the story

The Tail of love
This is my story over the past 20 years. Over the years I have fallen in love, fallen out of love. Each person I met, each girl I fell in love with, out off, but could never find that right person .Each one of them at some time wanted to leave everything and come to me and then their hearts changed as more men came in to their lives (or that’s what I thought).
Sometimes I feel whether love is just a game or did I, in my life was dealing with a lot of strange women who had a past, who had a future and I was just a part of their fleeing present. Each time they tried to come back, I would be in a different relation and at the end of it all, I wasn’t married, so there was a hope for all of them somewhere in their minds, that I was still available. What was it? I question myself at times. There are no answers .It’s a journey we all got to travel in our lives from one person to the next and as time passes, one of us would lose interest in the other, due to circumstances, work commitments, selfish motives or sheer fact, that we have fallen out of love and looking out for some one more charming, more debonair or someone who can solve our age old question of a settled happy life, which our current is unable to offer us.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Sid and I am one of those average looking blokes whom some girls in this world found hot , charming , debonair or someone who could solve their age old question of a settled happy life , till they came across someone who offered them more.
I happen to be a hotelier which means I work in the hospitality, and I got to admit that while today, as I sit down to write these memoirs, I do not really know when, or at what stage in my life I would actually finish these and if you are actually reading this then of course, it’s become a best seller on the international circuit. It is not something , I want you to relate with , it is something that I want you to understand, and, if I am able to save one relation through my efforts , I would be a happy man . This is not about me, this is not about you, this is not about the girl sitting on the next seat to you on the bus reading this book, it’s about all of us, who some time in life have fallen in love, sacrificed, hated the person we loved to the extent that we wanted to curse them and then the hope, that they would be back, stopped us.
This is also not a bloke’s guide to survival through broken relations or a girl’s guide to what not to do in a relation. It is just my memoirs , that I have written in the fleeing seconds as I have rushed to work , thinking of all the people I have loved, thinking what they thought of me and thinking , what if I was with any one of them now , how would my life be different? Would I be a happy man settled in life?
I am just happy living in my own dreams, wondering if they are happy in life with whomsoever in life they wanted, or chose to be with. Life would have been different somehow if I hadn’t got that call, but before that we need to travel to the times when it all began.
















Chapter one
My first crush
One of the advantages of having a picture memory is that you do remember all the small details in life, the way they happened. Now I could never remember my school books or what was written in them but I surely do remember, the girls I had a crush on. Those in school and years later, as I see them on social networks , adding them to my ever increasing friends list , wondering if she ever knew about me or was I just another guy in the huge crowd standing there, vying for their attention.
Nice cute bloke, who seldom showed interest in girls and if I was born in the current age, I would have actually gone forth and questioned myself “If I were gay?” I do know today that I definitely am not, and girls used to attract me the same way as they do now. I am still shy to walk up to a girl and ask her out, I still wonder if she would be more happy with the bloke who’s hitting on her, and I still can’t believe that despite all this, there have been so many women in my life, that I can actually count on my fingertips, and, yet I couldn’t manage to culminate a relationship in to marriage.
I still remember the day, I had walked in to grade 8, a boy who was growing taller every minute, thin as a reed, a cute smile and happy to finally get admission in to one of the most prestigious schools in Kanpur. I had never studied in a coeducation institution before that and was rather shy talking to girls. However this time, it was different. Being taught in a missionary school before that, I had always wondered, what it was like to have girls around. The boys or my friends used to talk about girls in our class and girls that were our junior discussing their vital stats and cracking lewd jokes, I would prefer to stay away from them. They would propose girls right , left and centre , some of them would get lucky , others just called them sluts since they got rejected but at the end of the day , girls would remain a mystery to me . During those days, I would ride my bicycle to school and had no way of knowing or coming in to contact with any girls after school.
These were the times when girl locker rooms used to be a mystery and standing near the stair case an obsession with many boys. As years passed on the length of skirts remained the same, and, I kept wondering what it was, I wanted in life? I had seen too many boys getting in to trouble because of their involvement with girls. I had decided that, I wasn’t going to fall in love till the time; I made some thing of myself. During these years, all I wanted was to get my dream motorbike, yet I was afraid to get myself a pillion rider. Such was my upbringing.
Time has an element of moving faster when you are happy and I do remember it was the year eleven of school. I was a happy man, had achieved my dream of owning my superbike and now, I no longer had to paddle my old cycle to school. I was zooming through town, with wind in my hair and some flesh on my bones due to my obsession with “Commando “and “Terminator”.
Posters of Porsche’s and Arnold covered each and every corner of my room. My sky blue study table used to be my heaven with a hand down chair from my grandfather. I used to sit there and day dream for hours together, not solving a single numerical problem with my books lying in front of me. What did I dream off? Definitely not being an author. I must admit I have failed to write a complete book for ages now. Ok, the dreams . Now, I definitely not used to dream of a girl, which is for sure. In fact the first time I actually saw a nude was not on the internet, but a hands down adult magazine from a friend of mine, who is a successful doctor in the United States today and I had definitely felt disgusted with myself for losing my innocence that day. I was a grown up suddenly, who didn’t know what to do with all the hormones, which had suddenly started to burst out of every nook and corner of my body.
It was the time, I did start to notice the female form up more and closely and suddenly girls didn’t seem to be a mystery. I felt attracted to fair skinned girls and girls with pimple were bad. Hair on the legs was a definite no for me, no matter how good looking or voluptuous the girl was. I had my own criteria of choosing which girls I was wanting in my dreams, but my first crush, I have to admit was my History teacher “Mrs Gupta.”
She had been teaching me history for the last three years and while the other boys had found her attractive, I always thought of her as a teacher .Just a normal guy who would study history for the sake of studying it to pass, but as my hormones kicked in, I wanted to impress her knowing fully well she wasn’t going to notice me until I did not achieve those great grades or come at the top of my class. It so happened that in the year eleven, Mrs Gupta became my class teacher, giving me a fleeing chance for her to notice me.
Now I wasn’t a genius in fact whole of my life I had lived under my brother’s shadow who is a year younger to me. He was one of those so called toppers in school, known even in other schools. A child prodigy who happened to my brother .Those who knew me, knew me as his elder brother and nothing more. The PTA meetings would generally involve around my parents collecting accolades for his success and would hang their heads in shame for my dismal performances in school. I would be often told by my parents to be more like my younger brother, but I was a dreamer and studies didn’t interest me anymore. I wanted to climb the Everest, go on massive road trips, do something extraordinary with my life or just join the navy and become a sailor travelling to distant lands. None of those dreams however came true and perhaps it was my failure at the naval academy that sealed my fate for ever in life to become an hotelier but that’s another story, another book perhaps.
It was the second semester and while I was not concentrating on my studies as usual with Mrs Gupta haunting my adolescent dreams, the school sports day was approaching. While the rest of the class was busy preparing for the athletic meet, I was sitting around studying history or for that matter, mugging it up just to impress her with dates. Now these dates were different, it was birth dates of great kings, battles and so on and so forth. I would often imagine myself as the king and Mrs Gupta, his lady love for which he would go out and fight a war. Little did she know that a student of hers was so much in love with her?
As the term ended, the sports day got over, it was frantic rush for the rest of the class to the study room while I was prepared for the exams and the results came out. I had stood second in class , my dad was finally proud that he could hold his head high now only to be told my Mrs Gupta , that his son hadn’t done some miracle but it was the rest of the class who hadn’t performed well. For the first time all my dreams related to her were shattered and I felt what a bitch she was, who washed all my efforts, all the late nights, I had put in to mugging up those stupid dates, just for her attention, with a single drop of sweat, that sat so precariously on the tip of her nose on that hot sweaty summer afternoon.
I never tried to seek her attention after that again. Class eleven went by and Dad got transferred to a different city. The last I saw Mrs Gupta was on 12 June 1995 as she struggled to walk being nine months pregnant to take a class looking no longer the way she used to look , who once was a queen in my dreams.
Over the years, my dreams with different women have been washed away with that single drop of sweat and little had I known that it was a long road; I would have to walk till I would actually meet the girl of my dreams or if such a thing ever exists. Now after so many years , I wonder if she is still teaching history , how her hair must have turned grey , and she would have looked the part of a historian , would she remember me ,of course I am sure she would remember my brother . I never saw her after that in my entire life because I was now in a boarding school trying to pass grade twelve and training hard to get in to the navy in a beautiful hill station called Nainital.















Chapter Two
The girl with the white handkerchief
I had finished my schooling or rather year twelve with a pretty sad performance on the mark sheet. I was given a good thrashing for not performing well and the only saving grace were my scores in history. While I had been in love, I had fallen in love with history and now was dreaming of being an archaeologist, Indiana Jones being my super hero. “Commando” and “Terminator” had now been replaced with a whip cracking forty something bloke, taking on baddies and discovering the world of lost treasures.
It was a tough situation, as my dad wanted me to be an engineer, and I was studying hard or dreaming hard of getting in to an engineering college, with maths, physics and chemistry being my nemesis. It seemed an uphill task that seemed impossible for me to accomplish, and yet, I did try until that night the phone rang and I happened to pick it up.
She had the sweetest voice and wanted to talk to someone who didn’t live at our address. Plainly speaking it was a wrong number, but we started to converse and spoke for half an hour. This was the first time I spoke to a girl in my entire life on those levels, as friends. Perhaps she wasn’t in front of me and that was the reason I could speak or it was just plain loneliness, trapped in my parents’ house grounded, for not being able to secure good marks in my class.
Now I do not remember what we spoke about but it was like a dream chat for sure because she promised me to call again, but did not divulge her number as she was afraid of her parents. I was afraid of mine too. Since those old dial me type phones with a ring that could wake up the dead, lay right next to my father’s bed. A call at night would mean he could wake up and listen to the whole conversation; I was having with this girl, whose name I didn’t know.
The cat and mouse game had begun. Each night she would call up and I would keep the hands free phone by my side. I would pick it up at half a ring so my dad who would be heavily intoxicated under the influence of alcohol wouldn’t get disturbed. We would talk late in to the night and no matter how hard I would try to find her name, she would never tell me. Only the sweet voice that I so got used to hear.
All good things come to an end. While our conversations kept getting longer and longer, my mom felt a hunch that something was wrong and one night the inevitable happened. My mom heard our conversation. She was furious and wanted to know who the girl was. I had no answer since I myself didn’t know who she was. After that for a few days, I decided to kept low, only to pick up the call again in the dead of the night and using radio programs that we both used to listen to communicate. Life was simply bliss. I had a girlfriend.
It was near fourteenth of February, Valentine’s Day and I decided to meet her. After much pursuing, we had decided to meet at a public place and since I had no way of recognising her, we had decided that she was going to hold a white handkerchief so I would know that it was her. I wore my best attire and was happier than usual. I was happy, that I had saved some money and broke my piggy bank to take out the much needed 100 rupees to buy her a gift.
I reached the designated spot and sat there for an hour but she never turned up. I had no way of contacting her. Cell phones weren’t invented then if you wonder why I didn’t text her and I never had her landline number. Any ways after an hour or so I decided to go back home. I reached home only to find mom was really angry as the girl had called up and spoken to my mom telling her to convey the message that she won’t be able to make it. My cover had blown up and I was cursing my luck. First I had sat there like an idiot for an hour waiting for her and now mom had come to know that I was still in touch with her.
She never rang me again after that. I would never know what my mom told her or who she was. For me she’s a mystery whom I had tried to put a face to that Valentine’s Day in 1997. My dad was a bit more understanding than my mom to my surprise but it was decided that I should be packed off to a different city where I could concentrate on my studies.
I decided to move to Agra for preparing for my engineering exams and my stay was arranged at my uncle’s place, a close friend of my dad. It was after three years, I was going to meet her again. The last time I saw her I used to come up to her shoulder and she would wear braces. Last that I had heard of her was she had won the title of Miss Agra. Charul was twenty one and I was nineteen grown up in to a handsome hunk. It was time to see her once again. Life was going to be rock n roll. “Time to be Sid” as I called it, for she was a temptress or my first real love in life.
Before we move on to chapter three and before I tell you more about Charul, it is essential to tell you here a year later I got a letter from that girl, written on a post card, explaining me, why she hadn’t turned up that day, how her mom had found out and how she was afraid that she wasn’t going to be able to communicate with me anymore. It’s strange that I could never find out, how she got my address as my dad was relocated to a different city and it was shear fate as I checked with the postman for some results and he had handed me that postcard. It made little difference to me, because I was in love with Charul as I tore that postcard and threw it in the dustbin.

Chapter Three
Of love and Sacrifice
I was packed off to Agra and my Uncle who was a close friend of my dad, had agreed to keep me in his house, since he had known me as a little kid. I had often heard that his brother who was child less, had wanted to adopt me at one stage, but my dad had not agreed to it. Now my Uncle was rich, and I was put up in to the guest room, which was better than a five star hotel room. It had a bar that was not used, and I felt happy. The day I moved in Charul was visiting her cousins in a different city and I felt a bit awkward staying with their family.
I must admit, that I did try to throw as fewer tantrums as possible and for the first time in life were eating veggies that I wouldn’t even touch in my house. My dad was extremely concerned and warned uncle of my philandering ways. He was not happy with my results in the previous exams and told him to keep an eye on me, if I was studying hard. After all he never knew my ability to dream in front of a book for hours together.
Charul came back from visiting her cousins and although she had known me as a kid wasn’t much impressed with her father’s decision for me living in her house. I also kind of stuck to my schedule of classes and other friends and study till lunch time to avoid her. We would meet at dinner time mostly and I would eat my food and quickly run off to bed. During the initial days, it would be my schedule and I knew something was happening to me again. I was suddenly doing two hundred to three hundred push ups a day and all the good food combined was looking better and better. My six pack was fairly visible now and then one day while I was working out, she entered my room.
I had just finished my daily exercises and was bare chested. She looked at me with awe. I was kind of taken aback at her blunt arrival in to my room without knocking and I knew she was looking at me. I wore a tee shirt and asked her how I could help her. She told me about this friend’s party she wanted to go and wanted to take me along since she would get late in the night and uncle wanted it so. I agreed as I was any ways getting bored with the schedule, I had been following and it was time to explore the city.
I got ready sharp at five and we left for the party which turned out to be a huge affair of who’s who. A famous comedian had been called to entertain the guests and it was my first taste of a real party. That night we danced together and on the way back she wanted to smoke. A girl smoking in 1998 was a big thing but that was her. A tom boy, a perfect girl. I got out of the car and go her favourite brand “Classics”. She offered me one and I didn’t resist.
As I took my first drag in life , little did I know years later I would be finishing of a box a day, my lungs craving for more smoke and the person who introduced me to this vice won’t be around or would she even care what happened to me.
I coughed and she laughed. The sweetest laugh, as I smelt her perfume mixed with smoke. Our windows were rolled up and I rolled down a bit to let the smoke out. “It’s not healthy.” I said. She smiled and I got hooked to her and smoking. Of the two things I got hooked to that night, I am happy one of them has not left me till date because if it were to choose between love and smoke, I guess love is more injurious to health.
We reached home around midnight and she thanked me for a great evening. I had made sure to get us some mints to ward of the smell of smoke and she thanked me for it. As I walked to my room, she decided to follow me and as we sat in the moon light talking about life, I felt a strange connection to her. We spoke for an hour and finally she left. I was in love once again only; I had no means to tell her. She was elder to me and I was a nobody at that time. I wondered if I was even doing the right thing falling in love with her. It had no future. A relation with no future always ends up in pain. I didn’t want to think about it at that time. I opened my physics book but my mind was somewhere else. She was smiling and I was skipping heart beats. I decided to sleep but sleep was nowhere to be found. I got up and decided to do some push ups.
The next morning we met at the breakfast table. She for the first time said good morning. It was usually me who would say that. I smiled and wished her a very good morning too. Uncle was busy reading the newspaper and didn’t notice a thing. I had my breakfast and remembered my last night’s decision. A relationship with no future ends in pain. Hell, what was I thinking? She didn’t even love me.
A few days had passed and I went about my normal routine as usual. I had decided not to go in front of her since I was getting attracted to her and I knew what was happening to me. I was losing interest in my studies once again. It was not good sign. I had to get in to an engineering college this year or my future would have been doomed. I decided to hell with it. I felt responsible for her.
We started to go out more often and she would take me everywhere. Be it shopping, going to restaurant or just meeting friends. We were kind of in- separable and would talk about anything under the sun. During this time, my dad invited uncle and family to visit them in Nainital and I was exhilarated. Seven days with her in Nainital. It meant fun.
The trip to Nainital was fun. We drove all the way from Agra to Nainital and she and I joked about everything. When she felt asleep on my shoulder, I made sure not to move for those two hours at all, in case she would wake up. We stopped on the way for lunch and when we reached home. I took her outside to look at the night sky. It was the first time the night sky had looked like that or was it that I was in love?
By this time, I had become over protective of her and it so happened that one of my Dad’s acquaintances misbehaved with her. It was a minor incident and he was intoxicated but I lost my cool and pushed him out of the house. Nobody could understand what had happened and they were rather surprised at my behaviour. I explained the situation and Charul appreciated me for protecting her as she was feeling uncomfortable with his behaviour.
I felt nice and decided that I would take her to me favourite spot in town the next evening. It was a strange place a graveyard from the British era. I knew she was like me, and would love it totally. I wasn’t wrong. The next day, we set out for our own personnel adventure, besides what my dad had planned. He would have never agreed to me going there and we bluffed our way. This graveyard has one peculiarity. It always has fog in it and none of the residents there had died a natural death. It reeked of pain and suffering and at one time I had often sat there and read stories of how people had died untimely just trying to rule a country, that wasn’t theirs.
I showed her my favourite grave, one that of a mother and her seven kids who each had died in a span of six years and the mother had died in the seventh year. Mrs James Carrington was wife of the local commissioner in the year 1876 and was blessed with seven children who were aged between six months to seven years. All of them had perished within a span of six years of cholera and Mrs James despite of being a powerful woman had decided to end her life after her last child died.
I told the story with authority and she was impressed. She asked me how I knew so much about her. I decided to show her rather than tell her. “Do you really want to know then follow me?” I looked at her gravely, smiling in my heart and thanking Mrs Carrington for helping me out a little after more than a hundred years. “Yes” she answered and we were off to the city library.
I have been interested in History since the times of Mrs Gupta and it was my passion for knowing the stories a bit more closely that had brought me to this library before. The story of Mrs James Carrington after accidently discovering her grave that fateful day had brought me to this library and after searching through the archives, I had discovered the sad story of her. I had made sure to take some flowers to her grave whenever I visited and this time had been no different. However my encounter with the colonel was something I cherished most while I would visit the graveyard.
I had been visiting the grave of Colonel James Robert 51, RAF division and had died in 1896, close to hundred years earlier. I wondered often as I would look at the grave that was adorned with a sculpture of a beautiful angel that was supposed to protect him through the long journey in to heaven or hell. Colonel James unfortunately wasn’t a victim of some gunfight but had fallen to Cholera, one of the deadliest killers in the hills around the area. Cholera had survived even after hundred years, while more than ninety % of the graves in the grave yard were victims of the dreaded disease, it amazed me how cholera had won the accolades for its role in the freedom movement. It’s something like if people die in a natural disaster, it’s sad but if they die in a bomb attack, there are terrorist to blame it on.
The grave had been broken open. I had been writing to the local newspapers in regards to this, of course secretly. I didn’t want anyone to know about it as people would have found it weird, more over my trips to these beautiful graveyards would have ended, my parents branding me as a lunatic. I did believe they still thought so, but never admitted it. In a country where live people could not get justice, it was hard for the dead more so, their graves robbed by men guided by hunger and unemployment. These graves were often sources of medals made of precious metals that were earned after hard work. I wondered if anyone of the grave robbers ever wondered if there was an antique value attached to it. Those were the days when graves attracted me more than the living and while the silence was eerie, it proclaimed peace away from the maddening crowds that were taking over the city like a swarm of crickets demolishing a corn field.
I felt bad, because the colonel had been a silent friend till now and had heard to everything I had to tell him with patience, not that he could do anything about it, after all he was dead. I looked at his skull that lay near the shattered angel, who had been unable to protect the colonel last night as he was robbed of his medals and dignity alike. I picked up his skull and looked at my friend for the first time. The hollow eye sockets stared back at me. Was he pleased to see me? I carefully place the skull back in to the grave as I said a silent prayer, not for his peace but praying that he wouldn’t grab me and pull me back in to the grave with him while I kept the head down with the rest of the bones. Once the skull was carefully secured back in to the grave I pushed the top stone back in to place feeling sad for the colonel.
I stood back and looked at my handy work. The grave was secured and while the angel no longer was protecting the colonel, I had done my part in saving him from facing further indignity by dogs, hyenas and other predators that lurked in the dark alike. As I said a silent prayer, I saw a man approaching me. He was young and handsome, his tailor made suit draping his thin frame, he looked the part of a corporate lawyer. He swayed his umbrella as he walked towards me. As he came closer, I looked at him more closely. He was a Gora sahib. I wondered what he was doing in the graveyard. Perhaps he had come to pay his respect to his fore fathers or something. I had seen grandsons and granddaughters of rulers coming back not only in search of their history but also to pay respect to their graves. I smiled as he walked in to an audible distance.
“Hello” his accent was definitely British. “Hi” I replied as I looked at him wondering if he was real or a ghost. He seemed real but places sometimes make you see things and graveyards and ghosts go hand in hand. I looked at him closely. He wasn’t translucent or a floating. He was real for sure.
“Just visiting a friend” I said trying to hide my awkwardness. After all I was in a graveyard putting stones on a grave. He could have taken me for a grave robber. “It’s ok.” He said. He had noticed that I was feeling awkward. “So you live around the area?” I asked him trying to make a conversation.
“Yeah, just around the corner.” He pointed in to the direction he came from. I looked at the trail that disappeared in to the forest. “Someday I will go further” I made a mental note to myself.
“Nice to meet you, I am Sid” I introduced myself.
“Hi, I am James.” He said as he shook my hand. His hands were cold, but so were mine. It was cold and soon the sun would go down. I looked into the horizon and saw clouds frantically lining up as if in preparation of a drill.
“The weather might be bad pretty soon.” I looked at him.
“Yeah, bollocks. I was just headed for the city.” James said.
“I can drop you, where are you headed for?” I asked him.
“Boat house club” he said.
“Good lets go then” I didn’t want to spend any more time in the grave yard. It was getting weird by the minute, as fog started to spread in the grave yard. I knew when it was time to go. Fog was bad not because I would see ghosts but I always used to get headaches because of it. I kick started my bike and with James, I set out for the town. The city was crowded with revellers partying on the streets. We reached the club and James invited me for a drink. I was getting late.
“Some other time, I know where you live now.” I joked with him.
“Yeah, you do, don’t worry your secrets safe with me” he said as he turned around and disappeared in to the club.
I smiled. I had a new friend. I reached home and as usual got a scolding for staying out so late. Rules were rules and coming home late especially with exams looming over my head wasn’t something that pleased my parents.
I pulled up my blanket and thought of the day’s events. The graveyard and James.
“Your secrets safe with me” I felt a chill run down my spine. Only last week I had told the grave me darkest secret. My crush, my infatuation, the girl with the white handkerchief.
“Thanks colonel” I smiled as I dreamed of my secret.
The trail that James had told me ended in to a cliff and there was no James registered as a member of the club. The colonel had found a way to thank me for making him at peace once again. I smiled to have met someone after hundred years, only if I had known and asked him more about life in his era or about Mrs Carrington. After all he had seen it all first hand.
Charul seemed to be really impressed with me now. While most of the nine-teen years, she had known till date had been listening to “who the fuck is Alice”. Here was a guy who was actually trying to seek answers to some kind of mystery or so it seemed. I was happy, that she was getting to know the real me now. We went for dinner that night and she commented how much I ate. Perhaps she would consume that much food in a week’s time. We both had laughed at it as we smoked at another of my favourite spots looking at the stars. I had wanted to kiss her but then I had resisted myself wondering if I ever was going to admit my love for her.
The trip was soon over and I was back in to my normal routine of dreaming once again but this time I wasn’t dreaming about getting in to an engineering college but of her. I would always wonder if I got married to her in a couple of years, how perfect my life would be, but destiny had other plans for me.
It was right after the Nainital trip, that my father had received that phone call. Ok this isn’t the phone call; I had been talking about earlier. It was from some guy who told my dad, that they were going to abduct me if I tried to come too close to Charul. Now I used to be a big guy at that time and I was young. I did not understand what fear was and I was in love. I loved a challenge in those days and I was in love. A deadly mix of vodka and coke.
I came back from my classes and found uncle sitting grimly on the sofa. I was sure that something was wrong. Had he found about my feelings for her or was it she was feeling the same and had told Uncle about it. The situation just turned out to be different. It was a phone call from my dad who had explained the whole situation to uncle; it seemed he wanted me to pack up my bags since my father no longer wanted me to stay in Agra any longer.
I felt totally devastated. I couldn’t leave her like that but what was I thinking. My dad came the next day and I had to tell him, I wasn’t running away. He felt proud of me and admired me for my courage but in my heart it was her love and the felling to be close to her that didn’t scare me. A Year later, it was that love for her that had earned me the name of “stud” in college, because, I never felt that fear any more. I was a rebel. What I didn’t know that I was going to be one for the rest of my life.
That evening I went to my classes as usual and my dad kept a watch on me. I felt secure with my friends and knew everything was all right. People who abduct don’t warn and of course, if I had got abducted, it would have just been an icing on the cake. I knew that she wasn’t going to forgive those guys. Who were those guys? Just some road side Romeos. Things settled down and my dad took me back home for a week. I knew I couldn’t live without her and after a week I was back in the thick of the action.
Time was flying by and soon December came. My engineering exams were just a few months away and I wasn’t prepared. All this commotion had taken its toll on my mental health and I wasn’t feeling very good about it. I tried to concentrate on my studies but I couldn’t. We would be together on some or the other pretext always. I was in so much love with her and yet I could never make myself say those magical words.
Now my uncle at one time had business links all over the world and it so happened, he invited one of those people with family to visit India. The first thing that happened was the decision that they were going to stay with us and I was moved to another accommodation. It was a disaster. I was moved to a big cold room away from all the luxurious comforts of the room, I had got so used to. The bar had been emptied out, thanks to me and Charul who would nick drinks from their only to fill up the bottles with coloured water. This was another tension on my head what if Uncle found out about it.
That fate full morning the Germans arrived. Now Indian hospitality is known all over the world and while they had got food from Germany (Quarantine laws still don’t exist in India), they were massive guys. The elder son was called “Martin” and he was the most dashing guy I had seen in life. He was massive and although I was big built at that time, I looked puny in front of him. The guy was single, had his own rock n roll band and was climbing the ladder of success on the German pop scene.
Uncle had organised everything for their stay with beer and mineral water to boot. Each evening, he would organise a bon fire and we all would sit around and drink beer, I would of course stick to coke for obvious reasons. They stayed with us for twenty days and Martin and I became good friends. So much so that he asked me, if Charul would be interested in marrying him. I told him that I would ask her and let him know. Suddenly from a lover, I was turned in to a match maker. That night as I lay in my bed thinking of all the events that had occurred that evening, I made my decision.
Years later, little did I know that a decision to let go, that I had made so easily that night would be so difficult to accept or understand and I would sit questioning myself, do I deserve happiness or am I just a peg in the whole wheel of someone else’s life.
The next morning, I was in a grim mood as Charul threw grapes and Martin caught them and ate them. There was a cheerful disposition in the air. There were no mind games. They looked perfect together. I had made my decision.
I decided not to ask her anything and let things take their own course of action. A week later they left. Charul had gone to drop them off and when she came back, she told me that he had proposed her. I still remember that day so well. I was sitting on my desk dreaming as usual. She had walked in to my room wearing a pink Tee shirt and jeans and flicked my books aside. She had climbed on the desk and told me “he wants to marry me, what should I do?”
I looked in to her eyes with all the sincerity; I could muster and said “Go for it.”
A tear had rolled out of her eye as she got down and ran out of the room. I knew it then how much she loved me but could never say it for the same reasons I could not. We were just friends and it was the most beautiful friend ship, we ever had.
It took a lot of patience and courage to explain to her folks about it. Martin being a foreign national did not help at all and they all had apprehensions. One by one each of the family members had to be convinced and I played a pivotal role in explaining the situation. My work was done.
Life was on a roll again and I had no reason left to stay on in Agra. I called up my dad and asked him, if he could come and take me back. I always thought he knew about it, a question I wonder, if I will ever be able to ask him? That day as I sat near the window, I overheard Uncle and Dad talking about her Divorce. How they were going to manage that. It was a shocker.
She was married before and now the picture became clear. The guys who had tried to abduct me. The people who were always around. She was married to one of them. It was a love marriage against the family’s wishes. Ah life, I wanted to curse myself and yet I knew a solution will be found out for the problem. After all my dad was a lawyer.
I have or I should rather say people go for great lengths in love. Sacrifice and are always honest to their partners, they wait for years and in the end they are with the one person they love. I mean, this is what we have been told by Bollywood, all the great novels, stories of lovers, how they died just trying to be with each other.
Charul had fallen in love with this guy when she was sixteen. Like a typical Hindi movie. She was in a girls school, this guy in my so called missionary school. He had wooed her and they had got married the day she had turned eighteen to him.
Since he was also the same age and was doing nothing at that time, they had decided that they would wait for a couple of years and he would make something of himself, while she continued to stay with her parents. I think they were sticking to the plan, till the day I walked in to the picture and she must have felt that she had made a mistake in life. When Martin walked in to her life, she just quit her previous relation that had stood the test of time, which had made him work hard on his career. She on the other hand had fought her parents tooth and nail for him.
The fact was that at the end of the day, she understood the futility of love by herself. She knew she was taking a big risk of marrying Martin but she also knew Martin could provide all that she had ever wanted in life. The luxuries she was accustomed to. Its human tendency to go for things that they desire, no matter what is the price they have to pay. It was a lesson being taught to me, when I was nineteen, what I didn’t realize that years later when I would be in a similar situation trying to make something of myself, my girlfriend would do the same thing to me and I can’t even blame her because, when Charul could leave the person she was married to, for a better life, she could do the same, only if I had known or learned that day, that love is not eternal, it’s a passing phase that lives it lifecycle just like the way we do and dies.
I came back and tried concentrating on my studies and yet I would keep missing her. I would call her only to listen to her voice but never say a word; I think she knew it was me. My dad got transferred. I never got in to an engineering college and by chance of fate secured admission in one of the hotel schools in Mumbai. The day she flew off to Germany to get married, I was on a train to Mumbai. Little did I know I would meet her again after two years and feel totally disconnected.
I met Charul on my twenty first and I happened to be in Agra at that time. In the last two years all I had received from her was a card on my birthday, and a letter, what an awesome time she was having in Germany. I had felt happy and had replied to her with my whereabouts. What I was doing in life, how I had ended in one of the most prestigious colleges in Mumbai and wanted to be a chef. She would have never known how everyone in my class knew about her, how I had sacrificed my love for her and how I wouldn’t fall in love again for the next seven years of my life.
She came to my party and left pretty early as it wasn’t exactly a party, where I should have invited her any ways. My accommodation was shabby and while she was going and I, at that time didn’t know that this would be the last time, I will ever see her, asked her “Are you happy?” She looked in to my eyes and said “Why do you care?”
She was gone forever. In these 15 years, she has often come to India but never made the effort to get in touch with me. Had a couple of kids and more so got involved in her own little world. Martin could never achieve success on the rock n roll scene but did fairly well for himself. More importantly, he had been around her. Hasn’t left her and that is what matters to me today as I write this, because I had always cared and I always will. I do question myself at times, in regards to all that had happened in those days.
When she had taken the decision to leave her love for money, should I have stopped her and told her this was wrong. I just wanted her to be out of that guy, I didn’t care if she would be with me or not but I wanted a better life for her. I went to all lengths to make sure she got what I had dreamed for her. Did that love die its natural death or was I responsible for its death, trying to play cupid.


