Am I The Culprit?

 Am I The Culprit?

It is getting cold as December is closing in. A typical chill will soon set in. I met her in the morning today after a long time. It felt like I had found a lakh rupees I had lost some time back. I still liked her; it didn’t matter if she liked me or not. She was still quite good looking; I wondered if time had indeed wrecked havoc through her character as was rumoured about her.

 

There were no apparent signs of a storm. Trees had not been uprooted, lightning had not struck: nothing of this kind had happened. Apparently, she was quite calm and quiet like a mouse even as several blizzards surely ravaged her soul. She stood before me in the cold weather without shivering like it was  a cool day in March.

 

A lot had changed for her, I knew, although none of the change was transcribed on her face in any language. She was adept at concealing her emotions right from the outset. It didn’t surprise me.

 

I wish I could forget the time when we met each other every single day, spent hundreds of hours together, and yet she didn’t let a whiff of the storm whirling about in her life get to me. At times, I blame myself for not being able to sniff out her woes; she was so close to me, I should have got to know about it a long time back.

 

She was engaged to be married to him rather against her wishes. It wasn’t that he had forcefully slipped a ring into her ring-finger; no one could do it, but she didn’t want to be affianced with him. She couldn’t find a logical reason to refute the choice of her parents, he was quite good looking and well off, but she didn’t want it to be with him; she simply didn’t like him.

 

And yet, there was a thirst for love which she wanted to quench. She wanted to be loved by someone. She was beautiful, she knew, but she wanted someone to make her all the more beautiful by telling her so. She wanted to be made to feel important and wanted.

 

Somehow, she couldn’t visualise him working at all this. A spiritual meeting of souls was what she was looking for. Somehow, she knew it couldn’t happen with him. His soul had wandered too far away in a wilderness even to be close to her. She didn’t want to enter the wilderness in its search.

 

She only wanted to be loved. There was a deep crater created within her by virtue of our company. I was aware I was the only one who knew the exact quantum of love required to fill in the abyss that had developed within her over the past one year.

 

Our company had managed to dig a deep pit within both of us. It was a deeper pit she found herself trying to fathom when she wanted to quantify my love for her; she tried to discover its bottom, but she found herself struck by vertigo for she was looking into a bottomless pit; no one had ever loved her this way; she felt sure no one was ever going to love her this way.

 

I had given her more love and attention than anyone could possibly give her while she lived. I loved her more than I loved myself. For me, she was a word with more meanings than can be found in a dictionary.

 

She knew all this. She didn’t want to create an affinity with him. Her engagement was a declaration of war on me. She wanted me to be jealous; I did feel a bit jealous of him, he was on his way to hold  a trophy in his hand while I won’t even get a consolation prize.

 

I dimmed the flames of jealousy leaping up within me with a lot of deliberation and thought. We were quite different, and she loved me despite all these differences. For a while, I wondered if it was going to be enough to lead a happy life.

 

She wanted us to be married as soon as possible regardless of all differences we had, and irrespective of all familial objections; it looked like if the world was going to end tomorrow, she wanted our marriage to be the first thing to happen today. She didn’t believe in tomorrow, a tomorrow when the world would end, terminating her love for me.

 

Despite all this, there was a typical glow lacking in our love-story. By getting affianced to him, she wanted to punish me for not taking an initiative where matrimony was concerned. On my part, I was quite unsure if a matrimonial-alliance is really the utopian end to all love-stories.

 

Very frankly, I don’t believe all lovers I see on the silver screen find eternal bliss and happiness in marriage. Her company pumped in a typical ecstasy within me. I wanted  to preserve it in a more tangible form than matrimony could provide.

 

When we were together, I wanted the moment to last an eternity. I yearned to be with her when she wasn’t with me. Her thoughts took her place on such occasions, and they created a louder jingle than her presence or even her company did.

 

Getting a husband for herself was her way to punish me: she knew that by punishing herself she was punishing me. I was also going to suffer while she suffered, she knew this, and she wanted me to suffer.  I wonder if a lighter punishment could be meted out for me.

 

After all these years, she has a doting and loving husband and they even have two kids. I don’t figure anywhere even in the wildest of her dreams now, I know. There was a time when I couldn’t imagine a day without seeing her, and one fine day, she moved on to brighten up someone else’s life.

 

To this day, I wonder who is to blame for this mess.