Saba

Time had devoured two decades; the buildings were taller, the roads broader, and the faces stranger. Ram thought that the part of himself which he had so carefully killed, somewhat deliberately, somewhat unconsciously—the part of him which loved this city so unconditionally and fondly, is, in fact, not dead. It still draws rusty breaths hiding behind his deep-buried memories. He had left Banaras, driven a thousand miles, but Banaras had never left him. He still knew all the streets.

Saba's home would take a half-hour-long walk from his hotel. He did not mind walking. It helped him think clearer and bought him some time with himself. He always carried a small diary and a pen whenever he walked. He opened that little blue diary for the first time in two years and wrote the date. The last entry was dated two years ago, the day Adele had passed away. He scribbled something. Something about the crowd:

Crowd. Sees Everything. Stone-Blind. Relentless Walking. Goes Nowhere. Blabbers A Lot. Says Everything. Means Nothing.

Every corner of the city was packed with fully dressed police officers in polished shoes and reserves in case of a riot. A young woman in a khaki uniform, brown shoes, and a revolver around her waist ordered a unit of twenty police officers. Ram looked at the calendar on his mobile. It was the day of Hanuman Jayanti. That explained the Hanuman prayers playing through loudspeakers at the street corners.

It was around six in the evening. He was under jet lag and a bit drunk, but he did not mind. The lag and alcohol made him slow, drowsy, and tolerant of emotions. He did not want to feel. But more importantly, he did not want to remember what he would feel today after meeting Saba. And Saba always made him feel. She made him feel—birds, shadows, strangers, emotions, and herself—by merely existing, by merely being, she made him feel—Everything. And he did not want to feel. He did not want to remember.

But did she make him feel the emotion that mattered the most? Did she make him feel love? Did he love Saba? He remembered the night before she married Raza. The night she told him that she loved him. The night he saw her for the last time. It was twenty years ago. She had told him that she loved him, and he had said nothing—done nothing. He had felt everything—the booze, the breeze, and even Saba—everything.

Everything but love.

It had started to get dark when he opened the gate to Saba's home. A few sacred fig trees were planted along the compound wall. And a streetlight had cast an intricate web of their shadows onto the swing. The winds were crazier than usual, almost lunatic, almost suicidal. The shadows of the trees moved so relentlessly and recklessly as if an instrumental jazz act was supposed to be performed.

 An act orchestrated by the winds.

 An act. A mission.

 A mission of utmost importance.

 A mission to embody death herself.

The thought of death reminded him of Adele, and he closed his eyes. He took a deep breath and closed them tightly as if he forced something. As if he negotiated with someone he possibly could not understand. And then he opened his eyes praying一praying even though he did not believe. He opened his eyes, hoping一hoping with a five-year-old's innocence and stupidity that the entire thing was a dream一hoping that he would open his eyes and see the ceiling fan in his room and Adele in the corner reading some trashy magazine. Hoping that the time had gone back two years. But he opened his eyes to a poignant reality infected with the fact that Adele was no more. He opened his eyes to a lawn swing at Saba's home.

"Ram?" Saba said, "Why haven't you come inside?".

Had she changed? Was it Saba who stood before him, or was it Mrs Raza? She certainly had aged, and perhaps she did not read poetry anymore. And maybe she liked to speak about politics, the Russia and Ukraine war, and the upcoming parliament elections. He did not—could not say anything. He just sat there on the swing.

"Winds," he said, trying to look into her big hazel eyes.

"Winds? Still haven't lost your love for the winds?" She laughed the way a Mrs Raza would laugh. Laugh of a rich and discreet woman who sat on a chair beside the swing.

She asked him about the journey and how long he planned to stay. She asked him about his daughter Mathilde and what she did. She asked him about France, and she asked him about his home. But she did not ask him about Adele.

"Why have you stopped writing?", she asked as she poured tea. "The last book you wrote was around what— three?— no, two years ago? Even the blog has not been updated since then."

Saba added two spoons of sugar to his tea. He was smiling, probably wondering how she still remembered the two spoons of sugar.

Maybe she knew what could possibly make him stop writing. But, knowing Ram, she hoped she did not.

"I was scared when the blog went quiet for a month. I thought you were—" she said.

"—that I was dead?" he tried to finish her sentence.

