My first attempt at a story, rather than the usual descriptions I do, though the tapestry is woven from borrowed threads of my previous blog entries! :-)

The Rock

‘Have you ever seen a six legged insect?’ she mockingly asked, as she painstakingly moved millimeter by millimeter with her walker, till she finally reached the car, and they helped her in, pulling away her four legs and tossing it into the backseat. She and her words keep appearing and evaporating in my head, like the slow smoke rings rising and disappearing from my cigarette butt. I hold it up and stare at its smoldering ashes, burning a live corpse at a painstakingly slow pace. "Poppo", a pair of burnt out purple lips sigh and part, lyrically carving into the silence, an ode to my cute little cigarette butt and Frau Schultz.

"You know that cigarettes cause lung cancer, don't you?” he'd asked me. "Of course I do," I replied. "I thought I'd let you know, in case you didn’t". "I do know, and that’s why I smoke", I had challenged and stared right back into his eyes. He shrugged his shoulders and left it at that. Tom was my ‘feel-good’ guy. Being around him made me at ease with being me. We’d been together for a short while, but he was too spirited to be fettered by a relationship and I was too insecure to do without one, and that was all there was to it For him, I was a delicate piece of machinery, which needed to be handled very carefully and taken care of, or a top spinning from the single point of a pin, retaining its balance on that one single point, when he was in a more euphemistic mood. For me, it was just Tom.

I empty the ashes remnant from his visit and pack the Kontakte CD. The monitor flickered to a stop before it died out. I set the alarm for 6:00am, and crawl out of my bedroom window and sit on the sloped roof, my passage to freedom. I savor the lingering taste of my kiss from the remnant smoke.

Breathe, goddamnit, breathe, I tell myself as I look at the stars above. My eyes search for the Orion. The Orion was something I related with familiarity. Many a childhood camping nights out in the wilderness would be wrapped with a blanket of reassurance at the sight of this constellation. Orion was solace that everything was all right and the world was back to its perfect self, and that I was safe home, no matter where I was. Orion was where Ma said she'd be and watching, when she's gone. My eyes strain and search, the unfamiliar stars become a blur and two tiny rivulets start trickling down. I crouch, and bury my face away from the sky, and break into violent sobs. My lips pucker up, and my trembling hands reach out and light another match for my funeral pyre. I stretch myself out, lie right there and breathe, sucking the starlit night into me.

We had last gone to the beach together, ma and I. It was dusk and I had lain there wasted, drained out of everything left in me, seeing the futility of the waves as they lashed fiercely against the unrelenting stoic rock. I watched her as she silently held back her tears. I looked away, from my helplessness and hers.

"I woke up with a horrible dream yesterday", I tell her. "I dreamt that I was mashing and stepping over someone's face. I was wearing heavy spiked boots, and stamping that face ruthlessly, while it kept getting distorted, disfiguring itself like a blob of clay. The face was bleeding and wroth with pain, and somehow I seemed totally oblivious to it. My face was stone cold, and indifferent to the pain that I was causing. I woke up, trying to remember who's face it was, ma, but I just cant."

"It must have been mine", she answered and I turned and stared at her in anger. "How long would you be gone?” she asked. "Two years." She looked away. I
studied the lines on her wrinkled face, distorted by pain, and had wondered how much of it I was responsible for. She looked so much older and tired than what I always remembered her as.

There were only three occasions when I had seen my ma cry. The first, when I was fourteen, and we had to wander from one hospital to another. The doctors
had diagnosed a probable epilepsy case, over a few recurrent fainting spells I had. It was a trying period. There was not one neurology department in the
hospital that we hadn’t visited. I was put on anti-depressant, taken to a psychiatrist. After nearly three years of running from pillar to post, they attributed it to something as simple as abnormal menstrual cycle and left it unto time to take its own natural course. But that period was tumultuous and telling on ma. Her tears had caught me off guard. Parents are not supposed to
cry. "Why are you crying?” I had asked her puzzled. "Because if there's one thing which I can never take is to see anything happen to you", she said, her
voice breaking, and I had pressed her hand.