Chapter four
The years between
After that I finished my college and secured a job at one of the most prestigious hotels in Agra, but couldn’t stay for long. I would keep going back to Agra in a hope that one day she might come back and yet, somewhere in my heart I knew she wouldn’t. It had almost been three years after that eventful night and I had decided to move on since my career had hit a road block big time.
I had no idea what I was doing in life. Being a rebel is not to one’s advantage when it comes to jobs especially in the hospitality industry. I had no responsibilities and I was a mind of my own. It was after struggling for a few years that I finally landed back in Mumbai. I was without a job and no future. Till now the world was limited to land lines, and love was about being with people you met or talked, but, did I know there was something called chatting online.
I was new to all this and while I would access a computer in one of the cafes next door in search of jobs, I hit on social networking websites. It seemed to open a whole new world where you didn’t have to look your best or speak the right words. If you got deleted, you would just move on to the next person. It was fun and I was kind of enjoying myself. Chatting let to webcam and webcams led to much more. I was enjoying myself once more. As Charul faded from my mind a wild thing had started to occupy my mind. She was called Trisha.
Trisha used to live with her dad in the USA. Hated him and would talk to me for hours together. We would be talking all kind of stuff which mostly used to be sexual in content and she would hold my attention for long hours. I knew it then, that I was falling in love and while we would have our fights from time to time, she would somehow make it up. She would tell me lot of stories how here dad owned a lot of businesses and was rich beyond my dreams. Somehow I could never believe her. However she told me she had spoken to her dad about me and he was deadly against it. She would wait for me online every day and we would talk for ages.
It was around this time, I was running out of money and while the going with Trisha was good, I had to look for a job. The biggest problem with any job is that you do not get any free time for chat conversations. I was chatting with lot of girls and one of them was kamini.
Kamini was the daughter of a commercial airline pilot and used to live in one of the posh locales of Mumbai. We got chatting and she happened to be in KL at that time. While I would chat with Trisha during the day, I had set times for Kamini. Soon she was coming back and I got her mobile number.
The day she arrived, I gave her a call. She decided to meet up with me the next day and we decided to meet up for some drinks and movie. She was a tiny girl around five feet tall, a tom boy with a history. I wasn’t interested in the history part and she would do things momentarily. The first day we saw a movie and after movie when I decided to drop her home, she was pleasantly surprised.
“Kiss me!!” she said. I was taken aback. I had never kissed a girl in my whole life till that day and here we were sitting in an auto, the driver precariously driving through the evening traffic, smoke from adjacent vehicles making it difficult to breath. I wondered if I had heard it right and before I could react I was lip locked with her. She sucked on my lips so passionately that I nearly gave out a whimper. Kissing in autos is an art. You do not make any noises while kissing and have to keep your eyes open and on the driver to see if he is looking at you through the rear view mirror.
Years later, I would have been following the same kissing in the auto routine with another girl with the same techniques coming in handy. I was on cloud nine that night and when I reached home, I couldn’t wait to tell me friends.
“Dude, she’s psycho, stay away from her” my friend Faisal had said. “I know her.” “How do you know?” I questioned him. “Well it so happens, her name is Kamini Mathur and she lives in the Lokhandwala complex in Andheri” He said. Her surname was the same as mentioned by my friend. I wanted to know more. It so happened that a few of Faisal’s friends were living at the same address and they had known her.
She was one of those girls who couldn’t take rejection lightly and had once tried to kill her by smashing her car in to a wall. Damn, what a story of love. She had seemed so normal and I wondered if I would meet her again as her taste lingered on to my lips. To hell with it, I was going to, after all I was the original rebel and no stranger to trouble, I suppose.
We met a couple of times in different locations and while I wanted to take the relation to the next level we would just end up kissing. She was coming closer and closer to me and while my bank balance was getting precariously low, I would enjoy her company. She would travel with me in crowded Mumbai trains, I trying, to protect her from roving hands and our relation was getting better. While I knew all about her past, I could never bring myself to question her in regards to that. I still don’t like discussing the past. However this often involves treading on dangerous grounds, since most people don’t change with time and when the present comes to the same stage as their past, they behave in exactly the same manner as they did in those days.
My bank balance was all time low and while my parents hadn’t seen me for the last three years, it made little sense for me to ask them for any money. I decided to get a job and secured a job as an assistant manager in a hill station near Mumbai.
I met her for the last time and she turned up an hour late. I wanted to ask her where this relation was headed for but she seemed really annoyed with me for leaving Mumbai. She drank more than usual and then got really mad at me for leaving her. I was aghast. I really didn’t want her to go to the same extremes as she did the last time and prayed for it all to get over.
On the way back she kissed me for one last time and I knew it was the last kiss. We were never going to meet again. I was glad it was over but would I call it love? I often feel what I had with her been out of sympathy. I wanted her to get cured of whatever ailment she suffered from.
I decided to steer clear of relations of these sorts. On the other hand I had lost Trisha too, as there was no internet connection in that remote hill station. Life was on a roll once again. I got myself totally absorbed in the job, I came to love so much. I was making headway progress in my career for the first time. Good food, wine and friends. I was forgetting all of them one by one. For me life was organising buffet lunches and dinners, watching hot girls dance the night away and stand there getting beer out of the bar, while the guests were drunk and replacing them with empty crates. I was the happiest of them all. For the first time in life, I had no girlfriend and I was living in one of the coolest hill stations in Mumbai, enjoying the rains, the five star treatments. Women were the last thing on my mind and then that Friday evening as it poured from the sky, a group of trainees lined up in the café to meet their new food and beverage manager.









Chapter Five
Love at first sight
She stood there shivering as it had been raining all day. All the trainees had cued up and were soaking wet because of the rain, which had now been pouring for two months continuously in that small hill district of Lonavala. They all were from a private catering school and were being inducted for internship at my hotel. It was the first batch of trainees which we had taken, in order to solve our labour problems and while the management had mixed views on it, I was looking forward to being a mentor for these kids, so I could teach them some finer nuances of fine dining, which had been falling on deaf ears of my current staff.
I had been with the organisation for almost six months now and while both Trisha and Kamini had faded off in to the distant past, I was single and happy and was looking forward to paying for the hands down motor bike that my executive chef had handed over to me in return of the loans that he would take each month, on some pretext or the other.
I really wasn’t much in to money at that time as food and accommodation was part of the package and a man seldom thinks about finances on a full stomach. The hotel, I must admit was full of characters, biggest of who was our general manager. He would wield his authority and I had soon learned, the best way to handle the situation was to act diplomatically and be with the people who held the real power in the organisation. The hotel was literally divided in to the food and beverage outlets and the administration by a road that divided the property in to two halves.
There would be pool parties for all the managers each night while the GM was never invited, he also felt, it was best to turn a blind eye, to all that was happening across the road, in order to control his power in the administrative sector. This gave the executive chef and me a free hand to run the outlets the way we felt like often bringing the term “Magic” in to action.
“Magic” was a code for all the stolen liquor from guest parties that would end up in our room, to organise house parties each night. Food, of course would be ordered from the restaurant and choicest of delicacies would be made in order to please the executive chef and the food and beverage manager. At nights the outlets would be handed over to the supervisors, who would run the place, whichever way they wanted. My only concern used to be, if the bills were signed at the end of the party, because in the morning the guest would often question the consumption and wonder how so many bottles were used.
Over all, life was good and I was enjoying my life in that beautiful hill station. Being in close vicinity to Mumbai, I would often travel down on my bike with one of my friends and meet my old friends from Mumbai days, watching movies and doing the same stuff as I used to do before only this time it would be for a day. I would often get up early in the morning, ride all the way back to Lonavala and then do my shifts, which involved the usual routine of eating and partying whole day long.
I was greeted with a “good afternoon sir” and it felt good. I wanted to smile but that would have portrayed me as weak. The GM introduced me to each one of them and gave me a list of who was allocated to which department. I read out the list not really bothered. I read out the names and told them to go with each of the respective supervisors, so they could be issued uniforms and explaining them basic rules of the place like punctuality, hygiene and other stuff.
I was rather surprised that I had been given four trainees and one of them was this girl too. I called out the name “Monika”. She came and stood next to me. Still shivering, she looked at me and tried to smile. I gave her a fleeing smile and called out the next name “Nitin”. Her smile grew larger as a six feet tall guy came and stood next to her. He looked defiant. I felt challenged. The game was on.
I escorted my four trainees to the underground restaurant, which was built under the swimming pool. It was considered to be a construction marvel as the roof of the restaurant was 16 foot thick, holding tons of gallons of water. It was supported on massive concrete pillars. As I explained these facts, none of them seem interested and I just decided to move on to the next section of the food and beverage department asking one of the supervisors to turn the motor on in my office to pump out water.
After all the marvellous construction feats, the engineers had forgotten that they had undergone the water table and when the water table in the ground rose in monsoons, most of the offices will be flooded. So much so for architecture. It was a challenge to keep the water out of all the offices, food and beverage stores and for that matter the restaurant itself. I would often keep my feet on the desk to dry them a bit, as there was always ankle deep water in my office at all times.
The motor gushed out water from my office and I could see the tiny cracks on the floor gushing in more water in to the office. I felt disgusted with the whole set up. It’s hard to feel happy when it has been raining for two months continuously and your feet stink of death. You long for a pair of dry underpants and as you pull the blanket over your head in the night, you curse as it is also wet with moisture.
Such was my life during those four months. I had got fed up of rain and while my laundry was taken care of by the housekeeping department, it was still a pain to get those neatly ironed clothes home dry, due to the rain.
The trainees seemed to be tired and were sitting in the restaurant. I wondered what I should do with them as there wasn’t any work during that time of the day. I walked in to my office and the chef looked at me. “What do you feel?” He asked. “Can’t say much, they have never worked ever before in their lives. Should I send them home?” I asked chef. These kind of decisions were often made after due consultation with the exe. Chef, something I had learned the hard way.
He flicked his head and looked at his feet. They were as bad as mine. I knew it meant a “yes.” “You want to see them?” I asked. He flicked his head in a different direction and I knew it stood for a “no”. “What time tomorrow?” I asked him again. “Ten”.
I paddled out of the office cursing the water and met the trainees. Their accommodation had been arranged by the hotel and the GM; I suppose had made sure it was better than an average manager’s accommodation. “Tomorrow at ten, you can all go home now.” I said as I dismissed the trainees. “GM sir told us that he would drop us home.” I had heard her for the first time in the day. Whom did she remind me of? Charul or the girl in the white handkerchief, Trisha, Kamini? No one.
“You know his office.” I was getting pissed. This GM was treating the trainees as managers or what? I needed to discuss this with the Chef. I walked in to the office. He was sitting there still with his feet up on the desk, a foul stench of rotten flesh filling up the room. This was however the last thing on our minds at that point of time.
The conference guest staying at the hotel wanted to have a rain dance by the pool with a wet bar. We would generally close the pool during rains as the floor around the pool used to get extremely slippery and in case someone had an accident it was impossible to get help in the night. “Screw them, I already told the GM, we can’t organise it.” He said. “What do you want me to tell that coordinator?” “Tell him to fuck himself; he’s just trying to impress the girls on the team by causing all this crap.” “Don’t worry; I know how to handle it.” I waded through the ankle deep water.
“Get me some tea and samosas.” I told the room service supervisor as I walked past him to meet the coordinator. We had been having this conference for a week now and while it had been nothing but a pain in the arse, I had come to understood that some people just don’t understand the difference between what can be done and what cannot. It is obvious you can’t have a bon fire, when it is raining but some nutcase CEO who runs a million dollar company doesn’t know that wet wood doesn’t catch fire. I walked towards the conference hall wondering, why I had to deal with all kind of idiots who knew nothing about practical life? Little did they know the more trouble they caused our duo, the bigger “Magic” would happen at their get-togethers.
The conference was breaking up for afternoon tea. This was the time to catch hold of that puny guy who called himself the coordinator of this conference. I saw him talking to the head of the company. This was my chance. I approached him and stood at audible distance from him as he bent down to grab one of those cheap cream biscuits. He saw me and said “Ah, Mr Manager, it’s raining heavily, are we all set for tonight” then without waiting for my reply turned to his boss and said “Sir, I have organised a pool party tonight.” His boss gave him a strange look as if trying to assess if he had hired an idiot for the job and looked at me. “It is all organised but I can’t arrange the Disc jockey, you got to use your own system, secondly I must warn you, the floor around the pool is extremely slippery so I can’t arrange an ambulance or any modes of transport in case of emergency. Rest all can be managed.”
“What you are saying is that it cannot be done Mr Jain.” The big boss of the company said. “Yes sir, what can be done is to organise the event in the conference hall itself, just like yesterday.” I said. “That would be fine.” The big boss turned around to talk to someone else. I smiled and walked back to my office.
The tea and samosas had arrived and chef was already half way through. “It’s all done.” I picked up the phone and called up room service. “Organise it in the conference hall, the same way as yesterday, everything else remains the same.” I instructed the supervisor as i poured myself a cup of tea.
That evening while the party was on in the conference hall and our supervisor controlled the magic numbers, chef and I sat on the pool side drinking beer and discussed the trainees. Tomorrow was a brand new day. Hopefully I was going to see some sun. Little did I know all that I had left behind so long ago, my perfect life was once again going to get shattered bit by bit all in the game of love.






Chapter six
The first day
I had totally forgotten about the trainees after last night of heavy drinking on the pool side. I felt hung over as I sleepwalked my way through the breakfast buffet service, cursing the ever increasing floods in my office. The rain had eased down a bit and the sky for once had turned blue from an ugly shade of dark grey since June. I was busy devouring an omelette with a healthy dose of cheese, when the GM walked in for breakfast. He looked at my extra-large omelette, licked his lips and picked up some soggy hash browns.
I felt bad for him. “I will order one for you sir.” I said. “No, I am on a diet” he said as he sat next to me. The exe chef looked at him and turned away as he tossed a toothpick in to his plate. I could feel the heat between the two but said nothing. I knew the GM never sat on our table. Some thing was on his mind. He waited for the exe chef to leave.
“I don’t want to get a complaint from the trainees in regards to you two.” He was referring to the exe chef and me. I felt strange as it were the managers who always complained, not the other way round. Here the training hadn’t even started and there was protection being offered to the trainees.
“What do you want; I can just send them home and sign their training certificate if you want.” I was getting pissed now. “No, no, I didn’t mean that, I just wanted to make sure that they are not mistreated in any way. You know how our staff is, from the back waters of Bihar.” Now I could tolerate anything but if someone insulted my staff, I would lose my cool. I kept shut. It was no use of telling this joker anything.
I sat back and finished my omelette. As soon as I closed my plate, my supervisor appeared out of thin air to clear it, a privilege that was only extended to the exe chef and me. “Sir, the new trainees have arrived.” He informed me as he cleared the plate. “Tell them to wait in my office and get me some fresh hash browns, these have gone soggy on the buffet.” I said as I got up. “See you later sir.” I said as I walked towards the conference hall smiling for giving an apt reply for insulting my staff.
After ten minutes and a couple of smokes, I entered my office. Mercifully the water had receded and I didn’t need to keep my feet on the desk. “Hi” as I walked cheerfully in to the office feeling good about treating the GM like shit. “All dressed up for work.” I looked at her. They nodded. I looked at Nitin. Defiance once again. I could see the protection for her, in his eyes. I didn’t care either for her or him, but I only noticed her of all the four, it was the beginning of the end.
“He’s Mr Thakur, your supervisor. For the rest of your training period he is going to allocate your shifts and work schedules. If there is a problem, you can approach me otherwise follow chain of command. ” I introduced Thakur, my supervisor who came in to the office to inform me that there were no hash browns left in the kitchen.
“Get me another omelette, this time spinach and cheese.” I said as I was still feeling hungry after that massive four egg monster. “Fucker, what are you doing?” The chef entered my office. “What happened?” I asked. “First you want hash now an omelette, what you think this is your house.” I told him to calm down as I told him what had happened. He started to laugh and called up the room service. “Yes, tell them to make two of them.” We chuckled as the phone rang and we both were invited for our daily meeting with the GM. This time he could wait while we devoured our omelettes, only to stumble into his office fifteen minutes late, smiling ear to ear as I burped.
A couple of days had passed and the rains had returned, I had decided not to put the girls on the room service for obvious reason. Since my office was constantly flooded, I was now a days sitting on the room service desk, and would see her running between the kitchen and the restaurant. She was a nice girl and while I seldom notice her smile, when she smiled, her eyes would light up. Ah bliss.
Life was good and then one day as I walked in to the restaurant, I saw her setting up the tables. Tears rolled out of her eyes as she folded napkins for the dinner service. I ordinarily would not have bothered, but thinking it was a staff issue, I decided to intervene. “What happened?”
“Nothing sir.” She said as she wiped of the tears.
“Did someone tell you anything.” I knew it had to be one of those roughnecks; I called my staff who must have said something to her.
She kept on crying and I felt pity for her. I told her to leave what she was doing and made her sit down. She stared at her feet as tears rolled out for one last time. “You can tell me.” I said. “Wait, what is your favourite ice-cream flavour?” “Butterscotch.” She answered.
Thakur who stood there wondering what was happening understood immediately and got a big scoop of ice-cream. She didn’t touch it. “Tell me?” I said as I saw Nitin approaching. “What happened?” he asked. “Go and do your work, you are not needed here.” I hated his guts. He glared at me as he left.
“One of the guests wanted my number. He held my hand” she said. I felt disgusted. These guys come for conferences but what they are perverts. “Why didn’t you slap him?” I asked. “Because you might have got angry.” She said.
I smiled. “Next time, he tries it, slap him as hard as you can, now eat your ice-cream.” That evening I scribbled a small note saying “Life has got many flavours, make each of them butterscotch”, and slipped it in her bag.
Years later when I had totally forgotten about that note, and was wondering what was going on in my life, I had got a mail from her with an attachment. It was the same piece of paper with the same scribbling, I had made that day. Funny thing was, something I had written to inspire someone else was sent back to me to inspire me once again about life.
The next day she was in a bright mood and I was expecting some fireworks from the restaurant when that conference guest came in to dine but nothing happened. I was disappointed. After the lunch service I walked to her. She had a smile and those eyes lit up on seeing me. “Hi sir” she said and I wondered if she had found the note. Of course she would have.
I looked around. Thakur was standing at a distance instructing staff to get the buffet out. “Hi, how did it go?” “Thanks for the note sir.” “Shit! I shouldn’t have written that” I thought. “It is ok, you needed inspiration.” I said as I walked towards the conference hall to check on the PM tea.
Monika would often come to me with problems related to work, family and other things, at times just to talk to me on random issues but mostly it would be about life. I knew that Nitin and she had been together for almost four years now and were planning to get married. What I did not understand was that I could never stop that from happening.
As days went by, I would try to meet her on some pretext or the other and slipping gifts in to her bag became a habit. Each day I would slip something new in to her bag, but mostly it would be chocolates. That big slab of chocolates would cost me nearly half my salary in those days, and I wouldn’t care.
Each evening after she would leave work and reach home, I would get a sweet message thanking me for the chocolate, and how she enjoyed it. I would feel happy. Was I falling in love after so many years once all over again, this time a confident manager who knew his job, who knew how to woo someone with gifts?
Life was on a roll. That evening, I had been in town dropping one of our employees to the railway station. It hadn’t rained that day and the sky seemed to be clearing up. He was Rajan our store keeper who would travel from Mumbai daily to work. As we drove past her, I slowed down. Rajan noticed that I was slowing down and commented. “She’s totally in love with you man”
“Stop fucking me” I said getting a little red in the cheeks as we drove past her. “Come on as if the whole of the hotel doesn’t know what going on in between two of you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, everybody knows, trust me pal you are going to end up in pain.” He said as I stopped my bike. We had arrived at our destination.
“I still don’t understand.” I said.
“Well everyone knows that you have been giving gifts to her, she goes around telling everyone how much you like her.” He said.
I was disappointed. It was the naked truth. Why would she tell everyone? Maybe someone had seen those gifts; after all she lived with three other girls. I knew she would still be walking back to her home so decided to encounter her. I was right, she was still walking back. I stopped in front of her. She smiled. I forgot everything I wanted to ask her.
“Sir, you never take me for a ride anywhere.” She said. I looked in to her innocent eyes. “Well where do you want to go?” I asked her.
“Let’s go to tiger’s peak.” she suggested. I was free for an hour before I would head back to my old grind and I wanted to spend some time with her alone. I was game for it. She was asking me out on a date and I couldn’t refuse. “Ok, I will be back in fifteen minutes.” I said as I button started me bike and vroomed at top speed back to the hotel to pick up my jacket. I was back in ten and I saw her waiting for me outside her house. She was wearing a white shirt and jeans. She had done something to her hair and looked amazingly beautiful.
On my way to her house, however I had noticed Nitin having tea at a tea stall but had ignored him totally. I picked her up and unfortunately, that tea stall fell in our way. I zoomed past Nitin, hoping he didn’t see us. He did.
As I approached a turn on our way to tiger’s peak I noticed him following us on his bike. Suddenly my mood got totally spoiled. Who needed a villain on a date with a beautiful woman? To make matters worse it started to rain heavily and while the mood turned from romantic to totally disgusted with this whole scenario, I decided to continue the journey. Now it became a race to lose him in the shadows. I wished a lightening would strike of he would have an accident. Nothing happened.
We reached tiger’s peak totally drenched and while an old lady sold corn on the cobs under a tattered umbrella, not a single soul was around. The weather was getting worse by the minute and when Nitin arrived. He knew that we had seen him on our way up so he decided to join in on this party of two. Monika did not react to his arrival but looked disappointed. She knew I was pissed off and while he drank a quarter of neat rum from the bottle, displaying anger in his eyes towards me, I planned to push him off the edge of the cliff when he bent over to see how low it went. It was rivalry without words.
We spoke a little and while I had to get back to work, I decided to leave the two love birds alone and head straight back to work. Monika seemed to be pretty annoyed at his behaviour and decided to head back also, however she this time decided to go with Nitin. I had just proved myself to be a rather unsafe driver on my way up, driving like a crazy maniac in order to defeat him, and had managed to put her life in danger.
As we drove back together, I saw them in front of me and I decided to slow down a bit. I was angry, hurt and feeling nauseated at what had just happened in my life. Once upon a time, I was too afraid to get myself a pillion rider and today when I did try, I had lost her to a nobody.
I reached the hotel and was immediately summoned by the exe chef. He was annoyed. “Fucker, what in the world are you thinking?” he asked.
“Now what happened?” I thought he was referring to some conference issues that seemed to keep on occurring all the time. “Why the fuck were you roaming in town with that girl, dude she’s just a trainee and that fuckwit Nitin is never going to leave her. They paint the town red all the time.” He said.
I didn’t know what to say. I was a fucking laughing stock in front of all the staff. It was a tough thing to control the gang of roughnecks and now that someone, one of them had seen me with her, it was going to be a scandal.
“She just wanted a ride, how is the conference going?” I asked trying to change the topic.
“Go home and sleep, you are tired, I will handle the shit here.” He said as he looked at my clothes that were all wet. I walked to my room, changed looked at my phone. It beeped. There as a message from her.
“Sorry about it today, he is really possessive” I deleted it.
The next day I happened to be off and decided to take an early morning ride to Mumbai. It had been raining and I hadn’t been to Mumbai for a couple of weeks. I thought it was going to be a good change and as I sat in my office early morning drinking tea, waiting for my friend to arrive, I saw her through the glass window. She stood their folding napkins with Nitin, who was saying something and she seemed amused. I felt my heart burning once again. I felt like walking up to them and pull them up but then I decided to maintain my dignity.
Thakur entered my office and smiled. “Good morning Sir” he said. “Morning Thakur ” I said as I instructed him about the conference and took some details of last night’s party. I knew that he knew but he didn’t say anything. As he turned to leave he hesitated.
“You want something?” I asked knowing he was one guy who truly respected me.
“Sir, its personal, please don’t feel bad.” I knew he was feeling sad for me.
“Go on, tell me” I knew, that I needed his advice. Thakur had been with the organisation for a long time. A lot of managers and come and gone in his tenure and although he had never bothered about any one coming or going, he and I had developed a special bond. I respected his experience and he respected the way I cared for my staff. It was mutual admiration and if we would have been on the same designation, we would have been friends. His family lived in backwaters of Bihar and he would work hard to save money and take care of his family who were struggling to make ends meet. I would often slip a couple of hundred rupees on some pretext or the other, knowing he needed it and he would return me the favour by shouldering responsibilities that in an ideal situation I should have handled. I knew him and had full faith in his observations.
“Sir, what you are doing is wrong. They are or were planning to get married after the training and now she has changed her mind because of you. Why are you trying to break it up.” He said.
“I am not trying to break anything; she wanted to go out with me, any ways I don’t care anymore.” I lied. I knew in my heart I was too deep in to it. Once I had let go of my love because I wanted her to be happy. This time I didn’t want to let it go because I felt, he was not the right guy for her. I have been pretty sure of myself when it comes to judging people and I wanted to use all my experience in life to save that beautiful smile but for now I was being treated as a villain by not only Nitin, but the rest of my staff. I just wanted to get out of it.
“Sir, the whole hotel is talking about last evening.” Thakur interrupted my thought process.
“I know, tell them there is nothing, I can’t screw up this job Thakur for some girl.” I said but she was no ordinary girl. My ride had arrived and I was off to Mumbai for a whole two days. I knew the grave vine would fade rather soon if I did not make another mistake. I was busy drinking with my old pal in “Gokul” behind Taj Mahal in Mumbai when my phone rang.

