 10, I have known that even family friendships are bound by some rules. For instance, it was free for her to come and go as she pleases into our house, but the same never applied to Biya. Biya was taught about lines. The same lines that were taught to me when I was Biya's age. Biya was always told that the relationship we had with her best friend's family was fragile, that it needed preservation and careful calculation and that she should never forget her boundaries.

I cannot curse Biya's stupidity enough. I cannot curse her stupidity enough. I cannot curse my stupidity enough.

Manu... Manahil still is Rabiya's best friend. I have no idea why. They have nothing in common. They don't have the same nature. They don't like the same things. They don't even belong to same worlds.

I was conditioned by my parents to remember my humble roots. All my life, during every hardship that my parents faced in raising me and Biya, they made sure I knew what our circumstances were, they told me to never forget my roots, never forget my societal status, never forget that I was not born to soar high in the skies. And I agreed on it all.

Till this day, I know I cannot have all the luxuries in the world. It is a daunting task to even manage normal meals during the month for our family. We dread accidents or repairs, for there is never enough saving.

Then why? Why did I let this accident happen?

"Manu fail ho gayi.Salahuddin, agar tum isse padhaoge, toh yeh pass ho jaayegi. Shaam ko waqt mile toh padha dena isko..."

"Mujhe aapka chehra zeher lagta hai. Aapki naak zeher lagti hai. Aapke kaan, Aapke baal, sab kuch zeher lagta hai!"

"Aap padhaane kyun nahi aaye mujhe? Zeher nahi lagte aap. Bure nahi, achche lagte hai aap mujhe..."

"Main aapko bilkul bhi achchi nahi lagti?"

They tell you never to fall in love, for love is blind in all its glory.

Let me tell you something, love is not blind. Love is not deaf. And love is definitely not under your control. Love is when you're in an accident, and you are experiencing the crash with your eyes open. You can see that you will hit and explode and yet you cannot stop. You know for sure that you will be burned to ashes, but something inside you anticipates the ashes.

Why?

Why do we allow ourselves to be led by our emotions? I for one, never planned for it. I wasn't even prepared until it hit me straight in the face.

And now, in the aftermath of it all, I can truly experience the acid jarring my insides, gnawing at the pit of my stomach, stabbing icicles in my heart. I must be a true masochist, otherwise, it is impossible to invite this amount of pain upon yourself.

The other day, she knocked on my door for hours. For hours she begged me to open the gates of my heart to her. For hours she asked me to accept her. Begged until her hands turned blue and her eyes turned red.

Yet, I didn't open.

I wanted to. The Almighty knows I wanted to. But this, this conscience of mine is the only thing I have control over. I will not let her win. I will not give into this. I am a nobody. A nobody that does not deserve her.

I don't have a stable job. A stable home. A stable life. I have nothing. And if I have nothing, what will I give her? How will I keep her at my meagre home? What will I feed her? I cannot even gift her a pair of those glass bangles she loves! Then who am I to exercise any kind of right on her?

It was my heart that fell in love with her. And I have never let my heart rule my life. It has always been my mind. And my mind tells me, that I am no good for her.

She taunts, in front of her soon to be fiance that I think she cannot survive without money.

She doesn't even understand that it is physically painful, to congratulate her on her soon to be finalizing marriage. It makes me want to rake away my own skin with my own nails. She asks me whether I think the man she has brought to me is sensible enough for her to marry.

What am I supposed to say? Manu, marry me instead? Marry me because I love you like the sun loves the earth. Marry me because existing without you makes the air around me burn. Marry me because your smile makes me want to achieve better, be better. Marry me because no man will ever love you the way I do. Marry me. Lord, Marry me please.

And I smile, and tell her that the man is a good choice. He is from a respectable family. He will keep her happy.

Her father comes to me, asking whether the man he wants his daughter to marry is of good character. He knows the truth. He knows I love his daughter. He knows his daughter loves me. Everyone in our families know the truth about us, and yet, they turn a blind eye. I smile and agree that I will talk to the man and find out his character. He pats me on the back, and turns away, happy.

See, it is not love that makes you blind. It is money. It is society. Her father trusts me to never break the boundaries. Never lose control. And her fathers' trust is something I will never shatter.

I will obey rules. I will never make her mine. But I will always love her. With all my heart. With all my existence. With all my pain.

For everything in my life is under my control, except my love for her.

[A/N: This one was based on Manahil and Salahuddin from Mann Mayal. Its a brilliant show and hope you liked this one-shot based on it. Next prompt will be reveal in two weeks. Thank you]

Reminiscing of a chaahna that is no more, in this evocative way, is very interesting. The way you drop lines, redolent of past memories and present pain, leaving the reader to conjure up scenarios, is very attractive.

Loved how the source of the nasha changed over time. Swirling thoughts replacing the swirling liquid. As intoxicating, if not more :)

I don't know Mann Mayal, but your OS speaks of the kind of love which wants to sacrifice for the good of the beloved. It's very movingly written. But, should that decision be only yours to make? Our present plays a part in shaping our future. But, the part is not the whole is it?

Looking forward to reading more from both of you.

Thank you Zeffy for recommending I read these stories :)