Even then it wasn’t much of a cry. Her tears, were something she just clung onto, arresting them between those two eye lids of hers. They'd stay right there, glimmering like a thin film in front of those eyes of hers, holding their forte with utmost pride. They excused themselves as gracefully from the guard of her eyes, as they came and receded, respecting the confines defined by her, and not treading beyond.

"I had a cramp in my leg last night", she told me. "I was writhing with pain and couldn’t move. I woke up your dad and asked him to massage my foot. He said the curtains were open and didn’t want the neighbors to get a peek into our bedroom activities and went back to sleep. It was 3:00am till the pain finally subsided and I could fall asleep". "Why is he like this? I wonder how you take something like this from him", I'd retorted. "I knew I was on my own they day he left me on my own, on my first day to work, in an alien city.” she replied.

Daddy might have been a lousy husband, but he is everything one would want a father to be. He would wake me each morning, with a cup of cocoa even through my college days. He would help around the house, do the dishes, the laundry, water the plants, and take me out on secret ice cream treats and concerts. When I turned 6 and discovered I could draw, he bought me the most expensive colors, an easel and a canvas and would pack me off to art competitions. He bought me my first piano at 7, when he saw my untrained hands glide effortlessly on my friend's two feet long cheap synth. My friends knew him as the coolest dad in the block. My grades were low for ratio and proportion in the maths classes in ninth grade, and we had to get an explanation written by our parents. He was given strict instructions by me that he should write something innocuous since the teacher was a terror. I went over my instructions over and over again with him, before I finally went off to bed, leaving the paper for him to sign on. His explanation read, “her coming to a higher grade and her grades in class show an inverse relationship. This might be due to her temporary over enthusiasm towards play rather than studies these days.” Even the teacher melted.

But he was nowhere close to playing the ideal husband, nor did he attempt to. He had bought her a beautiful dress on their first Anniversary. She had scolded him them for being extravagant, and he never bought her one after that. Ma and me had gone over each incident so many times over years now, but he still remained the most important man in my life, and a lousy husband. "What keeps you in this marriage ma?” I'd asked her. "Had I been in your place, I would have walked out of the marriage long back. Why do you do this to yourself? What is it that keeps you going when you are in such an unhappy marriage?" "You", she replied. And I saw the glassy film in her face for the second time.

She and dad came to see me off. I had touched her feet. "I'll be back next year", I told her as I kissed and hugged her, breathing in the last of what she smelt like, felt like. I held her tightly, not wanting to let go, sinking my head into her shoulders, my eyes watering. Finally, she gently pulled me away from me, looked into my eyes, smiled a beautiful smile, and said, "Go on now, you are running late." And I caught the elusive glassy look for the third time before they retreated as quickly as they had came. I, smiled, waved and went. That’s the last I saw of her, and the last I could ever have gotten to see of her.

I got my boarding pass and the finality of my journey slowly sunk in. I called up home and heard ma's voice on the other end and felt a lump pass down my throat. I talked to her for sometime and hung up. I walked up the gangway and settled myself down, staring out of the window, into the lights shining on the runaway. It seemed like a well-defined path, but where they lead, I couldn’t quite figure out. I helplessly saw familiarity melt, as the plane took off. Everything below moved as waves towards a huge black sea, shimmering with lights.

The familiarity seemed to melt away faster than I imagined, and at that moment, in all my irrationality, I looked in frenzy, for my house and my mother, amongst all those hundreds of lights... my street and my locale. The plane tugged, piercing its way into blackness, giving the final tug in all its mechanical might, to the invisible umbilical cord that had held us together for so many years now. I felt my eyes bulge out and my ears on the verge of exploding, till I gave in. Finally the lump exploded, and tears trickled down my face as I stared out into the night.. and I choked myself with the spoonful of bland food served, seasoned by the salty river trickling down my face... 'I'll have the same..', I heard the German softly telling the airhostess.