I excused myself out of the dingy bar, where her call was almost inaudible. She knew I would have been drinking with my friends and yet had called me. It had to be something important.
“Hello” I Said. I could hear her sobbing at the other end of the line.
“We broke up….”She uttered as her sobs grew louder. I couldn’t believe my ears. Did I hear correct? “Why what happened?” I asked her.
“He doesn’t want to be with me anymore.” She said as I struggled to sound normal or even concerned, when my heart was jumping with joy. I wondered if I was dreaming or was it true. I wanted to pinch myself.
“Don’t worry, I am coming tomorrow, we will talk then, I am there for you, please don’t cry.” I said in the same line, as she disconnected the phone. I stumbled back inside as I drank another bottle of beer my favourite this time “kingfisher”.





Chapter Seven
Destiny
It was Tuesday, and as I drove in to the hotel premises, I was full of dreams. This seemed to be my chance and yet somewhere inside me I felt sad. What was I fighting for? Did I even love her or was I just infatuated with her. This was a question that only time would answer but for now I had to help her out.
I stopped in the room service area and Thakur approached me. “Good morning sir.” A faint smile, something was worrying him.
“Good morning Thakur, everything fine, how’s the conference going?” I asked him. “Everything in regards to the conference is good sir, nice people but there was a scene here yesterday while you were not around.” He answered.
“What happened?” I knew it was in regards to her. “Well Nitin came drunk on the job and was abusing you and her. He said you were stealing her and he was going to kill himself.” Thakur replied.
I was taken aback. I knew that the time would come when I had to face these demons, but they would catch me off guard was something, I hadn’t accounted for. “Chef handled the situation and wants to see you in the office. He told me to wait outside in case you came around.”
I parked my motorcycle and went in to the office. It was flooding again. The same stench of rotten feet mixed with a rotten heart. I saw Nitin sitting across the table with his head down across the table. Monika was nowhere to be seen.
Chef looked at me with disgust and I knew what was happening. The crocodile tears of this looser had turned the tide against me, while I was busy drinking with my college buddies last night. Chef told Nitin to leave the office and he looked at me with hatred. His eyes were red and I knew he had managed to get me in to trouble.
“Fucker, what is wrong with you, why are you trying to break them up?” He almost shouted. “What did I do? It is her choice.” I answered.
“Bloody hell, I told that idiot GM not to get any girls for training. You all dickheads from you, bloody manager, to that stupid Harsh (convention steward) is after her pussy, look at this.” He threw a note at me. It was a written complaint that Nitin had written naming who’s who of the organisation for mistreating her and passing lewd remarks.
“What the fuck does it mean? She hasn’t written it. It doesn’t hold any ground.” I said. “I know, it doesn’t but think if he does something to himself, what are we going to do? All of us will get fucked, heads will roll.” Chef said calmly.
“Ok, what do you want me to do?” I was not worried in real terms. As a matter of fact I would have been happy, if he did something to himself. I could never have been held responsible for a weak person committing suicide. The chef got up and left. I went on to take the managers chair and kept my feet on the desk and rocked my chair back and forth. As a faint smile spread on my lips, I thought of her. I was turning in to a devil. I wanted her at any cost. Was it the power I wielded in that little organisation that was turning me in to one or was it the power to say “No” to top honchos of big organisation that came for conferences, who would plead to me to organise last minute events and I would do it as a favour .
I knew what I was becoming. I got up and sat on the opposite end. The black executive chair stood empty in front of me. It lured me but to think clearly, I had to sit in this uncomfortable chair that creaked as I rocked it back ward and forward. I looked at my feet. They smelled of death as always, shrivelled up skin, blisters that reminded me of all the hard work that I had put in this job. I couldn’t afford to lose the respect, that I had earned paying a price in the form of those.
I got up and saw Nitin. He stood there glaring at me. It seemed as if it was going to burn me as the rest of the staff stood close by, expecting some action between the manager and the trainee. Now I am sure they must have been betting money, if there was a fight.
Nothing happened. At first the silence was deafening. “I am sorry if I hurt you.” I said. Then I turned to the staff and repeated the same words. They all looked at me. I couldn’t see any one eye to eye and decided to go back home change and in an hour I was back. Everything was normal. I went about my daily routine. In the evening, as I sat down with chef for our daily meeting over a couple of beers, I thought about the phone call yesterday but decided not to drag the topic any further. We discussed different subjects and while the subject of her was a taboo at this meeting, the devil inside got the better of me.
“So the arse cried in front of you?” I laughed. “Yeah, the fucker wanted to jump off the tiger’s peak, I should have taken him myself and pushed him. The fuckers live on their parent’s money and think they are Romeos.” Chef chuckled. “What do you think? Does he have the balls to marry her?” I asked. “They are getting married against the family wishes and are already registered in court.” Chef answer came as a blow to me. The smile faded and then trying not to show my disappointment I said “Let’s just hope she is happy in life, cheers.” I gulped my glass at one go and stumbled out for a cigarette.
As the acrid smoke filled my lungs, I thought of Charul. How I had once sacrificed my love for her to be happy. Was I expected to do the same again in life? Was I supposed to keep letting go of everyone I loved? I needed a break from all this and I decided to take a few days off so I could go to Mumbai and clear my head for good.
I told chef on my decision of taking a few days of. He thought it was a good idea as the matter was still too hot. The next day I gave in my leave application and I was off to Mumbai. It was a weekend and so I and my friend decided to hit Goa. He needed a break from the corporate world and I needed a break from her. Off course we were drunk for the rest of the holidays and a week passed and I was back in the old grind. With memories of Goa on my mind, I was looking forward to seeing her again. Damn love.
While I was in Goa I had bought a beautiful Calvin Klein watch for her and just like the old times I slipped it in to her bag. The next day she came to me and handed a letter it read.


“Dear Sir,
Thank you for the lovely gifts you have been showering upon me. I have never given you anything in return till date. I have always admired you and love your smile. Please do not give us so much love that I will never be able to give you. I don’t deserve it and all the respect that I have for you brings tears in my eyes. I have always treated you as my best friend and a guide. Please do not give me any more gifts. Monika”
I read the letter a couple of times and threw it in to my wallet. The letter remained there for a long time changing places and often, in the years ahead, I would read it thinking what was going through her mind, when she wrote it.
It was my weekly off and I decided to take my trip to Mumbai. Since my friends would have been in office, I decided to go and check my mails in a hope that maybe someone had mailed me. There were no mails and I decided to check my social networking site.
Her name was Shikha, and in the times to come she would get me out of Monika but for now we talked general, about life about what was going on and we exchanged telephone numbers. I knew that in a couple of days, I would be back and didn’t want to lose touch with her, since she seemed really nice.
I had totally forgotten about her, when my phone beeped. I had a message from Shikha wishing me a belated happy birthday. It had been my birthday the day before and Monika had gifted me a beautiful lighter. I was still so much in love with her.
Shikha lived in Delhi and was pursuing her master’s degree. She had been in a broken relationship and had undergone the mental trauma of facing a divorce, way too early in life. She had seen life up to close and personal and I had felt a wave of sympathy for her. She was a nice girl but my heart was set elsewhere. I thanked her for her wishes and just in order to cheer her up in life called her “Ms Delhi” in my message.
We exchanged a few messages and then I got busy with work and wooing Monika. I knew her training was coming to an end and soon she was going back to her home town. I was feeling extremely low these days with the thought of not being able to see her any more. She and Nitin once again had become close and I felt left out in the picture. I tried concentrating on my work, since the hotel was organising a New Year party and it was going to be massive event.
The menu, the décor all had to be sorted out for the event and with a bunch of new trainees bound to come in around the same date, everything seemed to be chaotic. I had little time to think about anything and time flies when you are busy. Soon it was the thirty first of December, her last day in the organisation. She was leaving the next day and amidst all the chaos, I called her. Tears rolled out of my eyes as I spoke to her. “Come on sir, you taught me how to fight in life, if you are not strong enough, how I will fight the world.” She said. “Promise me, you are going to make something of yourself in life.” I asked her. “I promise I will make you proud one day, remember sir you once told me life is full of flavour, make each butterscotch. I am just going to do that.” Tears rolled out of my eyes and I felt so much in love.
I felt as if I was losing my soul mate for the second time in life. She left the next day without saying good byes.








Chapter eight

The after maths
After she left, I started to lose interest in my job. The parties by the pool no longer interested me and while at one time I would keep my hair short and slick, I let go of my appearance. I would arrive late for work. Did not care for events and it was becoming obvious both to the management and staff, that I was a changed man. I so desperately wanted to leave the place as everything reminded me of her.
I would message her like a mad person and would kind of message her every five to ten minutes. It would make me sick, as I often did not receive any replies to those. I had started to smoke a lot and while till now I had a slight idea, what pain was, I was going through real pain.
I was so much in it, and as my heart wept, I started to burn myself with cigarettes. The pain used to be unbearable, but would take my mind of the pain, I was going through. As I burned myself more and more, all the managers started to notice them. Chef was concerned but couldn’t help me. He tried to talk to me, but I was lost in my own world so much so that I finally submitted my resignation.
That day I was leaving that hill station for good. Thakur had tears in his eyes as I packed my bags. I handed him my favourite jacket, which I used to wear all the time. I had already disposed my bike selling it at half price, in order to get some money for my unemployed days.
I had nowhere to go and it was my home in Mumbai, where I had lived with friends before that was going to be my abode for the next few months. I was wondering where the auto was, that I had called to take me to the bus station, when I saw a familiar figure walking towards the entrance. It was her. Monika walked up to me. She had gained weight since I last saw her and was working as a marketing manager for some catering company.
“Hello sir, how are you?” she said. “I am good” I answered as I tried to hide the burn marks. She didn’t seem to notice them. She looked in to my eyes and I saw it for the last time. There was no love. She had come to invite the chef to her wedding with Nitin.
My ride had arrived and I sat in the auto. No one came to say “goodbye.” I looked back and saw a group of my stewards who had a crush on her circling her , laughing , joking with her. She enjoying equally with them. She suddenly turned and our eyes met for the last time. A tear rolled out of her eye or did I imagine it. After two hours, as I opened the door of my old Mumbai apartment, my phone beeped once again. It was a message from shikha “Hope Mr Mumbai is doing well.” I did not know what to answer. I was feeling so lonely. All that I crafted so carefully, my career, the power, all was gone because of this pain and it wouldn’t go away. I wanted to vent out my anger, my suffering and then I called Shikha.
She had a ringing voice and although we had just chatted online for a couple of days when I was in Mumbai, she had developed a certain kind of friendship for me. To begin with, I wasn’t interested in her since, I was in love with Monika that time. I had told her about all that was happening in my life in order to seek some advice on the girl psychology and her answer hadn’t made me happy.
“Hi” I said
“Hello, how are you doing?” she answered and we spoke for some time, I told her, how I had quit my job and seen Monika for the last time. She tried to console me but I was too sad and disconnected the phone. Now that I was without a job, I decided to go back to my old routine of internet job search. I would often bang in to Shikha online on messenger and we would go on talking for hours.
I wanted to see her but she was quite shy and I remember that the first time she had switched on her webcam; I had stared at the ceiling for ages before I actually saw her. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship that was to continue for over three years before we met and fell in love. After a couple of months I was back in Goa, this time working as a project manager for a construction company away from the power, handling labourers for a change.
Monika and I have been friends since then. I really don’t know, if she did love me or not but she still considers me to be her best friend. It’s sad that her marriage didn’t work out and her business, that she started with so much gusto didn’t work that well, but somehow she still looks at me as her ideal, asking for advice, showing love at times and just general chitchat .
They say, never curse the person you love with a broken heart, I did place a curse on her one day when I was sad. The answer lies in the blog, I once wrote in relation to Monika and Shikha while I was in Goa unable to forget her, cursing her for leaving me and perhaps its remorse that I seek for being selfish and not really loving her in life.
Do i Nail Her?
Do you nail the bitch when you had the chance?????? Strange .You might be thinking what is wrong with this guy?? My answer is well nothing is wrong with me .Something happened, that made me think about the so called theories of love. About true love that is. I don’t say that true love does not exist in this world, i would say those who get it are lucky but those who don’t are plain unfortunate .So coming back to my question .Should you nail her, when you had the chance bcos you don’t know if you are going to spend your whole life with her and while you are trying to woo her with flowers, somebody else is already playing with her flower.
So what do you do when that person happens to be your soul mate or you think so, but destiny has other games in mind to play with you?
She trained under me and i already buried her in my past, but one fine evening when i was chatting to my new found love she messaged me saying, all i wanted was friendship and i couldn’t give it to her .I wonder how to reply to her, but i knew what the message meant. Somehow i could always predict what was on with her in life and i could foresee, the events happening in her life .She was so predictable. She was getting married to her boyfriend and i knew it.
I felt a strange feeling growing inside me suddenly working so far from home had no meaning and going back was an option i could look in to. There was nothing left for me in this part of the country and the work, i do is boring enough to kill somebody. I felt that all these months had gone waste and as a matter of fact this year was wasted. Nothing much was achieved and nothing much seems to be at the anvil.
The strange part was that i didn’t feel a thing ,no tears building in to my eyes when a person whom i used to send fifty love messages a day was getting married to the guy i hated the most, bcos i knew her life would be over, if she marries him .No tears , the only thing i felt was i should have nailed her when i had the chance . Maybe on the day it rained and we were on my new bike or on that night when we were alone on the railway station .May be.
Did i do the right thing??? I love my girl now , and she’s really working hard towards our future together .I have never met her yet i love her so much that today when she hasn’t called up i feel sad ,something amiss ,something not good.....but do i nail her when i get the chance .I know she will not say no but i know that will be the end of our relationship .I can’t let her go and knowing myself i know i will just move on .she will also ultimately move on only after crying and cursing me .no tears will be shed .
I think i should get married to her or rather i would say i love her and should marry her .she supported me in more than fifty ways and i know if i loose her i may never come across the right girl but i cant connect to her i can’t predict what she is doing at the moment or say what she’s thinking .That way i could only connect to Monika and i regret it .I don’t need to know what she’s doing, as long as i know, that talking to me brings a smile on her face, and, if i don’t hear her voice i feel sad. Isn’t it enough to love her this way?
She knows everything about my life and i don’t hide anything from her and maybe someday, i will be able to connect to her communicate with her just the way I did with Monika .When i will be able to see her doing things sitting five thousand miles away from her .But then i know i did the right thing not nailing her because i love her and will always love her from my heart...........
Incoming from Monika " hi Sid, how are you can we become friends now i don’t love you anymore bcos i started loving Nitin and it’s all because of you .you are the way for my real love and its Nitin."
What do i reply to this ?
Fuck off!!
Oh its ok ,i also love somebody else
Yes
But my answer is silence i don’t want to answer such a stupid question .Why should i even get in touch with her when i know that sending even one message is against my ego now. The last message has been sent .The answer given
Silence
Incoming from Monika" My choice was so bad when you were there and i didn’t realize his love for me but now it’s not like that all is well"
Duh this bitch never stops .Maybe i should have nailed her, when i had the chance. The stupid girl doesn’t care for me and i don’t want to see her fucking face again in my life and she expects me to spend money sending a reply to those idiotic messages .She calls me a bad choice and i should go begging on my knees for her friendship
The answer given
Silence
Wait another message
Incoming from Monica "Ok will not disturb u, thank you r u with you darling sorry dear have a lovely evening bye and wish her congrats from me coz she got a lovely guy bye"
So i guess the bitch got the message ....
The answer given,
Silence
I really don’t know what to answer to these messages .How can a person behave so normally when she knows she’s broken the heart and spoiled the life of the other person whom she’s sending these messages too. The answer is, she is just plain selfish. She just thinks about herself and her shortening friends list ...But in the end i know she will be alone .All alone in this world.
There is so much difference between the two girls i loved in my life .One is a girl i should have nailed, when i had the chance and the other, i won’t even touch even if she openly said she wanted to be nailed before marriage .That is the beauty of her .That is true love.....Monika, if you read this someday remember, i loved you but do not even care a shit for you now because you know in your heart that you are guilty of breaking a beautiful heart and god is watching you .
You are condemned ....Never will be happy in life ....Not because i cursed you but because you made the worst decision in your life and i am happy you made it because it’s the punishment of living with that guy whom i warned you always about ...
This is fun so i got my answer too . You got to decide if you should or shouldn’t nail the girl but i guess all guys are too stupid to really know when the moment is right.
Life is such. That day when I was heartbroken sitting in Goa, I wrote this blog and years later as the mystery unfolds right in front of my eyes, how my curse has unfolded through wasps of time, I feel scared but then I have forgiven her, for she was one of the best pupils, I ever had who never forgot me through sands of time.
I do reply to her mails from time to time, being the philosopher, friend, guide, I once promised her, that I would be. It is strange that most people specially the girls I am dating don’t understand why I would do such a thing for someone, who hurt me so bad at one time. Let me explain, it was a promise, I once made to her, getting drunk at “Gokul” that I would always be there no matter what.




Chapter Nine
Back to home turf
I had been two months in Goa at that time and while I was chatting with Shikha online everyday coming closer to her, it seemed impossible for me to get Monika out of my head. This was affecting my performance in a field, which to begin with, I had no idea of. Each day I would get up and ride my company motorbike to work wondering what was in store for me. Till now life had be about fine dining and wine, now it was about engineers, labour cost and cement.
Since it was monsoon in Goa, I was facing the same problem of water seeping out of the ground again. The construction site being on a marsh land, it was impossible to dig and while the project seemed to be getting delayed, it was impossible for me to understand or explain why my life had so much water in it.
It had seemed that all my dreams would just get washed away and I was getting hopeless about life. My friends in Mumbai had moved out of my comfort zone, which had been our abode for the last couple of years and while I had got the news of Monika getting married, it had not in any way eased my suffering.
I would discuss about these things with Shikha, who seemed to understand me a lot. She would comfort me when I would cry and would talk dirty at times just to take my mind of Monika. She was a nice gal and I really wanted to get anchored now in life.
I was having dinner at a restaurant, when my phone rang. It was my boss.
“Hello, yes Sir” I said.
“Can you come to JW Marriott’s right now?” he asked me.
“Sure Sir, will be there in half an hour.” I said as he disconnected the phone.
He sounded urgent and I could feel it coming. I finished my meal and rode with heavy heart to JW. The meeting didn’t last long and since I was getting fired, I got two month’s salary for being kicked out. I was happy.
The next morning I rode to work as usual, got my pay check and was off to the railway station to book my tickets for Delhi. I so desperately wanted to get out Goa, which I had once loved. Goa, as one of my close friends once put it, is all about sitting on the beach the whole day eating and drinking beer and nothing more.
I stood in a queue for an hour with druggies, backpackers, strange men and women, who all seemed to be exhausted with paradise, for my chance to get a ticket.
“One way to Delhi, first class if you please.” I told the railway clerk who was too busy to look up tapping away on the keyboard. “795 rupees.” I handed him eight 100 rupee notes and got my ticket and change. I had three days in Goa before I left the so called paradise for good. It was time to hit the beach and live the dream, which I had so often lived in the past.
The next three days were spent drinking, eating good food and looking at cheap stalls that sold replicas of major brands. I remembered how I had bought that original CK watch from a backpacker who had needed money, onto give it away to someone who hadn’t bothered. It was getting too heavy. It’s strange when you visit old places, that you have visited once you were happy, give you more pain when you visit them years later having lost the person you had loved so much at time. The mind wanders back in to the realms of your past to unearth the skeletons that are long buried and gone.
I decided, never to come back to Goa and little did I know that I was looking at those passing palm trees, those little villages for a long time to come. I had informed Shikha of my arrival time in Delhi and she had told me she would meet me that afternoon at Rajiv Chowk. I was feeling happy. I was going home after almost five years and while, I had achieved nothing, yet felt satisfied that I was going to see my family and more importantly Shikha, who seemed to have grown closer and had no hidden skeletons in her closet.
A new journey was beginning and as I sat on the window looking outside from the comfortable environs of that first class coupe, my attention turned to the backpacker on the adjacent seat. She was a tiny girl reading “Marcus Aurelius”. It had been my favourite book and I couldn’t help myself but notice the tag on her bag. It boldly said “Linny, Italia”. “Italian travelling alone, reading my favourite author”. I thought. A smile crept onto my face; the devil inside me was beckoning me. I had a whole day and night to spend with her and I thought it was only polite for me to strike a conversation. After all she was a guest in this beautiful nation of ours. At first I hesitated, and then I knew, I had too. This was a journey that would take far longer than the one and half days, I had anticipated it would.
“Hi” I smiled as she kept the book down. “Namaste” she answered. I broke in to laughter. It sounded so funny she using the Hindi phrase that I hardly saw people use any more. She looked surprised and flustered and to make her at ease I just blurted out. “No, I laughed at your good knowledge of the local dialect. Not many people use it anymore.”
“I am Linny.” she said. “I know I am Sid” I answered.
“How?” she looked at me suspiciously. “It’s on your bag.” I said as we both broke in to laughter.
Linny was a thin brunette girl with Italian looks. She wasn’t voluptuous and it seemed her travels in India had taken their toll on her. Poor food and unhealthy lifestyle had made her look way older than her actual age and I had no way of knowing what her real age was. What remained unchanged was her laughter that I felt, at one time would have been infectious.
“Where are you headed for?” I asked her as I tried eating the watery railway food that was charged on my ticket. It was impossible to gulp down the filth but I was hungry and relished it.
“Himachal, the land of Gods.” She answered as she looked at me with a strange expression as if to say, “How can you eat that?” “Humm… nice place.” I said without looking up, carefully balancing the burnt potato gravy with bread.
“What about you? Where are you going?” she asked me.
Where was I going? A question that intrigued me, since I didn’t really know where I was headed in life? I had been so busy sorting my personnel life till now that I had totally forgotten the repercussions, it had on my professional life. I needed a break to sort my head out and Himachal seemed to be a good idea. Lost in the hills, seeking my soul, heal and nurture myself. It seemed a perfect escape plan.
“Don’t really know, just travelling through.” I said as I looked up trying to sound convincing. Now I had no idea what I was doing but as soon as I made up my mind, I felt relaxed. I didn’t want to face my parents in my current state anyways and I had the money to travel a bit, at least a few weeks.
“Have you been to Himachal before?” She asked me. “No, I haven’t” I answered hoping she would invite me along on this journey. She didn’t say anything.
We sat there in silence as I finished my food and got up to place the empty plate outside the coupe. “Do you want to join me on this leg of my journey?” she asked me finally. I was hoping so much she would ask.
“Uh… I don’t know if I should.” I answered, wondering what I was leading myself in to. “Well come along its going to be fun.” She looked in to my eyes. Her eyes were green and if she had worn some makeup, perhaps she would have looked beautiful too. “Ok.” I responded and wondered if I was headed in the right direction in life finally.
“I got some work in the afternoon tomorrow in Delhi.” I said. “Ok, I will be leaving tomorrow night and would catch a bus from Pahar ganj” she said. She seemed pleased that I had agreed to join her on this leg of her journey and I was wondering why I had agreed to go any further. Some journeys, like this one are supposed to be short and sweet. Friends made on trains should part ways when the journey ends. I on the other hand always seemed to be going and looking for trouble. For now I had made my decision.
It was almost two in the night and while we both had become kind of best friends, I wondered what she was all about? Definitely she was on drugs; I could at least make that much out. I looked outside the window, tomorrow I would meet Shikha for the first time after talking to her for such a long time on the phone and internet and perhaps she was the one. My gaze turned to Linny, who was now sleeping like a baby and wondered “or is she the one?”







Chapter ten
The mountain Gods
The train moved sluggishly as it entered the outskirts of Delhi. It was a cold winter morning and I couldn’t see much outside due to the fog that hung over the still sleepy city. I looked across to the adjacent birth. Linny was already awake.
“Good morning, did you sleep well?” she asked me.
“Morning, yes I did.” I got up as I started to pack up my stuff, ready to get off at the Delhi station. “So are we going to Himachal together?” she asked me. “Yeah, for sure but I would join you tomorrow perhaps, I got to finish some work in town.” I answered. “That’s ok, I will catch you there.” She said, as a tea vendor knocked on the door and I got myself some tea. I knew she would have hated the “Tea”, so didn’t bother to offer her.
“Two rupees” the vendor said peeping inside and gave me a sly smile. I knew what it meant and I shoved a two rupee coin in to his sweating palm. She looked at me, and smiled. Had she noticed the sly smile of the vendor or did she notice my reaction or did she notice both. The train was entering the station and I hurriedly helped her with the baggage to the door. She had her back pack on her shoulder and seemed would crumble under its weight. It was strange she didn’t allow me to carry it despite my offering her to help. Perhaps I was still to learn the Italian way.
I checked in to a Hotel in Pahar ganj and it was bustling with backpackers. It seemed to remind me of Agra where foreign tourists would live in shabby accommodations, visiting the Taj and smoke weed at road side stalls at night. The golden triangle was also the biggest network of drugs, its head and tail beginning from Himachal to Goa. I had witnessed at close quarters, the body and end of the demon and I was going to see its head up close and personnel, in two days’ time.
I took a shower and caught a metro rail to Rajiv Chowk. Shikha was already waiting at the designated spot and while she was a small girl, she was more beautiful than I had thought. She reminded me of a film actress and I was glad, I had fallen in love once again with her. We spoke for hours, she inquisitive about my journey and while she spoke a lot, my mind kept wandering off to Linny.
I seemed to have impressed Shikha as she wanted to know my future plans and what were my intentions in regards to marriage and having a family. She knew about Monika, so kept her out of the conversation. I responded mechanically to her questions and while my mind was elsewhere, I out of courtesy decided to drop her home. We travelled together on the Delhi metro and she smiled a lot on her journey back. When we reached our destination, she gave me a peck on my cheek. A few guys standing nearby jeered and I felt myself blushing.
Shikha was in love with me but was I ready. I wanted an answer and I knew I wasn’t. I had to make this journey in to the unknown to make my memories fade.
“I am not ready for it as of now.” I said.
“I know, you still in pain. Give it time to heal, I liked you and I am going to wait.” She said as she looked in to my eyes. I looked at them in search of a hint of green but it wasn’t there.
“Do you really love me so much?” I asked her.
“Yes, I do because I know what you been through and I have been through the same. I have understood you over all these months, you are the right one and I am going to wait.” She smiled as she walked away towards a waiting cycle rickshaw. She bargained for a while before the rickshaw driver agreed and with a triumph she waved good bye and left.
I took the train back to Pahar ganj and while the city slept, I roamed the streets wondering if I would bang in to Linny. I knew she would be on a bus to himachal right now. I couldn’t wait to follow her.
A journey in to the land of God was something I hadn’t imagined of taking up till that time. I walked in to, one of the many travel agents who thronged across the main road offering cheap tickets to luxury buses to Himachal Pradesh. I got a good deal and at four hundred rupees it wasn’t bad at all. I was handed a piece of paper with a bus number and scheduled time of departure. I still had three hours in Delhi before I would be off to a new place. I still had no idea where I was headed for or what I was doing in life. I however was filled with a strange kind of freedom. It was an exhilarating experience. For the first time during that day, Monika hadn’t appeared in my thoughts.

