Wanting and Wanting and Wanting #2
This is a story of everyday. A mundane story in which I took the same route to work each day. Without fail, I stopped the rickshaw a little farther than home so I could walk on the footpath for half a mile, how I twisted my mother’s dupatta in my hand, waved it around. This is the story where I gradually got used to the smell of you in my air, the rings that came out of your mouth, the smoke that filled my lungs from being around.
Like the instant guilt that follows when you eat from the left hand. You don’t automatically think of your father but somewhere he’s speaking to you in your head. All these memorized habits, chores and rituals become you and one day you are one with them irrevocably. As I am with you.
I used to think nothing ever became familiar but this want became as familiar as the road back home.
Love travelled like smoke all around me. It was hard to miss each time we decided to walk the long way. It was never easy to walk with you. I, lost in the moment and everything about me as I was living this life for the first time. I guess that sort of feeling comes each time you fall in love. And you, just abruptly trying to jump from one moment to another. As if you wanted to retain none of it. You didn’t want anything to mean more. Unpeel another layer and find my lungs filled with smoke.
Just the way you’d never finish a book. Only read its beginning and its end. Stay unimpressed. Well, that was just you. Perpetually unimpressed.
When I was young, I’d seen that adults had an art of ignoring. The art of looking away from what displeased them and what they didn’t want to admit. It was the only way for them to go about their day. Like your mother ignored your bruises and fell asleep mid-way of each story you shared.
This too was our ritual.
I would look at you with love and you would look away.
I thought it would be harder to go on. Love can hardly ever remain a secret. But then there’s willful ignorance. You’d give me half a smile when I offered you my half-eaten sandwich and laugh whole-heartedly when I said it was the closest we’d ever get to snogging.
It was a secret but unlike most secrets, it was perfectly kept by both. Sometimes I would take a different route because my lungs would fill up with so much smoke that I would start coughing. Then you would help me recover from kind gestures and prolong the death from the slow-poison of your love.
And then I would walk with a skip in my step on the footpath and you would mutter to yourself, “How sad” because you knew my disease was incurable and all you could do was watch.
You did nothing to stop me from hoping. You saw a child within me happily telling her stories and you didn’t want to sleep to them. Your pity became my demise.
This is also your story. It is more of your story than mine. Your love for the mundane. The repetitions, rituals and chores. Of your voyeuristic pleasure from being wanted and watched. Your smoke and dust. The dark pavement by which you waited each day. And how effortlessly you pretended to not know.