The phone rings and I stretch my hand back into reality and reach out for the cordless. I hear Tot’s familiar voice. "I am sitting with a pack of cigarettes and I am already down seven", I tell him. "Since when did you start smoking?” I heard his horrified voice on the other end. "As if one person burning himself up in the family wasn’t enough", he said. My brother had started to smoke back in high school, one of the exploratory binges which probably each kid his age goes through, only in his case the habit stayed. I had tried get him out of it, coaxed him, threatened him, even went to the extend of starting to smoke in front of him, to work on his guilt and make him stop. But all that he said, while lighting my cigarette was, “just remember one thing, smoke all you want, it’s probably just a phase. But make sure that you never buy your own cigarette packet… beg, borrow or steal… but NEVER buy your cigarette. The day you do, you know you are addicted to the damn thing.” A serpentine trail of cigarette packets slithering down the years and I would see the wisdom in his words.

“I feel so damn angry with myself. I feel like punishing myself for not being there when it mattered the most. Sometimes I wish I’d just stayed back and never came here”, I tell him. “Do you think your staying there would have made a difference? Daddy’s so proud of you. He keeps telling everyone about your work. You are still his darling daughter, and I, the black sheep of the family. Just stay where you are and do well. Ma would have wanted it that way,” he told me tenderly.

“If only I knew she’d be gone. Why didn’t anyone tell me?” “Because none of us knew! We expected her to be around till June around the time when you were planning to come. It was just way too sudden…”

Sudden… sudden is a word used, when you are sitting in the comfort of your backyard, basking in the sun, reading a newspaper on a lazy Sunday morning and you hear an explosion, and turn to realize that your house has been burnt to smittens. That’s sudden. Surgeries are sudden. Three months of excruciating post surgery pain is not sudden. Three months of drugged oblivion to the world is not sudden. Neither are three months of prolonged violation of a body with chemotherapy, and charring, not counting the eighteen odd chemo sessions over a period of five years and two recurrences. The cancerous cells just grew into our backyard five years back. It lay there smoldering and cindering, while we lazed our 240 odd sundays stretched over five years, till there was an explosion and poof! she was gone, just like that.

I’d call her up, and hear a loving “And how’s my little darling”, from the other end and the distance between us would get reduced to six inches of the cordless. I’d fill her with the mundanities of my daily rut, while she’d listen.

“How’s your surrogate boyfriend?” she asked. And I laughed. This was a joke between ma and me. elationships and me were like a dance at a masquerade. I wear a mask to hide the scars and they hold a prop to hide their flaws. We step in and out in synchronism, each time a new face and a new prop on either end, and the pace gets faster. The rhythm of their coming and going has become predictable and it makes it easier to step into the rhythm almost with mechanical ease now. And in all this Joe jumped right in.

My friend from school introduced him to me. According to here we were this “made-for-each-other- couple”, who just have to get together. Initially we used to laugh it off, and over time learnt to put some trust in her words. Two years down in the virtual world, and numerous phone calls after, he was as real as he could get within the confines of the cyber world. Ma had a lot more faith in him, than my partners from the masquerade. The logistics of us being together was bizarre. Even before thinking in terms of compatibility, we had to transcend geographical boundaries. So he stayed right there, as surrogate as he could be, till we met or we found someone else.

I never trusted Ma’s voice on the phone. They’d carry the same tone of tenderness and strength, through all times, an art she had perfected over the years. It was my aunt who called up and asked if I could visit the next month, instead of waiting for the summer. Ma was on sedatives now, and the pain unbearable.

" Life, has to be feminine… it is too complex to be a man”, I told Tom when I met him up the weekend before I was supposed to leave for home. Ma was the invisible guest invited to dine with us, as I went on talking about her. I looked out at the snow outside and felt the cold sinew sucking me in into its coldness and gloom. I took a deep breath, looked at him and said, "I wouldn’t know what I'll do when she's gone". I fought my tears and with whatever was left of my pride, looked out of the window. The chill inside me reduced the snow outside to an amorphous blur. The blur outside finally metamorphosed into one loud Scream, stifled for long, which Munch would have understood. The vibrancy gets too much and I looked back at him, "Cant life be JUST a little simpler?" He touched my hand and aid, “That’s because Life is a She”, and I smiled. We went back to his apartment, and it had five urgent voice messages from my roommate. All I remember was turning back and blurting out, “I hope she’s alright”, while I scurried down the staircase.