The journey was anything but comforting; the bumps came at regular intervals jolting my every bone. Indian film music belting out continuously from torn speakers agonising both the passengers and the player alike. Playing it slow was not an option as it kept the driver from dozing off.
Cigarette smoke of a different kind filled the cabin ant it made my head go dizzy. As the driver took puffs of it, a cold chill ran down my spine. I had smelled that smoke so many times before. It was weed. The driver was smoking weed and the horror of meeting with an accident being evident; I knew that I might meet God in person sooner than I had thought off. I wondered what will happen to Shikha, perhaps for the rest of her life, she would wonder why I rejected her. Linny of course would think that I never travelled to himachal, but what about my parents. They hadn’t seen me in five years, it wasn’t fair to them. My mind wandered off to the sushi bars in Japan serving stone fish ,a fish so toxic that it could kill a person in a few minutes ,why then people customary say there good byes before eating the fish. Putting your life in the hands of the chef, was an idea not many people would like to do, the chef specially trained in the art of cleaning fish, what if he had a fight in the morning ,what were the chances of survival, what about the person sitting next to you waving goodbye as you take a bite out of your stone fish .Was it the thrill that made people eat it ,or was there some kind of a death wish going on .What a terrific way to die, at least you died on a full stomach.
I looked at my fellow travellers. It was a mix of newly married couple and back packers, each having a different motive to travel to this location. What was my motive? What was I seeking out by making this journey?
I finally dozed off as I was tired and when I got up, it seemed the bus was travelling in clouds. I thought for a second that perhaps the inevitable had happened, and I was making my journey in to the kingdom of heaven. I had died a quick painless death in my sleep and I was happy. To my dismay it was just the fog was covering up the road.
Journey in the hills beginning, it was cold and damp ,but it lightened up my spirit ,the majestic mountains challenged my wandering spirit, Coaxing me to conquer them once again. I was transported once more to the days when I used to ride my bike in the Hills of Nainital, and then in Lonavala. It was a journey I was making back. I had always loved the hills and perhaps, I was being looked upon by the mountain gods who had beckoned me to visit them in the form of an invitation by Linny.

The bus stopped at a road side tea stall as the hawker shouted, displaying their wares. A mountain stream pouring down from nowhere, acted as a water source. The music of the stream played in perfect harmony with the sun playing hide and seek with clouds .The mountains looking on at the game with wisdom of saints ,smiling at this innocent display, by nature’s most powerful elements .A far cry from the hustle bustle of the city ,it was a different world ,nature at its best .
The sun putting on a different face at different places .In Bombay it had risen with a sophistication ,a sense of priority, an urgency to catch the 8.45 Virar express ,and here it was ,having all the time in the world to play that little game with the clouds ,hiding behind mountains, challenging the clouds to catch him .
The bus winded through the thin curvaceous road, like an insect testing his luck, climbing up the leg of a saint engrossed deeply in meditation, irritating him, tickling him. The saint opens up his eyes, smiles .The bus moves on.
My destination became visible through two odd peaks; it was time to look forward to a new adventure “The search for Linny”.
As the bus entered the under belly of a sleepy town of Manali, a swarm of pimps, brokering accommodation entered the bus, like bees enter in to a hive .Each of then held a brochure of a so called hotel he was employed for.
"Two hundred rupees, deluxe room, hot water." They bargained, targeting the newlyweds and back- packers. I wondered how many of these dingy rooms had secret cameras hidden somewhere in the room. Of course, these petty hotel owners couldn’t have afforded state of the art systems. The thought of getting filmed, just to save some money while making love amused me as I smiled, a familiar face seemed to have walked past on the main road. I hadn’t noticed Linny as I was too engrossed living my picture memory.
Living on the main road an idea popular with the newlyweds didn’t really excite me. Linny had mentioned a certain guest house called “Shiv Shakti”, where she had planned to stay. I got hold of my luggage I decided to walk asking my way in to old Manali.
As I walked through the underbelly of the city. I noticed that even attics doubled up as a guest room during summers, bringing in that much needed cash so important to survive the winters. A strange array of colour, signs were painted outside the houses. Small houses boasted of being guest houses as kids encircled me pulling at my bags promising me a comfortable stay at their house for much less money than the main street.
The town freshly snowed, a haven for skiing attracted lots of sports enthusiast each year looking for virgin snow fields challenging the Gods and mountains alike .A mountaineering and skiing institute boasted of best skiers in the country stood right next to river Beas .They say, if heaven was on earth it was this town. My image of being in heaven soon got shattered.

“My mom will take care of you.” A kid winked. The other said “His mom’s old, I got a nice sister to take care of you, inclusive.” I felt disgusted. I had just landed in to a land of poverty where, mothers and sisters were being offered for a stay and little money during winters. I took out a few ten rupee bills and gave it to the kids. One of the kids slipped a packet in my pocket and they all left to pursue the next tourist. I wondered what was in the packet, not really bothered as I was keen to see Linny; I walked on asking my way to Shiv Shakti, being offered accommodation and women alike. It seemed as If, I had just walked in to the biggest whore house up north, where air conditioning was being provided by Mother Nature, while the rest was on sale. This was a paradise for the wealthy, which drove to the city from nearby states to ravage poverty when they felt like, the mountain gods sitting and watching as meek spectators.
As I stumbled across the ice, I finally reached the guest house in a hope to see Linny. The guest house was closed, with an old 500 CC bullet motorcycle parked outside the adjacent house. Smoke bellowed out of the chimney and as fog and clouds once again encircled the hills, the wind chill increased. It was a setting straight out of a horror movie.
I knocked at the door thrice before an old lady responded. She was in her early eighties and looked at me through broken glasses as if to size me up. “I am looking for an accommodation. Do you have anything available?” I asked knowing well the guest house was empty. She said nothing as she closed the door.
I wondered if I should wait or just walk away, when the door opened again. A stout man stood in front of me. He was balding and wore a thin pencil moustache. He rubbed his hands and while I was sweating under the layers of protective clothes, he seemed to have been sitting in front of the fire. A streak of envy rose inside me but I needed accommodation for the night. I knew Linny hadn’t turned up here and I felt like a fool walking all the way uphill just to end up in this shabby place, when better accommodation was being offered to me right in the middle of the city.
“Welcome Sir.” He said crisply. “Yes, thanks. I was told about this place by a friend and was wondering if you had some vacant room.” I said.
“Of course, not many people come this far, who is this friend of yours?” he said. “Uh… someone who stayed here last year for a day, you won’t remember him.” I said as I felt unsure if I should mention her.
“Of course, the room rent will be 150 rupees a day and since my restaurant is closed, I can offer you food that is being made in my kitchen. Of course I will charge it. I need to tell you this area is being haunted by a maneater.” He said. I just wanted to stay for a week so agreed.
The room wasn’t bad but was damp as had been closed for a long time. Jindu the owner got me a room heater and few moth eaten blankets. It was getting dark and I was hungry.
“Can I get something to eat?” I asked Jindu who was chopping some fire wood.
“Dal and Rice?” he asked. “Fine.”
The food reminded me of the railway catering and I wondered how these people lived on this day and night. I was hungry and ate immediately segregating the lumps of rice on to the side of the plate. Then on second thought, I ate the lumps of rice and was still feeling hungry when Jindu entered my room. He knocked and had come to collect the plates.
“Would you like some dope?” he asked me.
“I don’t know, I haven’t got money to purchase it.” I said.
“It’s on the house.” He said and rolled a joint. I smoked hash for the first time in my life and as my mind seemed to get clearer, I saw colours. The mountains started to talk, move .The past, the present, the future all faded and I was just “Me”. The night was spent talking to Jindu and his stories of the maneater.
The sun yawned at the horizon, calling it a brand new day. It was Monday and today I had been in this sleepy town for two weeks. Life had still not answered my question; my aim still eluded me, my mind still not at peace. When I had come to this place I had believed that one day soon I shall be able to get the answers that I so desperately seek, were just not there.
They say you build the walls around your own imprisonment. My mind had seized functioning, all that remained was hope. The mountain Gods were angry. They had shifted and turned, a rock had changed the course of the river for ever. The mountains kept shifting and bleeding, the wounds very much evident in the snow. My heart felt sad. Who was I missing? I hadn’t spoken to Shikha or Monika since then. I hadn’t found Linny. I was imprisoned by my own device, in this remote district where I was just turning in to a drug addict and nothing more.
The previous night, a small earthquake had made stones fall in to lovely Beas River and I knew years later if I visit this place again, I would know when that boulder had landed in the river, altering its course forever. I decided to walk in to town in search of Linny. I desperately was looking for her as she was the one who had made me come on this journey in the first place.
I slipped thrice before I was able to get a solid footing on the ice. It was a sheer miracle that I didn’t break any bones. Maybe it was because of; I was wearing too many clothes or sheer luck. As I walked in to the town I saw familiar faces but not the one I wanted to see so desperately.
Newlyweds gobbled ice cream, laughing, throwing snowballs at one another. It was an interesting sight; they seemed to be happy or were they? They were still to discover the truths about life but they were happy unlike me who didn’t know what to do with my life? A story of a newlywed came to my mind that had discovered how tough life was. She had made a great impact on me and I had decided not to get married after that of course there were others as well.

"Take care girl, don’t fight, he is your husband." A man had told his newly wed daughter as I entered the compartment on the Delhi bound train. His sentence hooked me as I looked up to see a girl crying and her father trying to console her .Now she was no diva ,extremely fat, fair and nice features. She was probably married because of the fat dowry that had exchanged hands. She covered her face and was crying pretty dramatically giving those amazing sobbing sound effects .As the train started to snail out of the station, her father kissed her. No goodbyes, no thank you, no parting notes.
Staring in to the oblivion she looked depressed. Now I was sure that she hadn’t had a great first night, of course that would have been impossible with all the girth that she carried. It would have been impossible physically, but that surely wasn’t the case. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, she pulled out a mills and boon novel and started reading it, imagining her prince charming, tall dark and handsome, in reality a mediocre businessman who was not really interested in her or so it seemed at that time.
As she read, I stared, trying to analyse whether what I was thinking was true ,was it that book she read had disillusioned her, it had seemed so very much the case. Fed on a healthy diet of tandoori chickens and Mills and Boon she had become sick in both mind and body. What was it all about? Marriage a reality, prince charming an illusion.
What had that message meant that Monika had written that day and I had gone so mad that I had placed a curse on her? As the station drew closer she went back to her crying mode. The journey was coming to an end or was it a new beginning for her, an answer which only she could provide.
As she stepped off, a man approached her, her husband or so it seemed was a man of small stature, simply dressed, he had come to pick her up.
I had got my answer when she had looked at him and slipped the novel in to a nearby dustbin. I remembered how Monika had mentioned, how she hadn’t realised his love for her, when I was around and Nitin of course was a better looking guy than me. So what was it? Was I just a fling for her, but what about my feelings? Unable to think further, I decided to walk back to the guest house. It wasn’t worth thinking about her.
While I walked, I thought of Shikha. What would she be thinking of me? I looked at my phone, which had been dead since last two weeks. I decided to give her a call on my way back from town.
“Hello” I heard her say.
“Hi, how have you been, sorry couldn’t call you after that as I am travelling a bit.” I said. She couldn’t believe it was me. She seemed concerned of my welfare and told me to get my phone charged. I could feel her possessiveness and wondered for a while if I should go back and end this quest.
We spoke for a while and I described her, how I got stuck in the snow, just like in the movies and she laughed. I felt happy and as I spoke, I looked at the mirror in the telephone booth. A hollow face stared back at me. It had no expression. The eyes were sunken into the sockets and a faint smile that reminded me of someone I had known from my past.
I was shocked at the change that had come in to me. Two weeks ago, I had walked in to the city as a healthy young man. My hair was thinner and the clothes hung like a coat on a hanger. Poor food, too much dope was taking its toll on me. What I had I got myself in to?
I had thought, I would become a monk by the end of this journey and all I had done was to get addicted to one of the worst kinds of seduction. I knew why Jindu never charged me for the dope, so I would continue living at his guest house. I felt disgusted as I put my hands in my pocket.
A packet emerged and fell to the ground, as I decided to take of my gloves. I picked it up. It was given to me by one of the kids that day. I opened it slowly as an ounce of black substance stared back at me. Jindu was no different. Everyone in this town wanted you to get hooked. They wanted your money .It seemed as if I had just checked in to hotel California, each day the devil would feed on me little by little.
As I sat on my normal, everyday perch – the small rock at the foot of the hill on top of which is a temple with its saffron flag fluttering in the wind that always blows in the early part of the afternoon – and keep a watch over the buffalos who were not all visible now because they have wandered off in the vast jungle that stretched all around, I saw the man walking towards me from the end of the path. The path passed touching my rock – the rock actually butting into the path and covering about one fourth of it – and then stretches straight for about two hundred yards after which it took a slight bend towards the left. All around was silence punctured now and then and accentuated by the bells tied to the buffalos. So much silence that if a dead leaf falls, you could hear it touch-down. So much silence that, if you had ears as sharp as mine, you could hear it cutting the air as it fell. The mountain gods looked down and smiled. I wore a shabby look, which resembled that of any locale that had let go of his appearance a long time ago. As I felt the wind chill in my neck, I pulled my collars up to keep my ears warm as my beard swayed in the wind callously marking the insanity that I had entered in to.

The man is walking carefully, his senses alert. But he was not slow. From the distance I could see that he was a foreigner, a Lat Sahib, because he wore faded green trousers with a faded grey shirt and his head is adorned by a hat. He had a stick in his hand which he is held above the ground that swayed with his walk. A gun slung across his shoulders. He is quite tall and slim.

I knew who he was. Not that I had met him or come across him previously. But I knew from what I had heard from others that he is the Lat Sahib who has been putting up in the neighbouring village for the past three weeks. He had come here to kill the man-eater. He was good at it too – had killed many so far. I thought he was good because tigers were attracted to him. So they gave him a chance to kill them.

In a way the man-eater had contributed to the silence. In the past three years, this tiger had killed and eaten more than two hundred people from the hills. From that particular town itself, it had killed nineteen people. The last that it took was a young girl who had gone with ten or so other women in the afternoon to collect fuel wood. While they were doing so, the tiger stalked them. It followed them, silent like death, creeping like death and then springing with the suddenness of death. The women knew about its presence only when it had already grabbed the girl by her throat and was dragging her away. The remaining women shouted and screamed and stampeded back to the village, while the girl remained silent because she had her throat in the tiger’s jaws. By the time the men were summoned and a few of them summoned their courage and a search party was formed, the tiger had already soused its hunger completely. So what they brought back was just a few bits of flesh and a few bones and her red coloured clothes. She was cremated right there in the village itself because everyone was terrified of venturing farther than that.

Because of the man-eater, people didn’t move much. Men did go to their fields and women did go to collect sticks and leaves and grass. Because if you stop all that you would die anyway. But everyone was on their guard and tense all the time. And no one spent more time than necessary outdoors. By four in the afternoon, the doors were closed and people were already inside as a ghostly hushing hung outside the doors and floated in the streets. Tigers mostly don’t stir in the afternoon. They begin moving only just before sundown. But this one was unpredictable. The last victim that it took, she was taken when the afternoon hadn’t even started blushing. So people stood indoors even in the afternoons unless they had to step out. Traffic between villages had come to a halt – close relatives didn’t visit even in marriage ceremonies. Celebrations were less while cremations were more. I however was not scared and wondered if the tiger was watching me at that instant.

Since people had almost stopped visiting nearby villages, the traffic on this path had dwindled. As it is, it used to be deserted almost all the time even otherwise. But now, even the one or two who would pass during any given day are gone. The silence here is complete. Shiv Shakti was the last resort before one would enter the tiger territory.

Not that afternoon needed any assistance for its silence. In fact the silence of the afternoon was deeper than the silence of the night. Most people thought that it is the night that spreads more silence. But they couple the absence of light with the silence and reach their conclusions. Silence in the afternoon is deeper even with the light being harsh. In the night the tiger, the leopard the jackals hunt. It is the howls of the hyenas that make the night silence eerie. The bears are constantly on the move searching for food and their grunts and other sounds carry in the night. The hunted give alarm calls and run. Only the birds sleep. In the afternoon, all take shelter from the sun and conserve energy. Even the birds that filled the very air with their songs go silent. The only birds that seem unaffected are the crow, the woodpecker, the drongo, the blue jay, the bee eater and the egret.

The man was near my rock now. If my ears were not sharp, I wouldn’t have heard him. He was slowing down, looking at me. So I knew that he would stop and talk to me.

“Keeping a watch on the cows?” he asked.

“Buffalos,” I told him. He was sun burnt and very handsome. And he knew a bit of the local our language.

“Uh…huh,” he says. He took out a packet of cigarettes. I rolled out a joint as he lit up a cigarette. He looked at me disdainfully but didn’t comment. I offered him a joint that he refused.

“Got to keep alert.” He said “The buffalos went that way. ”

I looked at him. He knew very well which side Jindu buffalos must have wanders. Behind me were the hills and the temple atop it. It is a completely rocky terrain and buffalos won’t go up there because there was no grass. In front of me was the dense jungle that had enticed me so often but the stories of the tiger had kept me away. An odd tinkling or two of their bells is still audible from that side. But I knew why he is asking the question. When two strangers meet, inanities are the perfect tool to dissolve the initial awkwardness. I indicated which way they had wandered with a nod of my head.

“How long have you been a shepherd?” he asked me. “Idiot, thinks I am a shepherd.” I thought as I looked at him with a strange look but decided to play the game. I was feeling heady and didn’t want to tell him why I was here in the mountains or what I was searching. The fact was I knew that the tiger wasn’t going to harm me. My time hadn’t come and yet I wasn’t willing to take the risk of walking across the path and go that water fall that had lured me so many times before.

“The buffalos started knowing me from the time I was a child,” I lied.

He takes a good look at me now. “How long will you be here?” he asked.

I look at the shadows wondering if he wanted to know when I was headed back to the plains or just back to the guest house. “Two hours more. Then the buffalos will start coming back to this rock.” I hoped so. Jindu and his buffalos were a nuisance and I had secretly wished that the tiger would take them out one by one just the way predator had taken out Arnie’s team in the movie “Predator.”

“You always sit on this rock? Every day?” he was beginning to annoy me as the colours of the sky had started to change. The mountains were turning pink. Soon it was going to be dark.

“The rock has taken the character of my buttocks,” I smiled.

He laughed as I sucked the last drag of the joint.

“You are very different from the rest of the villagers. The others treat me deferentially. Obsequiously. You don’t. Why is that?” had he realised I wasn’t one of them.

“Do the buffalos treat you different from the other men?” I asked him back portraying to be Jindu’s shepherd.

He shook his head.

“Then they know better than my fellow villagers,” I told him.

He laughed again. And I could tell he is really enjoying himself. I smiled wondering how much I had changed. I was being taken for an ordinary villager. I wondered if I stayed on for long enough would I become just like Jindu. Perhaps I would marry his daughter and live happily ever after, I didn’t want my life to end in that hill district or the village as this guy had termed it as. Where was the tiger? Wasn’t he hungry?

“You think a lot?” he asked me.

“There is nothing else here to do.” I answered trying to be polite. I wanted him to leave but as luck would have it he seemed to have all the time in the world at this point where the town came to an end and the so called tiger territory started.

He threw his cigarette as he understood, I wasn’t in a mood to make chit chat. He straightened his stick. As I fiddled on my empty packet for another cigarette, I realised I had run out of smokes. He understood and offered me one.

“Smoke this when you feel like relaxing,” he said. “By the way, the man-eater is in this area right now. I saw his fresh pugmarks on this very path just ahead of me. Probably he heard me coming and so wandered off in the direction your buffalos are. I went in the jungle tracing his pugmarks but lost the trail after sometime,” he looked at me seriously. I wondered if he was trying to pull my leg. I had been there for almost two hours and if any of those cows were not coming back, I wasn’t going back in to the jungle looking for them.

Then, before he started on his way again, he yelled, “Take care.”

Only I and the tiger have the ears to hear his footfall. Dope if made your reflexes sluggish, it enhanced your power of hearing for sure. I was pretty definite I could hear god if I tried hard enough too.

What I had told him was true. There is nothing here to do except think. The silence in the afternoon was so thick that it pushes your thoughts up. Villagers who are Moslem tell me that Mohammed was a shepherd. And I think that the Jesus that the white man believes in was also a shepherd. I could understand. Only shepherds can form new religions. Their thoughts are precipitated by the silence of the afternoon. In a way it is silence that gives rise to new religions. I looked at the cigarette and decided to light it up. It was a heady combination of dope , tiger scare and the thought of becoming a spiritual guru. Pretty soon the snow would start to melt and the town would start to fill up with newlyweds who shall be fed with endless tales of the man eater, each man telling a different story of how it was captured , what role he had played in it or if it was still at large, how they should lock their rooms at night. There was still time a month or so perhaps and this man seemed to be promising.


I look to my left. The man was just on the verge of disappearing around the bend. His footmarks were clear in the loose soil. If the tiger could read the pugmarks, he could catch up with him. I wondered who was following whom as I got up to look at my watch. It was getting late. The buffalos should be on their way back. I wondered why I was suddenly getting worried about Jindu’s buffalos. They were after all his buffalos and if it weren’t for the dope, I would have definitely not been able to sleep at night.

A blue jay arrived on the tree in front and looked around for insects. It made a few dives but came up with nothing in the beak. Then it started to shriek. Its mate replied from somewhere in the jungle. But something made me look to the left again. The man-eater has suddenly appeared there. It is walking unhurriedly. Then it too disappeared around the bend. Was I dreaming? I had just seen the ever elusive stripes and that too a man eater. Why he didn’t choose me as his afternoon snack, I wondered. Perhaps tiger just like any other predator smells for fear or a weapon. If unarmed he would not attack you just like the predator in the movie. Or perhaps he didn’t want to get doped and made a easy target. The rules of the game were simple. Eliminate the threat first, easy could wait.

There is no way that I could warn the hunter– the tiger was between me and him. And in any case, if his instinct was like that which made me look suddenly to the left, he would know of the tiger’s presence automatically. And even otherwise, I knew one thing – taught to me by nature, by the silence, by my long observations and by my thoughts. What happens happens. You can do zilch to change it.

I may as well enjoy that cigarette now. As I took a drag I heard a faint roar, then a gun fire. I saw the man walking back in a triumph; I knew the tiger was dead. I knew in the fleeting seconds that the tiger’s eyes had met mine, I knew it now, he had walked to his death sparing me.
The autopsy of the body revealed a broken hind leg that had become infected, that had led it to become a man eater. Perhaps the pain had become unbearable. Perhaps he had heard the conversation between the hunter and me. Perhaps he wanted to go out like the king of the jungle. Who knew? I got up next morning to read the head line of the man eater that had been shot dead two days ago, my close brush with death and my way to finding a new religious order.
My head had started to spin. Distant memories started to reappear. Monika must be happy, Shikha must be wondering and Linny, where was she? May be she had decided to go to some other destination after all. I slipped the packet back in to my pocket. It would be a good gift for Randy, my new friend whom I had met while roaming on the streets and he had decided to move in to Shiv Shakti guest house. He was a failed musician, who was in search of his soul. Perhaps dope was a solution to all our problems or was it just a gateway to a dream world, where everything seemed all right. The questions we could not seek an answer to were perhaps not worth answering under the effects of this marvellous substance. I decided to stroll in to the town.
The sun was bidding farewell, the mountains first turned orange and then pink, some kind of communication seemed to be occurring here only there were no words being exchanged. The lights of Shiv Shakti guest house guided me, as I walked on the treacherous path which led to the guest house. The restaurant was relatively empty and in a corner sat Randy with Jindu who was rolling a joint.
"Where were you?" Randy asked, his eyes dropping, his peculiar smile in place. Jindu looked up and went back to his business of rolling.
"Ah, was at the town, checking my mail." I replied.
"So how was the day?" I asked.
"Nothing much." Randy answered.
"Just rolling and smoking, Jindu got this stuff from you know who and its rated as the best stuff in the world." Randy added.
"Humm… enjoy, I am tired and going to sleep now." I said.
As I lay in bed my past came haunting once again, I was a manager once again, running around, saying “No, can’t be done to conference guests”. The chef telling me to stay away from her.
"I want to leave." One day, I had told the chef who was rather surprised to hear this coming from me. He knew I would have got over her in a few months’ time.
"I can’t explain." I had said.
I don’t know when I went to sleep. A knock on my door woke me up; it was all a bad dream. My past haunting me, my future full of uncertainty I ordered breakfast that was a standard forty rupee affair.
Randy was already awake, strumming his guitar as he sat in the sun, his face making more movements than his hands , a crowd of local kids had gathered to enjoy this freak show free of cost.
"Hey Randy, those kids are making fun of you." I said, as I sat down next to Randy.
"Ah, tell them to take a chillax." Randy replied.
"Last night, I met my guru in a dream, which was so vivid it seemed to be real, he said I was going to achieve success pretty soon and therefore today I am going to practice." Randy muttered. Making no sense whatsoever, he got up and went to his room.
"What’s wrong with him?” I asked Jindu who walked in with my breakfast.
"Oh nothing I asked him for rent this morning and he is upset since then." Jindu replied.
"How much does he have to pay now?" I asked although I knew Jindu would never tell me the exact figure.
"Not much, I was telling him that the neighbours are complaining about his music and he kind of got angry threw money at my face and told me to shove it up my arse. I mean what kind of behaviour is that, you don’t talk to your innkeeper like that." Jindu said.
"Relax Jindu, he is not really a bad guy, and besides he pays of his dues on time, he is just a little frustrated for not being able to make it big." I explained, although I wasn’t sure if he really understood anything besides the language of money, my only concern was that Jindu did not throw out Randy who had grown close to me as a friend.
"Well, tell him to watch out. Next time I am not going to take any shit from him." Jindu said.
"Sure, I will do that, will you be going to the town today." I asked Jindu.
"Yes what do you need?" He asked.
"Some paper, news not rolling." I said as Jindu smiled and some tension was lifted from the air. I knew that this was going to be a very long relationship although at that time I didn’t know how long it was going to be.
"Hey mother fucker how are you doing today?" I asked Randy.
"Upside down.” He replied. He was a rock star or so he called himself and had been struggling in the music world for a long time. Staying at the Shiv Shakti guest house, he had been trying to make music. Dope according to him stimulated his mind inspiring him to create while all that I could make out was noise or music heard elsewhere. Randhir aka Randy would smoke whole day rolling joint after joint, discussing john Lennon, breakup of beetles and end of hippies.
"A sad case." I thought.
Life was unfair, but was it ever fair. Shiv Shakti guest house seemed to house all kind of losers. Be it spiritual seekers like me or music lover like Randy.
"So dude what’s up?" I asked
"Nothing" he said as he pulled up the last drag of a joint.
"You know john could write some amazing stuff after he smoked this stuff, some of his best works have been written after smoking this." He said as he prepared to make another joint.
"Yeah right" I said as I tore of some rolling paper to get it to the right size.
"Humm…you know Siddhartha what I like about this place." he said.
"What?" I asked him
"Nothing bothers you….." he said as he lit up another joint.
Randy had passed out early in the morning at nine o clock. It seemed to me he had been smoking since last night and finally his brains had given up.
I got up to get outside and his last words haunted me "nothing bothers you." Was it true, in a place away from civilization where the night sky lit with zillions of stars you could see with your naked eye, here were two men, one in search of his soul, the other for his music, but then music was his soul which meant we both were searching for the same things only the mediums for this search were different.
Was I running away from the civilized world, I guess, I was. I wandered if I died in my room, surely Jindu was going to call the cops or maybe he won’t for the fear of getting caught in the drug trafficking case, so maybe he will throw my body off a cliff to make it look like an accident. Prospect of dying a mountaineers death was pretty exciting and I smiled at the thought.
"Hi are you the owner of this place?" The voice surprised me as I looked up.
"Uh…no up there." I pointed to Jindu’s house.
"Thanks" she said as she kept her backpack down.
"You can easily get a room here, the guest house is only fifty per cent occupied." I said trying to make conversation.
"How did you know?" she asked.
"Well there are four rooms and only two are occupied.’ I said as I smiled at my own joke.
"Are you a rocket scientist?"
"No" I said.
"Well I could have never figured that out, good bye" she answered as she walked towards Jindu’s house.
I got up and ran to Randy’s room to inform him of this new development in our lives. The news of having a female at our hotel excited Randy.
"Jolly good, now we can screw too…." Randy passed out again.
The idea did excite me as it had been a very long time, since I had gone out with a girl, not in the last twenty seven years and I was twenty eight now and before that I don’t think I could have possibly have managed it physically. So I was a virgin and I thought about it all the time and this seemed to be so right. Making love to the person you love .Just like in the movies. God and spirituality came back with another joint and it was evening when I got up, hungry and thirsty I called Jindu who could be heard talking to someone.
I climbed down the steps which were surely meant a death sentence for someone not careful, I saw Jindu and our new neighbour drinking tea.
"The bastard is going to charge me ten bucks for that." I thought.
"Hey Jindu can you get me something to eat." I asked him waving at that new girl.
"Butter and toast." Jindu suggested.
"Fine." I just wanted to eat and I knew that this was the best Jindu could do for me at this hour.
"Hi there, what’s your name?" I asked as Jindu left to make a quick forty rupees.
"Lana" she replied.
"I am Siddhartha, like in Herman Hesse “Siddhartha” the famous author." I said trying to sound nice.
"Yes I have heard of that book" she said.
"So why do you call yourself by that name?" she asked
"huh… Well my parents named me that." I couldn’t come up with a better answer then that.
"Would you like to smoke?" She asked me smiling.
"Well, sure why not.” I said. I knew that this was going to be a fruit full relationship. Friends made while smoking dope generally remained friends, till there was more pot to be smoked, more carpets to be burned. As I rolled she watched me, studying my face.
"So what do you do?" She asked me as I neatly gummed the paper.
"Nothing now, I used to work for a hotel. Kind of retired now." I answered.
"What about you?" I asked her.
"Same thing, only a different department." She said and I knew she was lying. Maybe she didn’t understand what I was saying I thought but then maybe she was just hiding something she didn’t want to share with a stranger.
I didn’t care. I was looking at her eyes; they were light brown, just like mine. I tried to find someone else in those eyes, someone from my past. She was a stranger. I took out the packet and broke a piece to roll some more.