Ma was said to be breathing her last, and I was to take the next flight home. I started packing my bags, in a frenzy, in all my numbness. Snapshots of moments
raced across in my head, telling on each moment of mine with her. There was nothing more I wanted, than to be with her once, before she left. I was working with all my life in order to make all the years of her living worthwhile and reassure her that life's going to be fine even when she's gone. I wanted to just steal those few moments with her to reassure her that her precious flower is sturdy and rooted, and not a mere delicate effeminate metaphor to beauty she's projected to be. That she is capable of withstanding and would be able to take care of herself and be around and make a place for herself. All that I had built towards as a gift or an offering were a few precious moments of time. Now I slid into the helplessness of watching even time slip away. Temporality is mankind's nemesis. And yet we run against our mortality frantically trying to hold onto something, in our feeling of vulnerability. But even that something in all its thingliness is temporal and you helplessly watch as each of them fall like a pack of cigarettes. The phone rang again, and I was told she’s no more.

I reached home and saw a lifeless corpse weighed down with flowers that I did not recognize. I clung to the shelf, fighting back, refusing to let go, which they kept cajoling me to come and see her just once. I had dreamt of this moment when I would meet her for so many nights spread over months, and none of it was to be the way it was then. I slept on the bed she breathed her last, hoping that there was a bit of her still around that I could breathe in. I saw the steel support that had held her upright for forty days, without being able to lie down and sleep. Her skin would burn with anyone’s touch, they told me. I imagined her crawling out of the bed, to the floor, to the bathroom every single day of those forty days. All my prayers came back to me. I’d prayed for her to be relieved of her miseries, but never for a longer life.

She lived in my head for days and still lives. Talk it out, they would tell me, expecting her to ooze out from my mouth. I would see faceless people mourning around me, for a sorrow, which was mine alone. Faceless because after her no one really mattered. I felt anger and pain piercing their way through my brains, sending my head reeling and making me want to scream and cry that I needed her now. They clicked their tongues and pressed my hand, and all they saw a calm, lifeless face. They wondered what kind of a person sheds not a tear over losing someone so precious.

Even now when I walk down those streets of my mind, I feel like taking my hand right in down my throat and let it pass through my heart, to the depth of my soul and be in touch with the part that hurt the most. To twirl my fingers around it, and throttle it, maybe pain counters pain. My hands reach for another cigarette. “Are you there?” I hear Toto’s voice. “Yes”, I reply absent-mindedly. “So, how’s your surrogate boyfriend?” he mocked. “Ma told me all about him”, he teased. “Why don’t you go and meet him?” he asked. “Because surrogates are just meant to be surrogates. They serve their purpose and just slide away. That’s all there is to it.” We talk for a few more minutes and hang up.

I crawl back onto the roof and lie down looking at the stars. Zillions of stars, twinkling into the night, each with a story of its own and me crushed to a speck. And it dawns on me; what more could I possibly lose than what I have already left behind? What more could I possibly lose from where I was right now? The realization gives me a strange feeling of serenity. I have nothing to lose or nothing to cling to. I am now a speck, crushed to insignificance for anything significant to crush me.

Maybe there really are no bigger pictures. Maybe solace comes from accepting one’s insignificance and learning to live with it. The world changes when we turn our back from vastness of the sky, and start looking at other specks. Suddenly the world doesn’t seem all that big anymore. We look more closely, and the entire place seems to be filled with an ever-increasing number of specks. Other specks define our context. We establish attachments and invest emotions. We hold our grudges and wring our hands. We delve on sorrow, beat our chests and mourn. We become people and feel gigantic. We see ourselves and our sorrows magnify, not because we live through them, but because they shatter the notion of willfulness that we endow ourselves with. We mourn not for our sorrows, but for the jolt to our context and our notion of infallibility. I smile, and I stare back into the sky. I saw three stars surface out from nowhere and twinkle into the night. I was home.