Chapter 11
Mystical beings

"She doesn’t have great legs but exposing like hell, I mean she is those good in bed types" Randy who had been staring at Lana commented.
"What's your point?" I asked Randy, getting a little bit irritated because Randy was loud enough, for even Lana to hear, the smart comment he had just made.
"Well look at those thin legs but she’s got a real nice butt, really tempting, doesn’t it excite you ever." Randy said, as he stood there, staring at Lana, who was cooking her breakfast in Jindu’s restaurant kitchen, much to his displeasure, who saw good money lost, as he couldn’t make any profit in the fare, that Lana cooked for herself and her friends .
"Well did you do her?’ Randy asked.
"Hey you have gone crazy, stop smoking." I answered, getting a little irritated by this sudden intrusion, in to my private space.
"Ah then, what were you doing in her room yesterday afternoon for a full two hours?" Randy asked, smiling cunningly.
"Nothing, she was telling me about her life." I answered looking at the mountains, which were still in their place. I wondered, if I really was expecting them to move. They had already moved once and I had seen it happening.
I wondered how they would look down upon insignificant mortals, brushing them off as they tried to reach the summit. It seemed as if they could no longer stand the tickling sensation. People who had gone trekking were lost never to be found again, preserved in the snow for eternity; they were reminders of things that went horribly wrong, when you tried to tamper with nature. Man on the other hand would never understand when to stop. Love had been something similar for me. The more I had tried to reach the summit, the harder. I had fallen off.
"Hey, what are you thinking, you didn’t answer my question." Randy asked.
"Nothing I was wondering, what if these mountains were alive, listening in to our conversation right now, thinking what jerk off, we guys really are." I replied changing the topic.
"I know, what they are thinking boss.’ Randy said.
"What?" I questioned back.
"They are wondering how the fuck we knew, about this plant which gives us this cool stuff." Randy said as he drew smoke from his spiff.
"Humm... That is something I never could have thought off, you are a genius." Randy was unable to catch the sarcasm in my statement.
"Thanks man. So what was it that you and Lana were discussing so passionately about yesterday?" He asked.
"Nothing."
Lana had called me to her room, the previous afternoon on the pretext of smoking hashish, but after a couple of joints, our conversation had wandered off to discussing her personal life.
She was sad, her story right out of a masala Bollywood flick.
"The man, who is my father, is not the man my mother married; he screwed her and left her before marriage. My grandmother who was a woman of principles threw my mom out of the house and she was left to fend for herself." Lana had said while I sat there looking in to those light brown eyes.
"Was it such a big deal?" I asked Lana, I knew in India this was a big deal for a girl to become pregnant before marriage, but in Italy, I thought things were different and it rather came as a surprise, that out there, people were just as rigid, as they were in India.
"Go on, then, what happened?" I asked, as I was really keen, on knowing what had conspired after that.
"My mother, who had no shelter approached a college friend of hers and he gave her shelter, eventually he married my mom, but he could never come to terms with the fact that I was not his daughter, he used to beat my mother and when I was five years old, my mother started hating me, blaming me for all the misery that was in her life."
"After a while my father left us, and, from there on, life was hell. To reduce the pain and anguish, I started taking drugs trying to find a solution, but my mother’s face would appear every time I would be high. To escape that each year, I come to India, stay here for six months, because this is the only country where you can live like a king for six months on a small budget. Plus I have so many friends here, that it is, a home away from home." Lana said.
"Did you ever ask your mother your fault? Did you ever try to reciprocate love if there was ever a time when she felt lonely?’ I asked Lana.
"Well, I did do that but my mother has transformed in to a machine, who does not know what caring all is about, she is living in her past. The nail in the coffin was when my grandmother died, and, she came to know about it six months later when, a letter that she had posted to her came back with, receiver deceased on it." She said.
"I am sorry." That was all I could say. I could not think of any better sentence and I was rather busy brooding over the fact, what a little money could do for you in this country especially if it happened to be a foreign currency that was better than the dollar. For that matter, was I brooding over the fact how we cannot forgive people throughout their lives, making other people live in misery. I had to forgive Monika, but who was she? I couldn’t remember her face and it was sad. It all seemed like a dream. Was she even real? I wondered.
Lana had this advantage, of being born in a country that was rich, and was in a way, utilizing this advantage to the maximum. Each year she would come back, year after year, looking for a quick fix and a solution to her problems which of course were just not there, so she would dope crazy, cursing, and mistrusting people around her.
"Why don’t you trust people around you? Why do you have this wall around you?" I asked Lana.
"I will tell you Siddhartha. Two years ago, I was visiting this place and at time I was not even high on drugs. I had this guide, whom I had hired for a trek in to the Himalayas. It was a six day trek and one night he raped me, although he is in jail now paying for his sins but that incident sealed my fate. I will never be happy again." She said.
"What?" I was shocked to hear this and was filled with sudden remorse, I felt like hugging her, but couldn’t as I wasn’t sure how she would have reacted. Lana rolled another spiff and passed it on which I duty fully lit.
"Ever thought of adopting a child and bringing her up the way you always wanted your mother to bring you up?" I asked her.
"Oh yes, but you know what I met this doctor and he told me to adopt the little girl inside me, nurture her, cherish the beautiful feeling inside me, bring her up the way I always wanted her to be." Lana’s answer left me speechless.
Here was a girl, I thought was enjoying her life, but in reality her misery was much greater than what I was undergoing. I had everything and the only problems, that I had, been self-made. I felt like taking care of Lana, but I knew she wouldn’t have agreed to it .She was a person who believed in finding her solutions herself.
"You know Siddhartha, I generally do not discuss my problems with anyone and the only reason, why I did it with you, was that I find realms of positive energy around you, I feel good in your company. I feel safe, and, you speak the truth no matter how harsh it is. I remember the first day, when you had told me to start believing in myself, I knew that this person had something which will help me out in the long run and although now you know about my life, I feel safe in the fact that this information is safe." Lana concluded.
"Do you believe in God?" I asked her.
"Yes I do, but not the idol worshipping, I know God is testing me and although I maybe a fallen angel, bound to suffer I will not give up my faith, I saw this picture of some God in your room, it seemed to impart so much peace and sense of achievement. I wanted to ask you if I could have it." Lana said.
"Sure you can." I got up and went to my room to get it but Lana’s room was locked when I came back. I stood there thinking, if all this was real. During dinner I saw her and I knew she was avoiding me. I had felt the same way before. When you tell about your life to someone, you are taking of your inhibitions, till there are none left and, then you are naked, standing there in front of a stranger wondering, why you did it?
I walked up to Lana and she looked at me trying to avoid me.
"Hello Lana, how are you feeling now?" I asked her.
"Thank you Siddhartha, for being such a great friend and a spiritual guru." Lana gave me a warm hug and walked away.
Randy was right. Why was I here? What was I searching for? Peace, it was still nowhere around. God, I had lost my faith years ago. Love, this was the strangest of places where I could find it. So what was I looking for? I was actually confused.
Now, was I a spiritual guru?, or this was something, only Lana could decide, but one thing was sure, I had come to a conclusion, that my problems was not the least complicated, in comparison to hers. I decided to follow her.
"Well Lana, actually it was me, who wanted to thank you, not because you told me about yourself, but because, I realized that my problems, do have a solution unlike yours, and, they are not the least complicated for that matter." I said as I caught up with her. Lana looked at me and smiled, as she walked away.
"So what were you and Lana discussing yesterday in her room?" Randy asked me again and I was transported once again to the present.
"Nothing, spiritual stuff and the likes of that." I tried to evade the topic once again.
"Hah, Spirituality you must be out of your mind. All that female needs is a good bang." Randy laughed.
I wasn’t very pleased to hear this, and, decided not to go further on, but Randy didn’t stop there. Although he changed the topic, sensing that he had blurted out something that wasn’t really cool.
"She considers me to be her guru." I told Randy, who went hysterical on hearing this.
"So now you are a guru…" He started laughing like a madman.
"Sir, you, yourself are confused about life, why on earth would you leave your job, and come to the mountains to seek answer to a solution which already existed in your life. You were in a good position, and that’s what your aim in life was. God had provided the solution and yet you left it in search of a stupid quest which generally ends here in the Himalayas.’’ Randy had spoken words of wisdom, or, at least he thought so.
"Well I really don’t know, if what you speak is true?" I said looking away trying to hide my shame. It was the truth and I had been evading it till now but even Randy was able to deduce it and this was something I could not fathom.
"You know Siddhartha; the truth is that all the solutions that you seek lie in your head and, your head has gone crazy smoking this stuff." Randy pointed to the spiff in his hand.
"I think you are right but I am not sure, I know about this. I have to seek answers to some other problems in life." I said as I got up wondering what was going on. I needed a break from dope as it was making my life more complex, rather than providing solutions to it.












Chapter 12
Seeking sanity
Our mind has a strange power. It can conjure up things, which in the real world would be impossible to achieve. It can make you in to a movie star, a rich business tycoon or a head of state or in my case a hopeless lover. Yes I was in love once again. In love with Lana. I knew she wasn’t a girl, whose company any self-respecting man would tolerate, but I was a man with no self-respect at that time.
I had started out on this journey when I had lost it all; now looking back I found self-respect was one of the things amongst them. I would sit and dope crazy with Jindu and Randy while thinking of my past, that suddenly seemed to be much better than my present. Before I used to be just a hopeless lover, now I was a hopeless lover with no job, no self-respect and a drug addict.
Of course, I hadn’t admitted my love for Lana, as I was afraid, that she would leave me, if she came to know of my feelings for her. To solve this problem, I would, each day think of new ways to propose to her. The insane ideas ranged from hiring a helicopter, taking her to the highest peak and propose my love there. This plan had to be let off when I came to know that such an ambitious plan would burn a hole in my pocket by thirty thousand. An amount I wasn’t willing to spend on something, that didn’t guarantee success. Smoking Dope of all the things did make me slightly practical when it came to money issues.
I just loved Linny, her five foot six inches height, shoulder length brunette hair, small nose, and flat chest, which were probably a result of some hormonal changes, a side effect of excessive drug abuse.
"Hi Sid." Linny my sunshine had woken up.
"Hi… How are you doing babes?’’ Our relationship had reached the Sid and babe routine. Well, she had asked me to call her ‘babes’ as she found it, nice the way I spoke it. While I, in return had asked her to call me ‘Sid’, not because I didn’t like my name, but the way she pronounced it calling me ‘Shit heart’.
"I was thinking last night about what you said about peace and tuning of mind to listen to your inner self. Meditation really is helping me to keep on top of things.’’ Lana said.
"I told you that meditation is the best remedy for all problems, it’s about freeing your mind from the grasp of trivial things, and to seek, a higher plain in life." I replied.
"Very true." Lana said.
"What will you have for breakfast?" I asked Lana, looking for the cue card, that I had made in the night about spiritual stuff to tell her, to impress the wits out of her. Somehow, I had misplaced it and now was at a loss of words.
"You are such a jerk." She turned and went back to her room. Obviously I had uttered the wrong words. Words that made no sense, at that point of time. I heard someone laughing. Surely it wasn’t the mountain Gods who were busy meditating. It was Randy who had been observing this exchange of words with deep concentration. The next best step was to seek advice from an expert.

"Hey Randy good morning you heard the whole thing where do you think I went wrong ,was it the way I spoke it or was it something I said" I asked him.
"well, well, well what can I say, you said the wrong words, she was expecting you to say something spiritual, and all you could come up with, was ‘did you have breakfast?’, now if I was in her place, I would have definitely made out that you are some kind of an imposter trying to seduce her in to sleeping with her.” Randy said.
"You surely know that is not the case.’’ I said.
"On a serious note I feel that she is playing with both of our emotions , have you ever seen or realized the fact that she hasn’t purchased any dope till date and the last time I had asked her to get some, she had asked Jindu to put it on our tab fifty-fifty. Now what kind of a girl would do that until and unless there is something fishy going on?" Randy said.
"Now who’s getting paranoid?" I said getting annoyed.
"Suit yourself; ever since you and Lana have started this ‘Sid babe’ routine, you have lost it completely. Believe me she is just using you, trust me on this one." Randy said.
"I love her and I want to marry her one day, it’s just that I am not sure how to propose her." I said.
"Yeah sure, till that time you treat her to free dope and spiritual parties, and love, yeah sure, I am in love with Jindu’s wife, come on, do a reality check buddy. She’s a foreign number, she can’t shit without gobbling those one thousand tablets or so it seems, she spits, she’s flat. Hell she’s even got a goatee, what on earth attracts you to her." Randy retorted.
""You won’t understand." I replied as I got up and walked thinking about what Randy had said. The little town was left behind, I kept on walking. The mountains looked down upon me. They seemed to be smiling, laughing at me, and talking to each other.
They seemed to discuss the end of this love story, blossoming at their feet but they were the Gods and they knew the ending. It was me, who had to find it.
I looked up and suddenly everything went quiet. Dark clouds appeared from nowhere hiding me from the eyes of the saints. The temperatures dropped and I felt a sudden chill. The weather was changing. It seemed that even Gods didn’t want me to be happy. After two hours of rain and snow, my sleepy little town had once again turned white. The mountain saints had seemed to grow their beards miraculously in the last two hours looking more daunting now.
I slipped and fell thrice, before I could reach Shiv Shakti guest house. All this time I thought of Lana and had decided that it was in the best interest of both of us, that I should talk to her, and let her know that I loved her. At least this way I would no longer suffer from guilt or fear of losing her. Somehow I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake, I had made with Charul once.
Randy who was sitting in his balcony waved as he saw me approaching.
"Hey, where had you been and why are your clothes dirty. I am sure you fell quite a few times before you could reach back." He smiled.
"Yeah I did." I said ignoring that smile of his which seemed to make fun of our relationship.
"When you were gone, Lana and I saw some great things being formed in those trees due to snow; she was hoping that you would be here to explain the deeper significance of those forms. Guess my reasoning was just not good enough for her." He said.
"What did you tell her?" I asked as I felt a strange void around the place. Some thing was definitely wrong I could feel it in the air.
""Well, nothing regarding your feelings towards her, for sure. She didn’t like the fact that you left her behind when you went for a walk. I had to tell her that it was something personal that you had to sort out, like buy some condoms to keep your dick warm at night." Randy Laughed.
"Yeah sure bastard." I said.
"It snowed pretty heavy out here and Jindu tells me that it’s going to snow for the next three days, the weather forecast has it all sorted out on the radio." Randy filled me with important information, which I was least interested in knowing.
"All right, where is she?" I finally asked Randy, as he was now getting on my nerves, giving me information; I was least interested in.
"She jumped of that cliff." Randy said pointing to a nasty cliff near the guest house so seriously that for once I thought he was telling the truth.
"Cut the bull crap, I want an answer now." I demanded.
"There." Randy pointed to a house down in the valley. Surely I could make out Lana standing in the Balcony with someone.
"She’s got a friend staying there, who was in Goa and came back in today." Randy said.
"Who is he?" I asked Randy. I knew it was all over and what was left, was the post mortem of a dead situation.
"Her boyfriend, surely she must have told her Guru about him, oh she didn’t, so sorry Mr Spiritual guru, your student hid an important aspect of her life from you." Randy rubbed salt in to my wounds, as I stood there on the verge of crying.
"I had told you before, she is using us, but you wouldn’t listen. Today he came and she packed her bags and moved in with him. Jindu tells me, he is a British guy and stays here." Randy said.
She was gone. Just like that, no thank you, no good bye, all that was left was a void. I could see her standing down there in that balcony with a guy, maybe they were kissing. She seemed to have already forgotten me or else she would have at least told me about him. Maybe I should have told her, while I was still ahead in the race. I had finally understood that we all were travellers, in this journey called life. Getting attached to someone meant complicating things. To achieve Nirvana, one had to let go of all worldly desires, to start off, was love.
They say throw away the thing you love the most, if it ever comes back to you, it was yours, else’s it never was.
It snowed for the next three days. The temperatures dipping, as low as -5 degrees and, it seemed impossible to do anything, except sit in front of a wooden heater and smoke dope. I was worried about Lana who had moved to her boyfriend’s house.
"Oh don’t worry her boyfriend will keep her warm, it’s us, who have to worry about wood, being put in to the oven. Jindu get some more wood, this stupid fire is about to extinguish." Randy who was wrapped in a blanket said.
"This God damn Jindu tells me that he has run out of dope and can’t get it stops snowing." Randy said.
We discussed events of the past day and deducted that Lana, in fact were extremely shrewd and had used us. Although I was in love with her, to avoid any arguments, I had agreed with Randy. I was feeling strange, maybe I was sick.
"She will suffer in hell, only if we had all that dope she smoked." Randy was beginning to lose it now.
"Uh… Yeah" I whispered not sure if Randy even heard it. I was surprised what dope could do to you and was reminded of that beggar, I had met in the by lanes of Delhi, Who had thrown that fifty paisa coin on my face. Did I look like him now? The cramps were getting stronger with each passing minute. My mind stopped functioning, strange colours, started to appear before my eyes.
"May be I should drink some tea." I thought." My childhood had started to appear before my eyes now.
"Hey, it’s my turn to bat." My brother shouted, as I ran after getting out.
"Later, I got to study, tomorrow." I said.
"Siddhartha, you scored excellent marks." My mother had said on the phone after my high school result came out as, I was too nervous to go and check it.
"Should I marry him?" Charul’s face appeared in front of my eyes now.
"Come Siddhartha, let’s go. I have come to release you of this misery. You have suffered enough in this world…" An angel’s face had appeared now. I was at peace.
"But my aim still eludes me, I cannot go." I said.
"Siddhartha, Siddhartha." Randy was desperately calling out.
"Huh, what happened?" I was brought out of my dream, or was it real.
"Man you stopped breathing." Randy said, sweat dripping down his face. The room seemed to be extremely cold, and, I knew, that it was all real.
I got up and came out of the room. It was snowing outside. I looked up and saw zillions of snowflakes coming towards me, each one a fallen angel condemned to die a silent death.
"Why me God, why me?" I shouted looking towards the sky. A tear rolled out of my eye and instantly froze. I kept crying, till I could cry no more. My heart felt a sudden relief, I knew somehow the dark clouds, shall pass over and the silver lining was round the corner.
"You alright, Siddhartha?" Randy came stumbling behind me.
"Hey, you are crying, don’t worry I have asked Jindu to get some more dope." He said.
"No, I wasn’t crying." I said as I wiped my face with snow.
"Let’s go inside and eat something." I said as I got up to go inside. It was extremely cold outside and the chill had started to seep in to my body.
That night we ate as if there was no tomorrow. My belief in God was strengthened by this near death experience.
Next morning the sun was out in full force, Snow fighting a losing battle melted making the grounds slippery and difficult to walk. Jindu was busy clearing the walk ways while Randy and I sat enjoying the beautiful morning sun.
"I tell you I love the food that Swarnalata cooks." Randy said.
"Yeah, tell Jindu about it." I said as I nibbled on my toast tossing, the sides to crows that religiously gathered everyday on our balcony for their morning meals.
"Who were you talking too yesterday?" Randy asked.
"When?" I asked, knowing well what Randy was referring to.
"Yesterday, when you went in to your trance mode." Randy said.
"Oh that was nothing; I don’t wish to discuss that." I said.
"But…" Randy’s sentence was cut short by some commotion in the doorway that was blocked by ice. A familiar face appeared and she came running straight to me. It was Lana, she was back. She kept her back pack down and ran towards me. Before I knew it, she gave me a warm hug, as tears rolled out of her eyes.
"What’s wrong?" I asked.
"Ï am sorry, I left without telling you." She replied.
"It’s alright, go and rest." I said pushing her away from me. Something had broken inside me and it was hurting a lot. Lana sensed it.
"What’s wrong?" She asked.
"Nothing." I replied.
"He is not well." Randy butted in sensing my awkwardness.
"What’s wrong Sid?" She asked.
"The name’s Siddhartha." I said as I turned away to look at the mountains covered from top to bottom in a layer of white. They looked back at me and smiled.
The silence intrigued me. Silence, yet it conveys so much. Lana was no longer close to my heart, or was it my ego, that had forced me to take a decision, that I was going to regret. At that time, it was the best, I could have thought of, and I did, what my heart said.
"Hey Jindu, get the keys to the room next to Randy’s." Lana shouted at Jindu who was busy clearing the snow unaware of what had just happened. Lana picked up her bags and walked down the staircase grumbling in anger.
"The bitch got guts, to stay here after, all this has happened. She knows pretty well what’s wrong with you and yet she behaves innocent. I am not offering any dope to her from now on." Randy shuffled in his chair and went back to eating, much to the displeasure of the crows, who flew away to look for food elsewhere.
"I won’t be smoking anymore." I said.
"Cool, so I can have all your stuff." Randy said.
"Sure, if I have any." I replied.
Randy looked at me and looked away, I thought, he could read my mind at that time, and he knew that I was not going to smoke anymore, this however did not bother him as it was time to change loyalties, which depended on whether you have it or you don’t and I was the looser here, as that evening, I saw randy team up with Lana, discussing Nirvana and its theory, while I sat in a corner missing the high, that had given me friends and a care free life. I looked up, a divine thing had occurred, and I decided not to give in to the devil, that seemed to coax me.
The cramps appeared and reappeared, but I stood stuck to the notion, that I was no longer going to be dependent on anything, it was always better to leave before they hurt you, right down there in the balls.
Jindu who also owned a restaurant was keen on getting some tips from me how to increase his revenue. It was a small place constructed above the four rooms of the Shiv Shakti guest house and had a breath taking view of the Himalayas. There was a small kitchen, and eight tables with cheap plastic chairs .Every season with the advent of summers he would open it, hire some help and run it serving cheap food and hashish but one thing was there, he had built it aesthetically, and had used lot of wood to decorate the ceiling so the place looked like a good restaurant serving cheap hash.
"Why don’t you get some proper chairs and table?" I asked Jindu one day.
"No use, my clients, are the same bunch of dope heads who come year after year to smoke, they don’t care for what I give them nor they are willing to pay more, it’s like a no win situation." He had answered.
This was a fact, as all the clients he seemed to have were Lana, her boyfriend Daniel (yes they had gotten together after the break up) and their friends, who would sit in the restaurant, and ask Jindu for food. Jindu maintained a book and all there food bills would go in there, it was a no win situation, as I had often seen Jindu fighting over five or ten rupees which generally did not matter. I suggested Jindu a lot of changes, but the only thing he seemed to agree on was to increase the prices of dishes, after I explained him the concepts of overheads. This was not really welcomed by his regular guests, who seemed to know the prices of dishes by heart. They complained and eyed me with distrust, as I was a criminal out there to rob them, of their travel money.
Jindu however stuck to the new rates, which were nominally increased, after much due consideration .Although I taught his help some finer points of cooking, Jindu wasn’t very happy with the idea of putting garnishes, on the dishes as he considered it a waste of good vegetables.
However, I no longer had to pay for my meals, as I had become a kind of in house chef, innovating and introducing new menus, and would help Jindu run the place making accounts and keeping a tab on the expenditures. The business started to pick up and soon we were doing good business of two grand a day much to the displeasure of the regulars, who no longer could smoke dope openly, as lot of people would come every day, to taste the food that we were so meticulously making. Jindu was excited as he never thought he could make money from this place. Our customers just loved the mushroom masala and carom board, a smaller version of pool.
However Lana and gang became extremely impatient, as they did not have their clubhouse anymore, and for this, they blamed me. They started to complain of poor service, and lack of hygiene, but it was Jindu who put his foot down and told them if they had a problem, it was them who had to leave. This shut them up for some time and things were smooth from there on.
Randy would often sit with them, although he sympathized with me. I guess hashish was big drawing factors in this part of the mountains where friendships are made and broken, depending on the fact whether you smoke, or you don’t smoke.
"Hey Sid, you sure you won’t smoke?" he would often ask me, tempting me before passing of the chillum to his wild friends. Lana would eye me, and was surprised, how someone could be so strong to leave something like hashish, just like that.
I had made a couple of new friends, now that a lot of long staying guests elsewhere, had made it a point to eat at the Shiv Shakti guest house every day. Each day a young girl in her early twenties would visit us for breakfast. She was pretty average looking, but there was something about her that intrigued me, especially her eyes .She had the most amazing eyes that I had ever seen. I would wait for her to come every day and I knew what she liked to eat which was muesli with curd. Each day I would try something new with her muesli decorating it in a different way.
I would make it a point to put some extra banana in her milk shake. We never talked besides saying good morning and her placing her order .After the breakfast she would disappear in the mountains behind the restaurant, come back in the evening and eat dinner.
"Hi, Sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask you something?" I mustered the courage to ask her one day.
"Yes, of course." She replied.
"Well, I was just wondering if you could tell me where you go every day in those mountains." I said pointing to the mountain she would disappear in to every day. I had often seen her walking on to a trail until she would disappear behind the mountain.
"Oh, I discovered that route and each day I walk as far as I can, it’s a great exercise." She said
"Have you been there?" she asked me.
"No, I haven’t, never got the time to go in there." I lied.
"Would you like to come with me some time?" She asked me looking at me as if she could read my mind.
"Yeah, sure." I replied.
"Now"
"Ok" I said.
"I am Rizzla, Its, what you make of it." she said.
I smiled and said "I am Siddhartha like in Herman Hesse, also as in Guatam Buddha." I had found it easier to explain my name to strangers this way, as most of the traveling kind, had read the book ‘Siddhartha’ by the great writer.
"Yeah no deep meaning in my name though, it’s you make of it sounds like a rolling paper." She laughed and the ice between us was broken. The awkwardness of talking to a stranger, disappeared and, we were soon sitting there discussing food and the mountains.
"Let me inform Jindu, that I will be gone for the day." I said as I got up to tell Jindu.
Rizzla was from South Africa and was traveling alone. She had been to Rajasthan and goa before reaching the Himalayas. She was a traveller, and I knew that craving. I had once done that, and, I knew it well that although she could turn back and go back to what she had left, I would never be able to do so. This was life, and I had left what I had in life. There was no turning back now. The climb was steep initially, but slowly it turned in to a more even trail.
"So you are not on a mission, like self-realization or soul searching?" I asked her as we walked on that mountain trial. She stopping now and then to pick up crystal stones which looked like gems however were of no value in the commodity market.
"You see life has so many things to offer, you just have to reach forward and grab them as they come, like these stones, you kick them and you get nothing, you put them in a necklace and you get something, you feel great, when you create it brings in harmony and peace within oneself, the positive energy starts to flow." She answered.
"Humm…" I said scratching my chin wondering how she knew so much about life, while here I was much older, and yet wondering about my aim in life.
"But what if you don’t know what you want from life?" I asked her wondering if she had the answer to my questions in life, which everyone, whom I seem to know didn’t .Was my search going to end here. Was I about to find out what I wanted in life?
"Why do you ask me this? Do you feel that way? I see you every day working at Jindu’s restaurant and you are in command of what you do. I like the food you cook, the innovations, the garnishes. Let me explain it to you in your language. You create dishes wonderful dishes don’t you feel anything?" she asked me.
"But that is something, I don’t want to do and if that is what I wanted to do why did I leave my job in the first place? Why this trip?" I was confused now and wasn’t able to understand the point Rizzla was trying to make here.
"Think again." She said and went quiet as we kept on walking. Her words now haunted me, I was a chef and that is what I enjoyed doing most. Was it time to go back I wondered. Back to my old life.
"I know a lot about you Sid, You are on the run, running away from routine life, looking for adventure but you didn’t even bother to look for this route, even if it was there right behind you." She said. Her words now hit me hard, but were true. Every single word that she spoke was true and I could no longer look her in the eyes, that had intrigued me so much till now.
"Life’s little desires are not the things you get, but are the things that have been always there, but you are too blind to see them, cribbing to God that he hasn’t given you enough, when all you have to do is to grab them, look for opportunities and make your move, after all you need is food shelter and clothing." She continued.
We had reached the end of the trail which had led us to a beautiful water fall.
"Life’s little pleasures" She said as I stood there, looking at that beautiful fall, a perfect view, a place yet to be exploited by man’s petty economics.
"I lied to you Siddhartha; I have been coming here every day, cleaning it up, the mess left by so called campers and trekkers. People, who do not realize that there is someone, who is coming behind them, and some body has already been there where they are going,. Over the days I have been picking up empty packets and other non-biodegradable stuff and look at it now, as good as new, however, I know that this is not going to be for long, yet I am trying." She said.
"What is your profession?" I asked now completely smitten by her. I had been looking for so long, for a girl like her and now that she was with me, I couldn’t match up to her. Suddenly I started to feel so low, so shallow.
"I am a healer." She replied.
"Humm… So you are also on dope." I thought.
"I know what you are thinking." She suddenly surprised me.
"What?" I asked her.
"That I smoke illicit stuff, you don’t have to smoke dope to understand life Siddhartha, it’s a common thing, which, most of us don’t understand, or don’t want to understand." She said.
"That is not what I was thinking, well actually I was, but I stopped doing it once I realized it wasn’t the answer to what I seek in life." I said trying to be philosophical.
I was by now pretty clear in my head that you didn’t need to take help of something to realize, what you wanted to get in life. Here was a girl who wasn’t doing anything of that sort and yet, was so clear and, there was Randy who did nothing, but smoked and yet was so confused in life, about what he wanted from it. Strange things were going on and I was getting all the more confused, not that I didn’t knew about all this, but I had tried not to understand it till now, and yet again, the same things were now being told to me, which I had always thought were not true. Should I believe her and go back or should I continue on my quest. I had no answer for it. Not yet.
"Hey you got all tensed up, relax, and tell me something about yourself." Rizzla smiled at me.
"Well there is nothing much to tell about" I said. I wanted to be alone now, but was with her. She was making me think again of all the things. I had done in life so she now appeared as a potential enemy, in my plan of seeking my aim in life.
"Any girl friends?" she asked me.
"No, had a couple of them, both of them left me for other guys." I said as their faces appeared one of them unmistakably Lana.
"Oh I am sorry about that." She said as she looked at the mountains that looked even more majestic form here.
"What about you, any boyfriends?" I asked.
"Oh I have a steady boyfriend, I have known him for the last four years, and Kevin is the most amazing guy I have met. He is a dentist. Although he doesn’t understand my need to travel, but never stops me from doing so, he gives me my space. In a relationship it is extremely important for you to give your partner, the much needed space, or the relationship begins to go sore, and then it hurts, when you fail to understand the other persons need and try to impose your feelings on them." She said.
"So you have been in India for how long now?" I asked her trying to change the topic however she had told me before that she had been here for the last six months and had been to Rajasthan and Goa before arriving in that small sleepy town of mine.
"Six months" She said looking at me wondering if she hadn’t told me before.
"You know I am headed for Kerala tomorrow. Would you like to come with me?" She said, and I knew, she was attracted to me. The girl, I had looked for was asking me to come with her and this was the perfect opportunity to say ‘yes’. To be with her.
"No, I can’t I got a commitment here." I answered and instantly knew, she was disappointed by this answer.
"I understand" she said.
The sun was disappearing behind the mountains which turned pink. They seemed to cry, as they bid fare well to their beloved sun. We had reached Shiv Shakti guest house, she loaded with her rocks, had refused my assistance in any manner to carry them back for her.
That night we ate dinner together. Jindu smiled at me, and Randy looked at me in displeasure for not telling him where I was headed for.
"I hope we meet again someday." She said as she got up to leave.
"Yes I hope so." I said.
She walked towards the door, and then suddenly turned back and came running towards me and kissed me. At first I was surprised, and then I gave in to my emotions, and kissed her deeply and passionately.
"You want to stay back for a while." I asked her.
"No I got to pack." She said as she went out. Jindu came to me and congratulated me on this success. Randy ran up to me only to knock Ganguly, Jindu’s helper, down carrying a tray full of used utensils. Unperturbed he got up and came to me.
"So dude, what’s cooking?" he asked me with that familiar smile.
"Kidney bean soup." I smiled back at him.
"Bull shit, who was she? You lucky bastard." He asked me.
"She’s just a friend leaving for Kerala tomorrow." I said, as I got up to go to my room. I knew Lana, had been watching, what was going on, and had sent Randy to investigate, or so I thought. I wasn’t interested in getting her to understand, that I was in love again, or with her, for that matter, so I didn’t tell Randy anything.
A hot bath was in order, and as I stood under the shower, I wondered, if it was right decision or should I have had gone with her. Why did I do, what I did? Was there something in it was it an opportunity, that Rizzla had talked about. I did not know the answer. That night I slept like a log too tired from the day’s hike.
Slowly I had begun to realize, that it wasn’t just Rizzla or me who were confused, but a lot of people were. Some who weren’t my gurus .To others I was their guru. It was funny, as I had never considered myself one, but yet now I was being cast in to this mould, where I would discuss lot of spiritual stuff with lot of strangers, who would be there and listen to me talk to them. I would often go in to the trance mode, and tell them stuff they wanted to hear, or stuff they were unwilling to hear.
With Rizzla gone the next day, I felt lonely. While Jindu offered me free accommodation for my help with the restaurant, I felt lonely and while, I had no one left, with Lana busy with her boyfriend, smoking dope. It was time to leave Shiv Shakti guest house for good and follow Rizzla to Kerala. I had come in search of Linny to that mountain paradise and while I hadn’t found her, I did discover my inner self. It was time to go for one more thing, to find true love, but before that I needed to see my parents, whom I hadn’t met in the last five years or so.








Chapter 13
Back to rehab
When i was in college, i always used to call my home my rehab, not because there were rules to be followed, or things not to be done .My parents used to pamper me a lot whenever i used to go home, yet, i came to the conclusion that it was more of a rehab, as there were certain things i could never bring myself to do in front of my parents.
I could for instance, never drink or smoke in front of my father, and till date he thinks that i don’t do either .It’s also for the fact, that i get bored of things fast and smoking and drinking have been the same .
I would pick up habits just to leave them, once i loose interest in them .A serious mental disorder? I can’t get addicted to anything. Love had been same to me. Too often just to save myself from getting hurt, I had shut down myself, not responding to offers of love, knowing well, in the end I would just be left alone. This fear of losing in love let me go of some wonderful women in life, perhaps because I didn’t try too hard or had just wanted the best for them. Either ways, the loss has been mine, because somewhere in my mind, even today when they want me back, something stops me, telling me it is a mind game women love to play. No offence, but just let me go. You have done so in the past, so why this sudden remorse?
When I was in the Himalayas, doping crazy, I did realize that more than the dope, I was addicted to love. Love that does not exist and while men like me travel and shower gifts at our women, they are seeking something else. We all humans are like that. Always in search of something better, never satisfied. Nirvana, a term so often used in the mountains, people seeing gods in mountains and yet, that something better attracted them, cajoled them making us all prisoners in our minds, to the ever growing lust of a being something in life. To achieve more and yet never satisfied.
I do envy my fellow backpackers to be born in countries with strong economics to provide them with a conversion rate, that allowed them to live like kings in India or elsewhere, but I was definitely not one of them. I have seen too many saints on the streets of India, doing the same, who lost everything, and I did not have the will or any inclination of achieving Nirvana, that way.
The problem with me perhaps was that, i am just sheer lazy and knowing the truth does not help. All this travel in actuality had left me tired and I just wanted to get some rest before I set out again to achieve something in life. A healing process of both mind and soul. Where one could just afford to sit in front of the television for hours together. Eat three decent meals, without wondering how to pay for them. Home was one place, where I could put my feet up and relax in these five years.
Whenever i am working, just to prove to myself wrong, i work hard ,i work till the soles of my feet look like the surface of the moon with blisters all over ( this could be bcos i wear the wrong kind of foot wear).
I reached home and was given a huge welcome. My dad had risen in the ranks of the government and was enjoying the fruits of power. Everything was offered on a silver platter. I wondered why I had been missing this for so many years. My dad knew as he saw my tattered clothes, that I hadn’t done well in life, but was kind enough not to question it. He took me to the market and bought me clothes. My mom made some of my favourites from my childhood and I ate as if there was no tomorrow for the next six months. Soon my old demeanour was back. My eyes that had sunken in to the sockets filled up.
My cheeks glowed and with regular exercise, I had kept fit to face my next challenge in life. I gained around forty pounds in the six months of stay at home, looking once again like, I used to when I was in love with Monika. It was time to go forth and face the world once again. I had wiped my slate clean, where memories were just dreams from some bygone era. The plan was simple. To get a decent job, work hard and then get married. I was done with the concept of love and falling for all the wrong women all the time. I had decided that this time, I was going to be honest in my relation, no baggage and be happy. What I failed to realize was that, I wasn’t normal and playing with fire was in born. If it wasn’t too difficult to achieve, I knew I wouldn’t be interested and yet I was all set to go on the second half of the circle. However till now love had just made me travel a few hundred miles, this time it would make me travel to distant lands. I was all set for this adventure called life.
Getting a job, when you are out of the work force is not that easy. One is often asked about why he left the old job and what was he doing in between jobs. Now in my case the answer should have been, “Well, I was in love with a trainee and she left so I had to leave as the place reminded me of her and while I was looking for a job, I was sitting in the mountains doping crazy.” I am pretty sure no matter how honest, this would have sounded, and the fact is no one in their right senses would give me a job. So I did what, everyone in India does, or perhaps has the privilege of having to do so. I used my dad’s connections, which sat in high posts all over India.
Suddenly a smorgasbord of jobs was offered to me. I could make a pick from joining a big construction house to a five star hotel in Delhi. I chose the latter knowing well that, I wasn’t someone who wanted to spend his life dealing with labour. The week after I joined as an assistant manager for a coveted hotel in Delhi. The magic of food and beverage services and being the son of boss’s friend was something I hadn’t anticipated before. Life was good once again, and yet I missed something. I had to create a ripple in the perfect stream of events, which were being planned for me. I picked up the phone, went through the contact list and dialled “Shikha.”










Chapter 14
You can’t stop Destiny
As the phone rang, I wondered what I was doing. Why I was calling someone, with whom, I hadn’t talked in such a long time. She might have got married by now, as she was looking for a groom. I was about to disconnect the phone when a cheerful voice said “hello, how are you?” she still had my number.
“Hi, sorry to have called you at this hour.” I said realising the time. It was close to midnight. “No, it is ok had been wondering, if you were ok. It’s been a long time.” She replied.
“So married and all?” I asked her.
“No, didn’t meet the right guy.” I felt good on hearing this.
“What about you?” She sounded sleepy.
“Well, no one.” I didn’t want to tell her of my journey, and all that had transpired in my life in that last one year. What mattered to me was that she was still around. We spoke for a while just general, and then she disconnected as she was sleepy. I looked at the time. We had been talking for almost forty five minutes and yet it seemed that I had just started to talk to her. I felt nice about it. Finally I could once again connect with someone.
The next day I was off and decided to call her in the morning. She was awake and picked up my phone immediately. “Hi, sorry about last night, didn’t mean to disturb you.” I said.
“No, it’s ok.” She answered.
“Listen, I was off today and was wondering if you would like to go out for a movie?” I asked her without wasting any time.
“Ok, but I have to be close to my home.” She said. We decided on meeting at two o clock at one of the multiplexes close to her house. I wore my best clothes, which my father had bought me during my stay at home. The weather was nice and I felt the same feeling once again, I had felt so many times before.
I reached before time. It was the first time I was meeting her, before I had decided to elope to the Himalayas in search of Linny. I had nearly forgotten how beautiful she was. She got down from the auto and haggled a bit with the driver, before giving him a twenty rupee note. I stood at a distance watching her taking puffs of a cigarette. I quickly threw the ciggie and, decided to pop a mint, as she walked inside the multiplex, looking all around searching for me. She was wearing a low neck blouse and skirt, with a denim jacket, complementing it with some junk jewellery. She wore her long hair straight and was dressed up for a date. I liked my women, who took these events seriously, and would go that extra mile to look good, meeting someone for the first time. She somehow reminded me of Monika, only a bit shorter.
I saw her and waved at her, as I walked behind her. She turned around and gave me a hug, much to the dismay of some college boys, who had been eyeing her. I felt good, feeling nice about the fact, I had a beautiful woman to date. We argued a bit on what movie to watch, she being interested in a romantic Hindi chick flick and me more into a Hollywood Sci-fi thriller. Needless to say we ended up watching the Hindi Bollywood drama.
Since I was feeling annoyed at her, for not letting me watch the much awaited holly wood movie, I decided to bother her. I squeezed her hand, and she kept her head on my shoulder. Suddenly a romantic song started playing and she kissed me. It felt nice and soon we were kissing in the dark movie hall, not bothering about someone watching us.
The movie ended and we ran back to watch another movie, repeat the same kissing routine once again. I was in love once again and this time, my love was being reciprocated equally. I felt good about the fact that this time, there was no third person who could spoil this beautiful relation.
Shikha and I started meeting on weekends or my days off. She would often come to my house and we would plan our future, talk about general things and other matters. Since she was divorced once before, it was a tough thing to convince my parents in regards to her.
Although, I had started to tell my mom a little bit at a time about her, she wasn’t really happy with this new development. After all, my family was answerable to a lot many people in the society. I would often get worried in regards to this and while felt at ease in her arms, I would often wonder, if we were going to end together.
I would often feel disconnected with her, knowing well, that after having some wild passionate love making, I couldn’t really understand, what she was talking about. She was too homely for me. A girl, any guy would have loved to get married to, but I was different. She had started to bore me. She would often talk about God, religion and horoscopes and these things, while, once had intrigued me during my dope days, and irritated me.
She forced me to go to temples with her, praying to god for both of us, while I would stand there, wondering if idol worshipping was a solution to any of our problems. I would have bigger problems on my mind in regards to work and finances, in order to make this relation work.
Soon we started to argue about everything under the sun. I would sound too practical and she would get emotional. In the four or five hours, we would spend together in a week; we would be fighting for at least thirty to forty minutes. Such was life, but I was in love with her, and she was in love with me. My family had also started to slowly accept her, and now the only thing that remained between us was to pop the question of marriage, but our relation was getting duller by the minute. Did we really want to live together for the rest of our lives? What was the solution to it? May be if she got herself a job, it would get her out of the temple routine.
Shikha found herself a job at one of the aviation schools in Delhi. She was working for the first time and would often face harassment on the job. She was a beautiful girl; sweet natured and corporate world can be harsh. She would often complain of long working hours, bosses hitting on her, and, her desire to leave the job. We would often fight, whenever she would suggest this, especially when she was making good money, for that matter was gaining confidence in life. Something I have wanted for all the girls, I ever had in my life. I always wanted my better half to be confident in life, someone independent, not clingy and who loved their space. She was totally proving otherwise.
I needed to find a solution for the problem. Nothing came to my mind. My parents took it for a fling, and while we had started to meet less often, she being busy with her job and me, with mine, I for the first time wanted to get out of a relationship. Love was dying a slow death between us and while I did, now understand, how demanding a relationship can be, I was not ready for it.
Where did it all stop? Here was a girl, madly in love with me, who was going great lengths, facing torture from her colleagues each day, just to prove her to me, and, all I did was to become more and more selfish in life. What was it? Was I taking revenge on all the women, who had left me for someone else, or, I was never ready for a relation ever. Maybe, all my experiences in the past had made me that way. I would have given anything to be with her, if I was the same person before I went to the Himalayas. What was I afraid of? Why was I pushing her away? The perfect wife material.
I had journeyed far and wide in search of love. When I had found it, I did not care for it. Was it in my nature, but then we all are like that, in quest of something better. She was beautiful, but I wanted someone independent. Where was I going? What did I long to accomplish? Why I couldn’t live like the so many average Indians, feeling good about the poverty, triumphant over India beating Pakistan in the world cup matches. Coming home and having a cup of tea with Shikha, discussing the day’s events, her bickering about increasing prices of food. Going out once in a while for a movie, plan a family?
I got my answer. I was different. I wasn’t cut for the regular life. Maybe I had never had any responsibilities in life to take care of, and when the time came to shoulder them, I was trying to shirk them away, as always. The last time, I had quit my job, the next time I had eloped to the Himalayas and this time, I wanted to quit my relation with her.
I, at that time searched far and wide for an answer. Now Shikha was a nice sweet girl, who would take everything I would say seriously. She was busy with her job and while didn’t have much time on hand, we would often speak on phone. She was still keen on getting married to me. I did realise that my sole problem was the lifestyle I was leading in India and if somehow I could manage to get out of the country, I would be settled well and then I could marry her and support her. The only problem was my qualifications weren’t good enough for applying to any of the nations that assured that life at that time.
The solution was simple. Get her to apply for the citizenship and then get married to her and go. It was a devious plan. I for the first time in my life was acting selfish and now, which I regret it, at that time it just felt right.
“Why don’t we move abroad? It would solve this daily drama of fighting.” I had said when we were sitting in a café having lunch, one fine Sunday afternoon. “Humm…. Ok, what do you have in mind?” she asked me.
“You are so qualified, it’s just a waste of all the knowledge here in India.” I said.
“That is correct, but what can I do?” she looked at me puzzled. I felt bad but I was being guided by my greed.
“Well, I was thinking, maybe you should apply for a residency to Australia, and we can get married and live there.” I knew she was in love with me and won’t say no. “Ok, but I got no idea, how to go about it; you got to help me out.” She had agreed.
I guided her through all the paper work, and much to dismay of her parents, she actually worked hard for the exams and tests that pertained to the residency. I, on the other hand started to dream of a good life in Australia. Since my family was now getting against our relation, we had decided that I would travel on a student visa and later we would get married in Australia.
My parents were not really pleased about my decision of studying further, but it didn’t took me long to convince them, telling them, how it was going to benefit my career. My father reluctantly agreed to shell out the much needed dollars, which I promised to return him soon. I was soon giving the same exams that Shikha had given before, and was in the process of applying for the student visa. It was a Sunday afternoon, a week before the decision on my visa was to be made.
The phone rang. It was her.
“My visa got rejected Sid.” She was crying on the other side of the line.
“What?” I couldn’t believe my ears. My plan had failed and failed miserably.
“Don’t worry, everything will be all right. We can apply again.” I said.
“No, my dad’s annoyed at spending so much money. He is telling me not to get in to it any more. My mom came to know about you and she’s really angry.” She replied.
“Ok.” I didn’t know what to say next. I was in a terrible soup. I felt like crying at my fate and then she said something that got me off guard.
“Sid, I know you were never going to get married to me. This entire going abroad thing was to delay the process. Listen, I met someone at my workplace and he seems very nice. I wanted to give this relation a chance; I tried hard because I really loved you. You never understood me, always pushed me to do things and I did, thinking you would appreciate it but you are just the most selfish person I ever met in life, who just thinks about himself. ” She kept the phone down.
I was shocked. She had known everything, and here I was thinking, I was the puppet master. It was destiny who was the puppet master. I felt remorse for losing her. I felt anger and hatred for feeling cheated again in life. I felt sad for mistreating her. I knew it now, a week before, that I was going to get my Visa, no matter what, because I was being guided to a new ball game, where rules of love are different.
I called her up to say sorry, and we met for the last time. The day before, I was scheduled to fly. She seemed happy and her birthday, up next week, I got her a gift. She thanked me for it. We sat at one of our favourite joints, and ordered a pizza. She was happy and showed me a picture of her new boyfriend.
As I ate the pizza and heard stories of how, she had met him. How he was the perfect guy, my ego grew larger. Suddenly all the pain and anger for cheating her disappeared because it wasn’t me, it was her who was cheating me. Maybe we were too alike, looking for the easy way out. I was no longer in love with her. I got up, said my goodbye with a little peck on her cheek. It was time to head home to finally pack my bags, for a dream, I had dreamt for so long.

Chapter 15
To new shores
As I stood outside the Adelaide airport, a sudden chill engulfed me. I was thousands of miles away from her and while I once had written a blog how, I was going to love her even if she was thousands of miles away, I stood there alone. I remembered our last meeting and while, I couldn’t curse her, I wouldn’t curse my destiny. It was offering me everything, which I ever had wished for, only the price I had to pay, was my relationship.
It was six o’ clock in the morning and I decided to wait for sunrise, before I ventured out of the airport. I was feeling lonely and just like thousands of students, who land on the Australian shores; I had no clue, just an address and a couple of thousand dollars in my pocket.
I hailed a cab and gave him the address. The cabbie to my relief was an Australian, as I believed that Indian drivers knew you were new in town and would go around in circles, till you had a hefty bill.
I reached the backpackers accommodation, which I had searched on the internet and at twenty five dollars a day, I felt relieved. It being a Saturday and no chance of finding the accommodation, I decided to go out in to the city. It was dead quiet and stunningly beautiful. As I took pictures of the city with my phone, I realised, how terribly alone I was. Life would have been beautiful, if she was there with me here. We would have figured life out somehow. I reached victoria square and sat on a bench, thinking about all that had happened in all these years. All the people, who had come in to my life and gone, people I had cared for, and those who had cared for me. Days of ecstasy in Lonavala and love in Delhi. It was all distant past. A dream, that I longed to relive but then I had an ambition. I looked around, and, I had now partly achieved it. Away from the hustle and bustle of Delhi, I sat under a tree, watching a water fall, with not a soul around, to bother me. There were no beggars, no one to push or being pushed. Buses ran in an orderly fashion. Every five minutes a tram would pass.
It was like a movie. Only I was alone, who had an ambition to make it big one day in Australia. Who had paid a hefty price to fulfil this ambition, had let go of someone, who could have been my soul mate. I was missing her terribly, knowing she would be sleeping peacefully, knowing the fact; I was no longer there to bother her. To make her a part of my devious plans, to use her for my own selfish needs. How much, I wanted to call her and ask for her forgiveness and yet my ego, didn’t allow it. She had cheated on me and that is something, I can’t forgive, knowing well I had been doing the same, moving from one person to the next, in order to find something better. Someone who could make my dreams come true. For once, I wanted to feel remorse, but I couldn’t feel anything. Had I changed so much? Where was the Sid, who once had a near death experience, who had loved someone so much, that he gave up a cushy job, Who was I?
I clicked a picture of myself, trying to smile. The reflection was of an elderly man staring back at me. Receding hairline and double chinned, he seemed to tell a story. The man in the picture was definitely well fed but lacked the glow, a boy, once lost in the Himalayas, underfed and malnourished once had. His eyes seemed to tell a story, of love and deceit. Of failures and partial successes, more dreamer than usual.
Tears started to roll out of my eyes as I sat there, on that bench that day and all my guilt was washed away as I heard church bells, which proclaimed all was forgiven. I had decided the next time, I found love, no matter what, I will stay faithful, forgive and forget, but then who knew, what was to conspire next in my life. After all, it was my life, how could it be, just normal?
It had been almost two months; I had been in this wonderful country and was feeling right at home, with new friends, a good job and a comfortable apartment. I would often think of her and wonder how she was? Did Shikha and her new boyfriend were together? I would often cry at night after work, missing her immensely but did not have the guts to call her. I would suffer from guilt, and feel happy in the fact, that at least she was with someone who cared for her. I would often imagine them making love, an imaginary character with the face that had haunted me since, that evening Shikha, had shown me that picture. I was desperate and knew, it was in my best interest to move on, and what better way is there in life than log on to the website, I had initially met her on.
It was time I updated my profile, showing Adelaide as my home town for now. I would get a lot of proposals, mostly from India but my search was in Adelaide. This was mostly due to the fact that I did not want to get in to something long distance to begin with, and, secondly I did not want to go back to India. I would chat for hours but my mind would not connect to any of the girls, the way it once had with Monika, and later perhaps at some stage, in my relationship with Shikha. I had never actually connected with Lana and perhaps, it had just been a mere infatuation.
I was lonely and wanted someone in my life. It was mere fate that, I was home that I got that call, hold on it was not the call, I had talked about in the beginning of the book. It was from the brother- in – law of a girl called Mitali who had been settled in Australia for the last twenty five plus years. They owned restaurants in Adelaide and were pretty well to do family. The girl in question was working for one of their restaurants and although not highly educated was street smart. I spoke to the brother in law, and once he was satisfied with my credential, I was given her number. Of course she was at work and since I knew, how fast paced hotels are, I offered to call later on.
That evening, I called her late in the night and we got talking on the phone.
She seemed like a nice gal before we knew it, we were planning to meet up. It was just, what I had wanted. To meet someone who was likeminded, interesting, hold a good conversation. The perfect combination of, brains with beauty.
Mitali and I had been talking for a week, before we met. It was a Sunday, the only day she was off work and I had taken the day off, in order to meet her. It was one of those mild winter evenings, where one is unable to decide if he or she should dress up too warm or too cold. Unfortunately, I never had any jumpers, which would suit an occasion like this. I decided to wear one of my favourite jeans and a denim jacket. Needless to say courtesy, my parents, who had once again been generous in updating my wardrobe with new clothes, before I moved to down under.
I kind of lacked fashion sense, I still do, but in those days clothes mattered little to me. There were a number of reasons for this. First of being, I used to spend most of my time, at work. This would involve wearing uniforms, so while, I might have five set of uniforms, neatly ironed and ready to go, something that required dressing up, would often had to be dug up from my suitcase, that would inevitably be smelling of decay. I was never careful of storing my clothes in the right manner, often just crumpling them in to a big heap and putting them in a large suitcase, when the seasons would change. Most of the times they would just hang in my cupboard, gathering dust.
To cut the long story short, it was a pain to get my clothes organised for the occasion, which involved not only washing and ironing, but also trying to find myself, some nice smelling “Pour homme”. It was an effort to put together that so seventy something look, and I felt too tired, wondering the next time, I should just wear my jeans with my torn t-shirt.
Never in my life I had taken so much effort and perhaps, after that never will as I made a mental note to myself, about not to bother too much about appearances for my next meeting with her. She would understand, moreover I wasn’t the dress up types any ways so it was a waste of time to try and impress, when your wardrobe anyways seemed to be from my grandfather’s era, and perhaps I was hoping that once the fashion cycle would repeat itself, and my denim jacket shall once again be in vogue. However it wasn’t going to happen tonight.
We had decided to meet up in the city at six in the evening, in a place that was centrally located. Since we hadn’t planned on doing anything together, we had decided that, she would pick me up and then we could just go around and know each other more. I had decided not to go for a movie, since I had fond memories of Shikha. It would have been a disaster, if I was going to a movie, kissing her in a hall and would have called her Shikha.
She drove a two door “Holden Astra”. And I was pretty much in love with the car. As I walked towards her, she checked me out in the rear view mirror, wondering if it was me. I knew it was her as in one of our conversations earlier, I had guessed her plate number and she had almost jumped, thinking I was some stalker. I opened and sat in the car.
She looked at me and said “Hi.” I was disappointed. She didn’t look a wee bit like the girl, I had seen in the pictures, she had sent me or what my mind had thought she would be like. “Hi, how have you been?” I asked her as we air kissed. “Good, good, so what’s the plan? What are we planning to do?” she asked me. I had no clue. I hadn’t been around Adelaide much, besides work and the suburb, I lived in. “Well, I am game for anything.” I said smiling. I could feel, a thin layer of ice already beginning to freeze on this relationship. She started the car and as we drove towards her side of the town, she kept on going on and on with her life, how she had been really busy in life and couldn’t find the right guy. How she was engaged before and the guy just wanted to come to Australia. I was intently listening to her, agreeing, giving my opinions mostly through one liner. Soon those one liners started to turn in to “ah…” and “Umm…”. “ So what do you think of it?” My mind had wandered off in to my past, wondering about Shikha and her new boyfriend. Was I doing this just to take revenge on her?
“Yeah, it’s a good thought.” I said as I vaguely remembered her talking something about food. “Indian or Italian?” she asked.
“Definitely Italian” I had been carrying those curry boxes every day home from work only to pile them up in the fridge, till they would become factories for fungus. Once too often, I would take the garbage bag and dump out everything from the fridge, since the smell of rotting curry would become unbearable. These garbage bags, straight went in to the bin, since dustbins with self-respect, in my house wouldn’t allow such foul smelling food material to be held for long in their stomachs.
“I am longing for antipasti with a bowl of risotto and some tiramisu.” My knowledge of Italian cuisine had become pretty good, since my days with Lana. She had once made some spaghetti bolognaise for me, which had been praise worthy, but could have done with some oregano. When it comes to food, perhaps I am too blunt in criticising. Needless to say, there were no free lunches for me after that.
“I know a good place just for that.” Mitali brought me back from the Himalayas. “Ok” I replied, as she started to jabber again about, how huge her family was and how her parents had started from the scratch.
“Shut up!!” I thought, as we drove past the ocean. I looked at it for the first time. The last time I had seen it was from the oval window of a plane, as it had started its descent in to Adelaide. The ocean looked so different that time. Life was full of insecurities and now, right now, I was being driven around in a thirty thousand dollar car. A citizen trying to woo me or may be the other way round. I looked out of the window. I smiled.
“And here we are.” She announced as she drove in to one of the Italian fast food chains. So perhaps she had no idea of what the Italian food tastes like, I thought.
“Great!” I tried to show my enthusiasm, as I covered my mouth to yawn. Either I was bored, or just plain sleepy of all bickering, that was being delivered to me in the last one hour. “Should have just worn my jean and t-shirt.” I thought as the first time I saw her footwear. She was wearing ordinary bedroom slippers. Now as I have mentioned earlier, while I might just dress up the way I like, I prefer my women to dress well. Shikha new the art. I was totally turned off in an instant. She held my arm as we went inside. Her palms were hard just like mine, perhaps due to carrying all the heavy trays. We sat down.
“What are you going to have?” I asked her.
“Spaghetti bolognaise, they make it excellent here.” She said with a smile. It reminded me once again of the incident with Lana. I smiled as I thought at least they would have oregano out here. “Any entre’?” I asked again without looking up, as I read the menu, keenly in order to find something, which would appease me.
“Could we have an antipasto platter for entre’, spaghetti bolognaise for the lady, a mushroom risotto for me and could you get me the wine list.” I ordered doing a mental calculation of how much did it all add up to. I was still new in the country and sometimes, although I had started to earn now, the conversion did worry me at times. “Can I get a bottle of Pen folds Bin 555” I ordered the wine. She ordered coke for herself.
Suddenly, I was alone in this restaurant, sharing a table with a stranger who was talking to me about things; I didn’t bother or care about. We had just met and I was in no mood to discuss, how many kids we were going to or not going to have. I decided to enjoy myself. I slowly chugged along the wine, as we had our food and while she just had a glass, since she was driving, I made the cardinal sin of drinking too fast and too much on the first date.
I was pretty tipsy by the time “Biscotti” arrived. We had our desserts and I cursed myself for drinking too much. I paid the bill, which of course was my nearly my last week’s wages and immediately regretted it. This was not India and she had offered to go half. “When in Rome, do as Romans do.” I made a note to myself.
We walked out and she knew, I was tipsy, as suddenly it wasn’t my one liner but more monologues coming out of me. I was suddenly vomiting out all my dirty secrets, thinking just about half an hour ago, she was discussing kids with me. It was only fair to me. The wine acted as a truth serum. It always has that effect on me. Pretty soon, she got acquainted with the girl in the handkerchief, Monika, Shikha, Lana and my drug philandering days. As we sat in her car next to my house, I was in love with Mitali, I felt so comfortable after reliving my past with her but little did I know, I had just fucked up a perfect relation. The past sometimes should remain under wraps because while some one might think, it is cool to back pack and do drugs, others who have lost their loved ones to the same feel otherwise.
While I was too busy not listening to Mitali, there was no way, I would have remembered, how she had lost her brother to drugs and how much she hated it. While I was off drugs for many years now, she would never believe it in her life. The next day, I called her to apologise, to give me another chance but I knew her. I knew her well. We never communicated again. I made a mental note to myself that day “Never drink red wine with Biscotti, it fucks you up.”













Chapter 16
The lost condom
I had been alone for some time now, with no relationships going on, I was bored. It was time to find myself someone new and while all this time, I had waited for Shikha to turn up, I hadn’t heard anything from her. Perhaps she was married to that guy in that picture and already a couple of months, knocked up. I decided while looking for a long term relation is a good thing, why not just create something called a “Fuck buddy.” I had heard of this term before and one of the networking sites, I was a member on; I would often come across this word on different profiles.
I was keen to explore the no strings attached scene, however I was afraid to try it out. I didn’t want to get stuck up with the wrong person and while my love quotient was on an all-time low, my sex drive was pretty high. Summers generally does that to me. Years ago when I would go to Goa, scantily clad women on the beaches used to be one of the sightseeing itineraries. I was feeling desperate and while, having a steady girlfriend has its advantages, I was always stuck to the wrong girl. This time I wanted to try something called no emotions, just “Love”. Mind you, it was just “Love making” on my mind.
I became pretty active on the social networking sites, making it a point only to contact women, who had cars and were in the vicinity of Adelaide, so if something worked out, we could meet up and then see where to go from there. I met this girl from Maldives, who was also a student. Now to be honest she was no Cinderella, but I was not looking forward to be seen in public with her. The idea was to find a dump ground for all the toxics that had been accumulating inside me for some time.
She was an insecure girl, who had lived in the city for almost five years. While she had a couple of relationships, they hadn’t worked out sue to obvious reasons. After all if you are not good looking, compliment it with a hot figure. Don’t go on a binge diet, so that even if someone might have got interested, he would also think twice. Now since child hood, I have had a set criterion for my women, and more or less they all fell in the requisite guide book rules. This was the first time I made an exception, after all I wasn’t looking for a relation, just friends with benefits.
I had come to this decision after giving it a long and hard thought. Relationships for me don’t work. I had realized it, more over being stuck on a student visa, any ways I had time to pursue cardinal sins. I however was suggested this by her, since she was also not interested in a relationship. The set up was perfect and all I had to do was to find my day off, and call her home. It happened sooner than I realized and while she was uglier than I had thought, I was desperate. For the first time in life, I realized how much I was missing doing it and yet someone like a ghost was stopping me dead in the tracks. She sat right in front of me, teasing me or trying to tease me. I closed my eyes as I bent forward to kiss her; it was Shikha, who appeared. I was happy to be in her arms once again.
I kissed her and she responded passionately, she perhaps hadn’t had it for a long time as well. I kept my eyes closed imagining, I was kissing Shikha. It was getting dark and I decided to take the party to my room.
We were almost naked as we hit the bed and I once again closed my eyes to imagine Shikha making love to me, while this ugly chick did her fair. I suddenly realized in order to make this happen, all I had to do was keep my eyes closed during the act and I won’t lose it.
“Just think it is Shikha.” I told myself.
As we got on with it, I slipped on an ultra-thin Zero; after all she was a stranger and might be carrying some disease, who knows? I was enjoying some passionate girl on boy scene, when without thinking I opened my eyes. I saw this Ogre riding me. My erection disappeared in a jiffy and as she got off, I realized I had lost it. I just hadn’t lost the bloody erection but also lost the ultra-thin somewhere.
I frantically searched for it, but it was nowhere to be found. She was getting frantic. “Did you come?” She asked as I looked for the bloody rubber.
“Nah, wait I lost the bloody condom somewhere.” I said as I ripped the bed sheet off the bed. Still no sign of it. I looked at her and then it dawned at me.
The bloody thing must be inside her.
“Do you feel it inside you.” I asked her.
“I won’t feel it for the first two weeks, what you talking about?” she said coyly. She was enjoying my desperation to find the rubber, while had no freaking idea, where it could be.
“Shit, bitch” I swore.
“What?” she was taken aback.
“Yeah bitch, have you got any diseases?” I asked her as I was now feeling scared. Who knew how many partners she had?
“You prick.” She screamed as I pulled her on the bed and opened her legs. I shoved my hand inside her and finally pulled out the lacy, wet rubber. She was already moaning once again, while I was operating on her, making it difficult for me continue my search. She must have come at least thrice, while I was at it. I wondered if I was really needed to even bother, about the lost rubber. After all, it was her wonderland, and her ball game, who knew how many rubbers, I might have recovered that night, or for that matter, did I even recover the right one. I was pretty sure, mine was a transparent one, and this one was kind of pink.
In the morning after making me uncomfortable the whole night, she decided to leave. I took a sigh of relief. I had decided, what I needed was some sanity, than go looking for a fuck buddy. Women, who are good looking, or my types, weren’t found on websites. They had been around, in to relationships, moving out of relationships. All I needed to do was to keep a sharp eye. It was one of my ground rules, never to break any ones relation, just because, I fell for some one. Where was the respect for something so sacred then? How would I feel if someone else did that to me or for that matter, I already had faced it in Shikha’s case?
I had dumped her in a royal fashion, and then suffered for so long. I would miss her and often tears would roll out from my eyes. I had tried to move on, but it had just been a disastrous effort. What was I trying to do? I couldn’t get her back. I wouldn’t get her back. While I loved her, I hated her. Yes, I have hated her more than, I have loved her for dumping me. For leaving me and yet all I could ever say then, or now is “Hope she is happy.” That night I wrote the following for her.
“ It is the most beautiful feeling that hadn’t come in an instant. It grew gradually. Each and every aspect of this love took time. The understanding of one another, the faults, the forgiveness, it was all amazing. It grew slowly. It took me side to understand you; we gave each other time to really understand this concept of longing and belongingness. I realised that in time, this love grew no boundaries, and whenever i thought of you, it brought a smile on my face.
The hardships that i faced, the longing and then not being able to write a single line, all contributed to the beginning of what, i call was “the perfect love”. For me you were perfect. For me love has always been a sacrifice, and for the first time in my life, i didn’t want to sacrifice my love for you, at any cost.
I had this strong belief that no matter what, my love will always be there waiting for me, when all this is over. I always thought that you understood how much I love you, doing so much for our relation to survive. I have been through a lot of hardships since you are gone.
One thing, i always believed in was that everything was going to be all right. Once i am back, and you would be there waiting for me with open arms. Alas, it didn’t happen.
Love, what is it? Just a feeling that binds, one human being to another. Something, that gives hope that, everything in this life is going to be all right. When it is not there, most important things in life seem so vague. They lose their meaning.
I had decided that I would gradually get out of this feeling of love. I was going to kill it, then why in the night, i get up and check my accounts for your mails. It was those three words, which always brought me back to you. It tells me that, maybe, just maybe you thought of me. Maybe you are still in love with me only lost in the evil plot.
One day you shall return, and i would be waiting with open arms, but would that love be there. Would i still feel the same that i feel for you today? The answer still lies in what i call the perfect love that goes beyond age, caste, creed, distance, marital status and colour. It is the most wonderful feeling that a man can achieve. To find that perfect person with whom one wants to share the little joys, that life’s got to offer.
I know when you will read all this, i will be gone. Long gone .maybe lost in the world of pain agony and remorse. Maybe met up with the creator, but this love will still be there. Love a four letter word that can change someone’s life totally. A feeling that, i cherish for you. A feeling, that doesn’t let me move on. A feeling that makes me forgive you, even when i know you are no longer there. A feeling that makes me ask god for your happiness rather than mine. It’s just a feeling that conquers your mind.
It makes you think, and then realise, that it’s no longer there. It was just a game. A game that hurts, a game that makes you feel sad, a game that kills that little hope that you have towards life.
I always thought you knew what it feels like to get hurt. You had been hurt before and bad. I always thought that you would never do that to anyone. That’s what made you perfect. A perfect person, for that perfect love that, i have for you.
It’s strange that my life is so full of setbacks, that it has stopped hurting any more. When the time comes, i lose everything, which i had created through hard work and labour. Today is one of those days when i feel, i haven’t only lost you but everything else once again. It’s so difficult to get up and start walking again. That crippled feeling.
In time, this letter will be lost for good, occupying cyberspace in some distant future. Maybe it will act as an inspiration for another book. Who knows how this will end? Who knows what life holds, what gods greater plans are but all i know for now is that this love is perfect and the most beautiful of all feelings i ever had in my life...”

When we had decided to break up, we both forgot, how much effort we had put in the relation, how those moments of togetherness were important for us. In an instant, we decide to break a relation when, it has taken ages to build up. It is often seen we tend to look for that perfect partner, when no such thing exists. What we need to work on is that perfect love and not the perfect partner.
We all make mistakes in relationships and they are hard. Yet we all keep falling in them only to get hurt again and again.
As we come to know more and more about a person, we begin to like him, love him. It is all mutual and as time passes, the fondness grows, till eventually one day, due to circumstances, one has to move cities. It is the testing phase of any relation, no matter how long you have been together.
It is at these times, one need to understand the importance and then revisit all those moments, and one had spent with his or her beloved. Do you see any truth in those words said?
If you feel whatever you had during those moments of togetherness was true, then why not give it a shot. Why not work on the relation, rather than just give up and start all over again. After all you had those moments when you totally surrendered. It would take ages to trust someone again to that level of intimacy. Remember it is you, who has to survive this. No one is there, no one will understand, no one cares. Friends, family may sympathise, console you but it is you, it is your heart that ultimately will feel the pain and loss.
The idea is to believe in a relation and work on it. It is important for both partners to understand the concept of being together, of giving time and space. Of developing that love they had for each other to a new level of understanding.
This is a perfect time to make it happen. Follow your dreams. Do things you always wanted to do, but couldn’t because of your partner’s needs. Keep in touch over email and phone, make sure they are all right and don’t forget to say “I love you”. It is extremely important in a long distance relation as it comforts a partner. It makes him or her feel wanted. It gives them a sense of hope to hang on. Know that someone is waiting for them.
While I could have followed the sanity, as stated earlier, I decided to follow my own trail. My ego was just too great to give it a try, to wait and for that matter I had waited for a long time now. If someone didn’t realise my importance, I had a bigger ego to cater too. I do feel that during those days, I had started to carry a split personality syndrome, where they would whisper good things and bad things sitting on my shoulders, advising me to bend down, not to bend down. Call her, not to call her. All that I was trying to get out of it was failing, and miserably.
I decided to take a break, but where ever I would go, my mind would follow me, it was a part of me. I cannot escape my mind, and the solution was to be found in my head. I knew calling her wasn’t the solution. She would behave normal, talk about life, ask about my life and I would hate her more.
Did I just say “hate her more?”
That night as I said it, it was over for me. I had finally got over Shikha. I picked up the phone and called up my lost condom buddy for a quickie the next day. I wondered if I had got over her and would perform. I wasn’t wrong; sometimes you don’t need to be in love to get some good exercise.






Chapter 17
The Nazi circuit
While my Fuck buddy soon found herself a steady partner, I was happy that I got rid of her. She was becoming clingy and I was becoming cold. While making love had been great initially, it was getting pretty dull off late. May be my desire to be alone, or for that matter not able to do anything else to her , due to physical constraint, I totally lost interest. She would call me up and I would stare at the screen blankly, hoping she would disconnect.
One day I got the message, I had been waiting for and I was happy. I was out of a so called friend with benefit relation, without even trying. It is strange when, even we both knew, about the rules of the game from the very beginning; she had made the mistake of trying to convert it, in to something else. I did not love her and it didn’t matter, I didn’t lose a condom in her again, I was just plain and simple “Love phobic”.
With her out of my life, came a fresh breeze of freedom. I was doing the art gallery circuits, and my new found passion, was researching WW-2 and history behind it. I was keen on understanding Hitler and his associates. Somehow I could associate with the power, he had wielded at one time. I came to know about this art exhibition on Hitler going on in Adelaide and decided to pay it a visit. After all, it was my favourite subject “History”, thanks to “Mrs Gupta”.
As I walked in to the hangar, that was holding the exhibits, I felt exhilarated. I was feeling like a little boy in a toy shop. While there weren’t large crowds, just some tourists, I saw this girl standing and reading about one of the “zeros”.
She looked like a librarian, but wore a business suit with stilettos. Somehow this was the perfect look to get my attention once at least. Over the years, I had developed this keen eye for women who looked sharp in business suits, and they always got a second look from me, no matter what. Perhaps it was fetish, I am yet to discover.
Anyways coming back to the story, she stood there, reading about one of the Japanese torpedo launching airplanes used in the bombing of pearl harbour. I took out my camera and clicked a picture of her, standing next to the plane, without her knowledge. I looked at the picture, it was the perfect shot.
“Could I have your mailing address, I need to send you something.” I had walked next to her.
“Es tut mir lied” she replied. She was German.
“Oops , sorry, I was startled ” this time she spoke perfect English.
“Meine Schuld, ich hätte wissen Sie nicht einen solchen Frauen in Australien” I said remembering a bit of German, I had learned from a book, in order to communicate with Martin. Of course, I never ever used it but then, I was good at learning languages and perhaps, it does come handy some times.
She laughed. Hook, line and sinker.
“I must warn you, that’s the maximum German, I can speak.” I didn’t want to push my luck too much, since my language was rusty. I had used it for almost ten years and unlike my mother tongue, it was language, which needed practice.
“So what were you sending me?” She asked me.
“This” I said as I showed her the perfect “pearl harbour” meet “titanic” picture. She was impressed.
“You paparazzi?” she asked me.
“Only for a beautiful face like yours.” Strike two.
She smiled, her pearly whites glowed and there was a twinkle in her green eyes. Her skin was baby pink and she stood tall almost my height. Kirstin was an exchange student visiting Australia, for a year. She had just flown in the last week and on getting information about this exhibition, had decided to come and see it. She was doing her PhD on the role of Australia in the Second World War from Dusseldorf University in Germany.
“Australia did play a major role.” She said.
“Yeah I know, indeed it was a base camp for the US forces as far as I know during the Second World War.” I said supporting her.
“How much do you know about the second world war?” She asked me as she sipped her coffee. I had invited her for a cup of coffee o which she had readily agreed. Of course, I had my favourite cappuccino.
“Not much, just here and there, gathering knowledge, it is like a hobby” I said.
“Interesting Hobby!” she was laughing, as if I had cracked a joke.
I didn’t care, who wants a woman to take him serious any ways. Specially till the time a guy proposes marriage or says “Ich liebe sie”. I didn’t want to tread on any of those territories.
“I happen to be gay.” She said. “That’s a loss for the mankind.” It was interesting to discuss women with her, and as we started to meet more and more, our friendship grew strong. I would often tell her about my past relations in order to seek advice, where I went wrong , in order not to repeat the same mistakes again. The only problem was that, either she was too busy writing her thesis or chasing women. We would often meet on my off days, where we would drink coffee, eat those massive burgers and discuss relationships. I had found someone with whom; I didn’t have to portray a different character. I didn’t have to dress up. I didn’t have to order fancy dinners. Her orientation didn’t bother me at all and as a matter of fact; we were able to talk on lot of male, female issues, how things work and how most women and men think.
It was however, a good learning experience for me. We would often sit in the library at the university discussing the war and women alike. While we both, at time, whistled on seeing a hot female, they would often turn back and stare at me. We were a bunch of weirdos brought together by destiny. For the first time, I wasn’t complaining or running away from a relationship.
Friendship, I think was better than love. You cared and yet had your space. You didn’t have to live together, or sleep in the same bed. You could drink together, do the buddy thing and yet did not need to go through the relationship rules. However, the rules of the game were different. I might have turned gay during that phase in my life, because Kirstin was a knockout, guys would stare at and girls would lust. Here I was, just a friend who, loved her just for her friendship and companionship.
I knew where to draw the line and follow the dictum. I did not try to turn her straight, never questioned her and would always thank her for the beautiful company she would offer me. At the end of the day after all she was just a friend, and when someone offers a friendship, one needs to accept it just in that form, not trying to twist it into a “Love relationship” .
Kirstin’s stay was coming to an end and I knew I was going to miss my beautiful friend. I also knew that I had made one more friend for life. It was funny how much similar we were. I always wonder if destiny, instead of making one soul mate has made a number of them, offering them when we need them. It is however for us to decide, who’s worth what?
Some of them like Kristin could be her weight in gold, who still writes me a mail. Still apologises for not sending my drunken pictures at the pub. Still whispering her email address, when I was six mugs down, and couldn’t walk straight, challenging me to remember it. Was it love? If we had been straight, I mean if both of us were straight, would we have fallen in the love trap. She was hot and I look good myself. I was straight and should have been attracted to her, but I wasn’t. Why was it like that? I can understand that she wasn’t interested in me. Perhaps, it all was about loneliness or companionship. Whichever way, she was one person whom, I could confide anything and just when you became the best of buddies; time once again grows wings and decides to take a flight. She was off to Dusseldorf and I stood there shedding tears and calling out “Achtung baby”.
Just like that, I learned in my life that all my relations weren’t going to be perfect. Some of them were perfect for some elements. While some were good, just as friends and infatuations and love damaged perfectly healthy relations, others which were bound to be just perfect life time relations, were lacking certain elements. It was just a strange thing that my life was about to go full circle, something I didn’t know but do I ever stop trying. You guessed it.
Never.








Chapter 18
The cupid strikes
After Kristin left, I was lonely again. It was however not long before, I noticed someone who would walk back from the university at eight every night. She was a student at the university and her name was Samia. I had often seen her in the library, but never bothered to talk to her as I would be too busy with Kristin getting her thesis sorted.
The library would close at around eight and that was the time all students had to leave the premises. I hadn’t noticed up till now that she used to live in the same apartment complex, I used to. That night I had got off work early and was walking back home, when I saw her lugging a huge load of books back home.
We had often seen each other and although we never had talked before, I decided to help her out.
“Hi, may I help you?” I had asked her as she dropped a couple of books.
“Sheesh kebab!” she swore and I broke in to a laugh.
“Here let me carry some of them.” I took most of the books out of her hand as she balanced the remaining books on top of the books, I was holding. It was a huge pile and I could hardly see over it.
“You are strong!” she had commented as my muscles ached in agony.
“ok not that strong!” I exclaimed as a couple of books slid and went crashing to the floor.
She laughed and picked them up as we started our slow walk towards our apartment complex.
Samia was from the Middle East and was pursuing a dream of hers in Australia. Coming from a staunch Muslim family, she had fought tooth and nail to pursue her education and her parents although had been supportive of her decision, didn’t really appreciate the fact that she was living alone in a foreign land.
In Middle East girls her age would have teenager kids and here she was, doing her masters and had planned to do her PhD.
We reached the apartment complex and I trudged in holding the books in to her apartment.
“Keep them over there.” She said as I looked around for a place to keep the books. “Your apartment is different to mine.” I said as I tried to make a conversation. “Yeah, they all are designed differently.” She said as she took off her scarf that she wore over her head. Her hair was long and dyed blonde. Without the scarf she looked total Australian.
“Wow” I uttered. She smiled.
“Oh yeah, I like it blonde” she smiled as she had noticed me staring.
“Want a cup of coffee?” She asked me innocently.
I was getting excited. She was perfect. Damn hormones. “Yeah, why not.” I said as I looked at her keeping my eye contact.
She turned around to make coffee and I while I sat in the lounge, I saw her pictures adoring the walls. Self-portraits. In some of them she wasn’t wearing any clothes or so they suggested. Her sleek shoulders complimenting her long hair as she looked in to the oblivion. The black and white posters covered all the walls of the room and I decided to have a closer look. They all had the same expression in them. A smile but the eyes, just like mine, had a dream and were lonely.
“Did you like my pictures?” She asked as she walked in to the room with two cups in her hand.
“Yeah, I do. Who clicked them?” I asked.
“Well, I did on a self-timer.” She answered.
“Interesting expression.” I commented.
“What do you find interesting about it?” she asked me.
“Your eyes have a dream and yet seem lonely.” I replied as I took a sip of my coffee. She smiled.
“You are the first guy, who didn’t comment or ask about my clothes in the pictures” she laughed.
“Nice coffee.” After all I was thinking about that too.
“Well, I did notice, that the lack of clothes is just a barrier that you have broken in life. It reflects nothing more. I know you are a staunch Muslim with the head scarf, but inside you is a free girl who is not afraid to express herself.” She seemed to be impressed with my observation.
“What are you, Sherlock Holmes?” She was giggling at my observations.
“Just have a keen eye for life’s details.” I smiled.
I bid her farewell and gave her my number. We agreed that next time she had a heavy load to carry back home she would give me a call. I was pleasantly surprised when the next day, I got her call.
“Hey Sid, can you please carry some books for me?” She asked me.
“Duh” I thought. She thinks I am a porter or something.
“Okies, where are you?” I asked sweetly.
“Building F library.” She said.
“I will be there in fifteen minutes.” I replied as I disconnected the phone.
I quickly jumped out of bed, got ready and ran to building F library. She was standing there holding a magazine.
“Where are the books?” I asked her.
“There are no books, I just wanted to meet you, let’s go to subway and have some lunch.” I was lured in to a date.
We sat there and spoke for hours together, she talked little about her family and told me the subject for her thesis for her future PhD. I had recently helped Kristin out with hers, so had a lot of knowledge about deadlines and research work. As I told her more about the PhD and how to go about it, she looked keenly in to my eyes. I saw a dream, the loneliness was missing.
It was almost five in the evening and as luck would have it, I did not have work that evening. We had already been told by the subway staff politely to move on if we were not going to buy any more coffee.
“Want to go out for dinner?” I asked her.
“Yes, sure” she didn’t want to leave me and I was enjoying her company too.
“Ok, lets head to wool worth.” I said.
She was surprised.
“Trust me.” I said as I started to pick up ingredients for dinner.
We shopped and walked back home. “So where are you taking me for dinner?” she asked me.
“Apartment 24 at 8.30 pm tonight” I said as I looked in to her eyes. “Come at the scheduled time and dress formally.” I told her as I dropped her in front of her apartment.
“Okies” she winked and ran inside.
She arrived on time dressed in a red off shoulder short dress. She had ironed her hair straight and looked straight out of a Bollywood blockbuster. I opened the door and a whiff of chanel no 5 filled my apartment. I had made sure the apartment was spotlessly clean and a candle flickered romantically as two plates were set up for the big night. The cutlery was polished and the wine bottle just waiting to be opened.
She sat on the sofa and looked at me. The moment was magical as we kissed. Our tongues rolled inside each other, when she pushed me away.
“I can’t” she said.
“What happened?” I was puzzled. The moment was perfect but she wasn’t ready and I had to respect that.
“Nothing, it is just too soon.” She answered not wanting to tell me the real reason. I knew it had to be something from her past. It always was, wasn’t it?
“Ok, let’s not get in to it and do what we decided to do, have dinner.” I said trying to get her mind off the reason for that sudden coldness. I just wanted this night to be special and getting laid wasn’t on my agenda any way. Some women you dream to spend your life with. She was one of them. I was impressed with her and I could wait for magic to happen.
As the corkscrew came off and wine goblets half filled, her mood changed and she sat on the bar stool observing the great chef in action. The entre’ was served. Cold cucumber soup. Something I had learned a long time ago when I was in college and as she took a sip of the soup, a drop dribbled down her chin. I picked up the napkin and as I bent forward to wipe it, she smiled.
“You are a total gentleman, are you in love with me?” She asked
“No, I am not” I lied. The fact was that I was confused. I just had this great relation with Kristin, which had made me realize, that love went much further than sleeping together and I was willing to wait. Wait for her to admit it. What could go wrong this time?
“Liar” she said as she took a sip of her wine. The candle light was making her look all the more beautiful. It was intoxicating but I knew the game. I knew it so well and had decided, I wasn’t going to fall for it this time. I was being hit by the cupid’s arrows left right and centre. The off shoulder dress, beautiful silky legs. Perfect setting, all enticing me towards her.
“No, I am not lying, I admire you.” I said looking away trying to control my feelings. I didn’t want it to end in to a one night stand. “Say, you love Me.” She got up and walked across and sat in my lap. “Well, I don’t want it to end.” I said as I picked her up and carried her back to her chair. Her breast rubbed my chest and I could feel the bulge in my trousers, growing by the minute. I wanted it but I had to hold on.
“End what?” she asked as she finished her soup.
“What we have.” I answered as I took a sip of wine that wasn’t helping now. I could feel her grasp tightening over me. I didn’t want to get in to something that I wouldn’t have been able to control. Was that the real reason? I was just afraid of getting hurt again.
She looked at me, her eyes now were moist. The wine was having its effect. The main course was served. Grilled barramundi with lemon honey butter. She took a bite and went “wow.” I felt happy. It was my food that was being appreciated by Samia, who perhaps ate out of take away cartons amidst all her research.
“You know, I am Hindu.” I said wondering what she thought of our religions. After all she was a staunch Muslim, under all that modernity. “Yes I know, does it matter.” She said.
“It does, if I intend to be with you in the long run and that is my intention.” I said. “Are you planning to get married to me!” she exclaimed. “You hardly know me, common Sid, stop being a hypocrite, and you wouldn’t do it just because you want to marry me, which means that you wouldn’t marry me if we did it.” She was talking sense. Didn’t I do it to Shweta?
“No, it’s not like that.” I didn’t know what else to say. What do I tell her? She was a smart woman and under all sophistication, I had shown tonight, she had identified the real Sid. I felt naked.
I turned away to avoid her gaze, but she stared at me, as we ate our fish in silence. The mood turned heavy from romantic. Her perfume and my cologne, mixed to make an ugly fragrance of guilt, which nauseated me. I opened the door and walked out for a cigarette. As the acrid smoke filled my lungs, the ghosts from my past began to circle me once more. Why in life, I wasn’t able to move forward. Why in life, my past came back to spoil my present. One of the most beautiful women on the block sat right now in my living room offering her to me and all I could think was of how I had used people in my past. I was unable to understand myself. Till evening, I was planning to propose to her and now that she wanted me too, I was backing off. Just like in the past, with so many women, I wasn’t just ready. Was I waiting on someone or was I afraid of getting hurt. I knew I would get emotionally involved and then would be ceremoniously dumped in the frivolous pursuit of some dream.
I took my last puff. She was still there. She smiled and I thought “what the hell enjoy it while it lasts.” “Dessert time” I said as I whipped up my own concoctions. Mixing and marrying different ingredients. She watched me with intent and as we devoured our baked Alaska, feeding each other, we started to smother each other with ice-cream, licking it off. The moment had resumed to be magical once more as we shed our clothes to hit my bed naked, willing to please one another. I was in love once again. This time I wasn’t letting go.
The next morning, we made love once again, before she headed of for the university. Since I was living alone, I had offered her to move in with me. After all if we wanted to be together than why not? She had asked me for some time to decide over it.
I didn’t see her that evening as I was at work and while I texted her, I didn’t get a reply. I went to look for her at her apartment late in the evening after work, but she wasn’t there. Her phone went on voice mail and now I was getting worried. Where was she? Had she decided to dump me? It was two in the night, when I received that call. Samia had been arrested and I was required by the police for questioning. I was very afraid, what had I gotten myself in to? What had she done?
I went to the police station. The officers were polite and it kind of relieved me.
“We saw your messages and calls, so decided to call you. She has already told us you are not involved in any way to the case. It’s just a routine enquiry” the detective said as he sat down. “I don’t understand. What has she done?” I said.
“She was arrested late night, working at an illegal brothel. We have done the necessary paperwork and since we believe that she was innocently enticed in to it, we are letting her go. You can take her with you. Just sign the release form.” I was shocked and yet my feelings for her didn’t change.
She was sitting in the waiting room as a lady constable stood guard. I walked in to the room and looked at her. She hung her head in shame. We did not talk on our way back home and as I paid the cab, she ran inside the apartment complex. I came to my apartment and as I lay in my bed, I could still smell her in my sheets. I tried to sleep and yet sleep was miles away. I thought about her. What could have been the circumstances that made her do it, money? Don’t we all need it to survive? She had to pay her bills. She had expensive tastes and then she chose to prostitute to cater to her needs. She wasn’t wrong, I knew it in my heart, but I needed to hear it from her mouth. Sleep came as a relief after that tough night and while I had decided not to mention it to her, or bring up the topic, I was never to see her again.
The next day I got up late and after I got ready, decided to pay her a visit, only to be told by her house mates, that she was gone. She had left suddenly and they had no clue where she had gone. Her number had been disconnected. I would often go to the library in search of her, but she was never there. She had moved. All she had to do was to say “sorry” and I would have forgiven her but she had decided to just move away, away from my life.
I was left alone and while I did not cry for her, I would often feel lost. Those golden moments spent with her, the smell of her perfume and that cheeky playful demeanour, often made me feel like, going and look for her.
It was another phone call, which ended the mystery of her disappearance. It was the NSW police this time. She had been found hanging in her apartment, her pictures strewn on the floor and a note which had said “Please call Sid, his number is …….. He must be worried.”
Samia was gone forever. I don’t know if she killed herself because of the guilt. All she had to do was ask me but perhaps she was weak. I must say that I had loved her a lot, but never shed a tear for her. I don’t know why, I do not feel any pain. Perhaps she wanted to ask for my forgiveness, perhaps she was so ashamed to be humiliated in front of one person she had come to trust, or perhaps she didn’t believe in me, that I would accept her after all that had happened. She was wrong on all the counts.
I still admire her for the courage she had shown, to walk out of a conservative family to follow her dreams. I still admire her courage to surrender herself in front of unknown men who would have ravaged her. I still admire how she had managed to smile through all the pain she had been through life. Why did you do it Samia? I was there; I was always there, no matter what. Remember I had promised you, I wasn’t going to leave you ever that morning.
I went to NSW to pay my last respects. She was buried in a Muslim cemetery. It was raining that evening. As I stood there getting wet, thinking about her, I felt a tear roll out of my eye. Was I really responsible for her death? May be I was. If I hadn’t walked in to her life that evening offering to carry books, nothing would have happened. She would still be alive, lugging books back from the library. Why I had offered to help her that day?

Chapter 20
The guilt trip
The worst thing one can do to oneself is to blame oneself for someone else’s weakness. I was feeling guilty ever since, I had come back from NSW. I would often wonder, what that letter had meant. Why had she mentioned me in her letter?
“Please inform Sid …..” what was the real meaning behind those words? Did she know that I was in love with her and would have forgiven her anyhow? Did she remember the promise I had made to her that morning and wanted to release me from that everlasting wait? She had known everything about me that night as we had lain in bed after making love. I had told her about all my ex girls and how I had tried to keep my promise to them, to be always there when they wanted me to be there. Had she believed in me so much that I would always be around, no matter what and then destiny had played its cruel game again?
Sometimes a small meeting can make a great impact on us, while living together for ages may not reduce the distances. I would often imagine how much guilt she must have suffered from to commit such an act. How much responsible I was for all that had happened? If I go back and look, hadn’t I called her mobile that night, the cops would have had no clue of my existence. She would have probably been released by morning and would have gladly kept her secret in her heart. I wouldn’t have really bothered to know it anyways, thinking all her lavishness was being supported by her family in the Middle East.
At first I did not feel any remorse for her death, but slowly and certainly as the facts around her death started to pop up in my mind, I felt severe depression hitting me. I would write emails to her knowing she wasn’t reading. One day her message box became full and the mails started to bounce. I was on the verge of meeting her but then life always has other plans.
That evening I was sitting alone thinking how I should finish it all off. I had to meet Samia, tell her I was sorry. My phone rang. It was Shweta. It had been almost three or four years since we had been in touch. Strange thing was she had acquired my number from my family.
“Are you OK, I had a really bad dream, wanted to know if you were all right?” She had asked me. I started to cry and told her everything that had conspired in my life. I would tell her everything always. “I knew something was wrong.” She said. I kept on sobbing. It was a long time, I wanted to share my guilt with someone and yet I couldn’t. No one would understand me.
“Listen Sid, it wasn’t your fault that it had to end this way. While she herself was suffering she didn’t want to make you a part of it. It was her love for you that wanted to protect you. She knew that you were waiting for her, and I think just wanted to release you from that endless wait. I have loved you and I know that you keep on waiting, for your ex- girls to come back in to your life. You do not think of the present but live in the past. You are a nice person and that was the reason she decided to at least inform you. ”Shweta said.
“But why she had to die?” I was sobbing uncontrollably now.
“We cannot control free will Sid.” She said.
“I understand you; do you want me to come back to you?” I asked her.
“It’s too late Sid, I am married now. I have to go now. Remember, we cannot control free will. No matter what.” She was gone.
I felt happy for Shweta. At least she was happy with the person whom she chose to be with. She had tried to come back once too often, through my mind, but I had ignored all the communication that was being made through unsaid words. The connection was still there, or was I imagining things once again. Maybe I should have given up on this dream and gone back then but my ambition still ruled my mind. I couldn’t go back as a failure in life and yet I wasn’t getting any success either on the professional or personal front.
I would often call up Shweta and she was always there to listen to me. I would talk to her for hours online as she would go around office and routine work. She would guide me how to tackle the guilt. I totally immersed myself in my cooking often experimenting with food and yet those days spent with her would pop up in my head. I tried to work hard and the few hours, that I would work every day, used to be my escape from her ghost.
I would often imagine her sitting in the chair in front of me, next to me in bed or luging books back from the library. She wouldn’t have become an angel for sure and I knew she was around watching me. It was all inside my head and the best way to get rid of poison is to take an antidote made from the same poison.
I had to move on. With Shweta gone for ever and Monika nowhere, it was time to look for companionship if not love. I had to go back to the same website and yet this time I wasn’t looking for anything. I would surf the internet and yet nothing would interest me. Life alone can be boring sometimes but when you start looking at the mirror and talk to yourself, it comes a step closer of ending up in an asylum.
I desperately needed to move out of Adelaide and what better choice would be than to move to a tropical island in the south pacific. I was moving to Hamilton Island in new role and perhaps it was my ticket to the much needed healing I required in life.














Chapter 20
The Sun Shine State
I reached Hamilton Island and as soon as I landed, I felt I was dead. “Paradise on earth” was the only words I could utter. Clear blue waters, cockatoos and parrots, palm trees and beautifully landscaped road. It was a paradise away from civilization. The island was the perfect getaway for people lost in the world and while boasted of some of the most beautiful sunsets, sitting and watching the sun go down had become a passion.
I would often see Samia wearing the same dress sitting next to me, keeping her head on my shoulder and would watch the sun go down. We would not talk and when I was about to go, I would see her standing in a distance waving at me. Then she would disappear. She wasn’t a ghost; I knew just a figment of my imagination that would come every day to give me comfort through these times. I soon got settled down in my job and perhaps sooner in to the drink every night party routine.
Each night I would drink two bottles of wine just to get a couple of hours of sleep, which was impossible for me otherwise. The mornings would be a frantic rush to the hotel and begin my daily routine jobs. It was a perfect setting and as I began to work more and more, often nearing fifteen to sixteen hours a day, Samia would wait for me to come to see the sunset but I would be working somewhere, keeping myself away from her thoughts. Soon after one day I went to the same spot but Samia didn’t turn up that day and I knew I was released. I might not forget her, but I had felt relieved and had prayed that day that where ever she was, she should be happy and would have found peace.
I was doing all right on my professional front and while life was good, living on the island for the rest of my life was a good option. I wasn’t finding any pleasure working for days together, and while it wasn’t tough life was interesting. Each night there would be a party, which would attract me in to beehive. The bees would buzz around me and yet I would just swat them away. I was turning in to someone who was obsessed with work and then one day she arrived on the Island.
Latika was an Indian of Spanish nationality and had travelled through the world. Although she had a Spanish passport, she would speak three different languages and was a woman of substance. She joined the Hamilton island medical centre as a nurse and while I would often see her in the bar nursing her lemonade, I would be busy drinking away with my friends. We would often look at each other, knowing that we belonged to the same country but then, I wasn’t ready for another relation and she was just not accessible without a reason. A reason to go to the medical centre.
I fondly remember how I got down with the flu one day and while I was sitting at the medical centre with my eye covered, she had looked at me and said, “You look amazing, need an eye patch.” I had smiled as her hand touched my hand and there it was an instant connection.
My first touch with her. She gently held my hand down to have a closer look at my eye, and blew a little in to ease my pain. She was a professional and I was falling in love. As she looked closely, I looked at her with my good eye and wondered what she was about? Her hair tied in a knot. She had this innocence that attracted me to her, but women like those are generally hitched a long time ago.
I knew she wasn’t married as she wore no ring, but chances of having a boyfriend tucked away somewhere was so bright. I didn’t want to get into the triangle again. I knew it was as vicious as the Bermuda triangle and it wasn’t just a good idea to really try it. She wrote me some prescription and gave me a sick note for my illness. I was happy I got a day off. Since I was the only patient, she was kind of free and I asked her.
“Are you from India?” “yes, I am but I have been living in Spain for years now.” She replied. “Ah, then you must speak Hindi?” I smiled.
“Haan, err yes, I do” she smiled and it clicked.
We would talk for hours on phone after work and would meet up for dinner often. She was a vegetarian and I would often prefer to eat veg in her presence. She told me how she had been unsuccessful in finding love and how she had travelled through countries to reach this destination. I was impressed with her story and just like all my women, she had a past. Perhaps in my life it has been essential for a woman to have a past.
She was perfect in every regards and more so was a dreamer just like we. As we would sit and watch the sun go down. I would often see Samia standing at a distance and smiling. I knew she was happy for me. I had her blessing. She was on a short stint on the island and soon had to move to USA. The last day was spent together with a promise to be together soon. I didn’t know what was going to happen next.






Chapter 19
Beginning of the end
Dear Latika,
Today i visited your webpage... Was planning to surprise you with a message there, but came across a few messages that really hurt me the messages are as old as two months and end at least till last month... Words like Love and i love you are there. Unfortunately i couldn’t find the name of the person, but i guess it’s not me definitely and you have also replied “i love you” etc. funny.....i am not asking you to give any explanations ... but if you are no longer in this relationship, i mean you and me, please let me know i will respect your decision but i can’t stand infidelity in a relation ...will always love you though ...
Take care,
Sid.

Latika seemed to be flabbergasted, at how I had come to know, she knew it was never possible to access that webpage from Hamilton Island.
I know u love me and I would never cheat on a relation... U also know that
A lot of things happened while I was in that group and u know I don't let anyone touch me but yes I drew closer, coz u just left me alone hang on that's no excuse but I did meet him
on that dating site…
Well I still want to work on our relation if u want to?
Let me know??
Latika.
It had almost been a year Latika and I had been in a relationship over the internet. We had met by chance on the island.
We were so alike, it was like an instant click and soon we were talking for hours together. I would come back from work and she would always be there waiting on me. We would talk about everything under the sun and soon we were in love.
Latika and I had been deeply in love till then. As she moved to the USA, poor connectivity and work commitments, made it impossible to keep in touch with her for a couple of months. When one day, I happened to log on the internet, I had found that she was with someone else now. It had torn me apart, because here I was trying to save every penny for our future and there she was who had already given up on me. It was a painful decision as I read that mail from her. I felt guilt for not trying to take out time for her. I felt remorse for not able to understand her feelings, while I was pursuing my dreams.
The fact was that, the island had sucked me in to it. I was working hard, but was drinking harder. Life was so busy that it was impossible to keep in touch with my inner self forget someone else. It was a tunnel and I had hoped so much, that she would be waiting with open arms on the other side.
Over the next year, I tried hard to get her back in to my life, but she was gone too far. A bright future awaited her and although in her mails she would promise to meet me, I knew there was a triangle forming with me gone. When I was back in Adelaide after my stint on the island, I had to look for a job. Since I had lot of spare time in those days, I would think a lot about what went wrong, so much so that I nearly went in to a suicidal mode.
What was I trying to achieve? I should have let her go then. Deleted her from my life but perhaps with age comes maturity and with maturity, I remembered a promise that I had made to myself once upon a time. I would never let go of a relation. It was a losing battle but I had decided to fight on for love. The chances were slim, as when you are not physically present, you can’t explain a person.
It so happened that I got a job with my old employers and slowly, as I got involved in work, I started to realise that if it was going to happen it will happen. If not so be it and soon I made my decision to move to Sydney for good. I had realised that it was more of a place than people, which remind you of the past.
I do not know if I would ever meet her or not, she was maybe just a myth in my mind that I loved. An imaginary love that I would never forget in my life, however just like so many that came before her, in time she will also fade away. But will I let her fade; perhaps not as I always keep mailing her, keep in touch with her for one sheer fact, I don’t want to lose her.
While this chapter is not about another failed relation of mine , because somewhere in mind there remains a hope that one day perhaps we would meet and fall in love once again, what I wonder is, before that happens, what if just like her, I am just bidding for the right time. Will it heal me? Because my guardian angel can’t see me in pain for long time and always bring forward someone who is willing to give me a shoulder to cry on. However before that I need to realise that I have made mistakes in life. I have taken people for granted, that they would love me no matter what.
I have gone out to follow my dreams, sacrificing love and hurting people in the bargain. I have been selfish in life and while I just thought about myself all this while, I have failed to realise how my decisions have affected those who have loved me from the bottom of my heart. Perhaps it has been my guilt for hurting so many people in my life that this time I decided to try and bury my ego. To be there, whenever she needed me and then I guess, I was just punishing myself by not falling in love once again with that someone special. Or is she that special someone who I want to be for the rest of my life. It has never taken me that long with anyone to move on in life but then I guess my love for Latika has stood hold its grounds through time. I have been around since then always there waiting with open arms, for I am a changed person who has given up on pursuing the tail of love but perhaps be with just the one, no matter what.
Perhaps we both had clicked so well in the first place because we were so similar. Our hobby, likes dislikes. I understand that just like me, she is on a journey herself, to go forward and discover herself, before we end up together, at some weird destination. After all we are destined to be together.
Two strangers meet on the highway, part ways, meet again a few years later, fall in love and this time again part ways just to be together. It was an interesting thought to live with. The only question remained was, what if we were to be together and just because we both are selfish to the core, we will never give up on our dreams, the other one may go to hell.
Of course while I thought all this, I had a strange feeling growing inside me. I had been selfish throughout my life, dumping people, being dumped, only to find someone new, why was I not able to move so easily this time. After all it had almost been a year and I remember I never took more than a couple of months to make up my mind and the healing would start immediately.
Whatever!
It was time to be happy once again. Although I would miss her, I engrossed myself in trivial pursuits which I called my hobbies. Since I was working in the kitchen, I developed a passion for cooking and tried to learn as much as possible. It is a great healing process when one starts to divert his or her mind in to something they like doing. I would create some beautiful desserts and would post pictures of it on my webpage. She would often comment on those and it made me happy. The idea for now was to make something of myself in the professional world. Actually I had ignored my profession for too long and while I had lived and had an amazing journey through life, going from place to place, I hadn’t made those millions of dollars and my bank balance would often remind me that, as a kid I used to have more money in my piggy banks.
It was time to forget about love and follow another dream. To be successful in life. How to do that?
I had wasted enough time following love and all I could ever get hold was its tail. It would wag it for some time, and I would gladly hold on to it firmly only to be bitten by it.
The move to Sydney was a good idea. This time I wasn’t moving because of love but for a simple reason that, the city had better opportunities. Within a week of moving to Sydney, I was able to secure a good job with one the leading chains of hotels and while I once again faded away from the virtual world, I cared a little about love. I had found my real love and it was no one but me. Something I had failed to realise, all these years the only person that I ever loved was living inside me.













After note
When I look back today and think of all the dreams I had as a child, I do realise, most of the dreams did actually come true. It’s true that I did not climb the Everest, but ‘love’ took me close to Everest.
I did not become a sailor; I travelled to distant lands, lived on beautiful Islands and met some of the most amazing people while on this journey. As I leave this journey for an apt completion in time, I do feel that I did achieve most of my dreams. Perhaps if I had become a sailor, I would have been confined to a ship, hitting at ports now and then, not really experiencing the culture or for that matter would have just skimmed the surface.
I do not have millions of dollars stashed away, but a heart that’s worth its weight in gold. Yes one of my close friends and critics told me once, that I always went after good looking girls, and if an average girl would fall in love with me, I wouldn’t consider her. For me, it was an eye opener but when I look back, none of the girls, I fell for, was because of their looks. It was more than that. It was about comfort levels, I shared with them or for that matter, as I said earlier in the beginning, I was just a part of their fleeing present.
I do not blame any one of them for leaving me, for trying to come back because we all seek those beautiful moments, when we were happy and had let it go for some dream, only to realize that it wasn’t worth it. At the end of it all, each one of them wanted me back, but where was I headed for? I still had my own dreams to achieve and while I just said dreams that weren’t worth it, then why don’t I go back and be with one of them.
The only problem lies in the fact, that love at the end of the day is a complex process. When you have been in love with so many people, and with each one of them, you had felt that connection. Each one being fit to be your soul mate.
Whom do i choose? Do I choose Monika, who once out of anger I had cursed and believe that her life became miserable because of it. Do I choose Shweta, who at one time did everything for me, giving me everything? Someone whom I couldn’t curse, but took me years to get over with or, I choose Latika who took as little as a month to move on after promising and deciding our future together and did not even bother to tell me about it. I have over a period of time thought a lot about all three of them. They were all different to one another, with their own needs and yet there was something common in between them.
They all were sad in life when they met me. They all were afraid and while I tried to help them out, they fell in love with me and, me with them. As they grew confident in life, my need for them kept on reducing. I was like a teddy bear whom we as kids hug and can’t live without. As we grow up, our dependency on the teddy keeps getting reduced, till one day we just dump it in the attic. I was just a cute teddy for them, and I was there, when they needed a hug and a shoulder to cry on. As each one of them from time and again, come up to the attic, dusted me up, gave me a hug, I have felt love and yet I know I would never ever share the same love, that they once had for the little teddy called “Sid.” Of course between all of them was Samia, who knew I would have forgotten everything and loved her still but decided to end it all out of shame.
Today as I finish writing my tales of love, I do understand that I made mistakes, mistakes that costed me some precious relationships. I did not understand their importance and decided to move on each time. Life does throw curveballs and it is up to us how, we tackle them. I was afraid to commit, at one point of time with each one of them. I was so busy healing them that I forgot that, when I would get hurt, I would need a similar healing touch.
Destiny always brought some one in my life, who would need my help in the healing process and then, I would get healed too. Love after all at the end of day heals us all, this time it was me, myself. Someone who cannot leave me, no matter how hard he tried.
Some day when I am sitting alone on my laptop loving myself, I might just hear from someone, who at one time, I hadn’t considered as my soul mate and then a new journey will start all over again, the complex process of falling in love. I will always be available for all of them, who once put their faith in me and the word that we so easily use “Love.”
While we all have fallen in love from time to time, in school, in college and in life with so many different people, our movies often depicting love as something eternal carried on between a man and a woman from one life to the next. It is ironic in today’s world, how easily we decide to give up on love to follow our dreams in life. We all are just self-centred and often what we mistake for love is just our need of companionship. Long time ago when I was a child, I would often begin my essay with “man is a social animal.”
Over a period of time, I discovered that how relevant this statement is in our world. No matter how hard we try, yet we cannot live alone. The need of companionship often makes us take decisions that in due course of time we start to regret and then the so called “Love” that had brought us together dies. The growing rate of divorces stand a testament to the fact, how poor our decision making has become, when it comes to choosing the right partner. We often tend to seek our better halves out of sheer convenience of location, money and greed. We seek a comfortable life and if our suitor is able to provide all that, we follow the trail blindly. We do not understand the fact in life that people are changing all the time. What we are today, we won’t be tomorrow, and so what is the ground for love?
In today’s world, it is easy to discover fast love. Love is just a product coming out of vending machine. Log on to a dating site and there you are. A million suitors all looking for love. Then why is it so difficult to find one person that we are willing to spend our lives with. Why can’t we for once decide to leave everything and follow this trail? Share and love what we have. Sometimes we will fail but then over time we will realise and discover that in reality, maybe we all are hopelessly in love with someone real or mythical.
No matter how vicious love can be, I have gone forth and held its tail time and again to be bitten. It would take time to heal, but I would go forth and hold its tail again. The process would repeat itself, but for once I held the tail firmly and as love turned to bit me, I turned with it, choosing myself to love first. In life when we love ourselves first and not look for love. Love follows us. We are holding its tail, moving in circles.
Often it is seen that people tend to let go of themselves, when they get hurt. They tend to eat more, let go of the beautiful life or dreams they once had. Cry inevitably for days together. It is all a part of the healing process and while we all know we are hurting, it is best to ahead and pursue something that we were not able to do, when in love. I know I might be sounding like a preacher right now, but that’s what I did in life. I started to love myself. All the things that I longed to achieve started to come true around me. I was happy once again and yes if I am destined to be with someone someday, it will happen. Only this time I am going to be ready to embrace love with open arms, not worrying about my dreams or goals to achieve. Do I go forward and fall in love again or wait for someone from my past to acknowledge my love. As I make a mental note to myself not to bother any more with love.