"I was going for something like retired or sick. Do you writers always need to put things in extreme words?" Saba said.

His last book, published a month before Adele passed away, had been a big success. He had thought extensively about death and love since her death, but he did not dare write anything. Mathilde always told him to; she said it would kill some time and take his mind off things, but he did not dare. He had written every story and poem, thinking and imagining what Adele would feel while reading it. She was the only audience that mattered. Without her, he did not dare write.

"You think my writing is extreme?" He asked her.

"In a way. Perhaps that's what makes it what it is," she said.

They drank tea, and they talked. The time passed quickly, and it was now past midnight. The alcohol made both of them garrulous.

The moon seemed like it was scratched and reminded Saba of their youth. They would stay up, talk about life and pain, compose poems, and finish each other's verses. And they would pretend to be drunk on stale lemonade.

"Do you remember that May midnight?" , Saba said. "The last time we saw each other, rather cold, drunk, and quite odd? We were drunk, and you told me I looked like a poem in flesh and blood. Your eyes seemed tired, lips dry, and you smoked and passionately spoke about love being binary. Ones and zeros. Love and ones and zeroes and obsessions and death and the poems of Dickinson you spoke about. Your eyes tired and lips dry," said Saba.

"Two decades ago, the night before you married Raza, the night I left for France", said Ram looking at her.

"Two decades Saba and we never spoke, two decades and not even a simple postcard?", Ram asked her, and she smiled. Her smile terrified him. The strangeness in her hazel eyes seemed like a ghost smirking from the beyond. And the forced smile on her sunken face seemed like a haunting personification of a nasty curse.

A curse that had woken up after sleeping for two decades.

A curse which smirked through Saba—was Saba.

Everything she said seemed practised. Everything she said sounded like a sad poem. Written and edited a hundred times before the final draft. A poem that had waited decades to finally find its way to the only person it was composed for. Ram. She sounded no more like Mrs. Raza. She sounded like Saba, his Saba. A wildness who loved poetry and said what she felt. A girl who would smoke his half-burnt cigar and walk the footpaths of Banaras with his hands in hers.

"I was always a zero in your binary idea of love. A definite iota in your infinite life", she said. "Not a one, a zero. Not an obsession, a friend. Not a song, a poem—without rhymes and music. Two decades, Ram. I have loved and lived and carried on. But a part of me remains haunted by you—plagued by a tumour made of you. You ask about two decades and why I did not send a simple postcard— a simple postcard, you say? A simple postcard would have spread the tumour all over, and a simple postcard would have revived the love I had so painfully killed. A simple postcard would have made me fall again, and a simple postcard, Ram, never would have come remotely close to making you fall."

"So tell me about her", Saba said, sounding as sober as she could. Her voice showed no signs of having had a breakdown a few seconds before. Her face showed no signs of a quarter of a bottle of whiskey.

"Adele?"

"Yes, Adele. Adele," she said.

She continued, in a 13-year-old girl’s voice, "Your strongest muse! She must be magic! Tell me everything about her. Tell me, please tell me you have brought her to Banaras with you."

"She is no more. She passed away two years ago”, Ram answered after a minute. His voice always cracked whenever he talked about Adele, but today it hadn't. For the first time in two years, he seemed to accept the reality. Saba had made him accept the undeniable ugly truth of death.

 She had done it again.

 She had made him feel again.

 She had made him feel even death.

 Even death, but not love. Everything, but love.

Nobody said anything after that. A familiar silence filled the air. A familiar comforting silence they both recognised from their past. A silence where they no longer needed words to understand one another.

 A silence where Ram and Saba were no longer Mr Adele and Mrs Raza.

 A silence where Ram and Saba were merely Ram and Saba.

The silence lasted for the rest of the night. Ram on the swing, Saba on her chair, they spent the night looking at the sky.

Half-awake, half-drunk. Half-alive, half-dead.

"I will tell the driver to drop you at your hotel", Saba said getting up from her chair.

"Okay", Ram said.

"Jupiter and Venus", Saba said loudly as Ram walked towards the gate.

"Hmm?", he turned back and looked at her.

"Jupiter and Venus", she said, pointing at two sparkling things in the sky. “To our eyes, They look so close to one another. But, they are separated by millions of miles." Her eyes sparkled like the stars she was pointing at.

"Are they?", Ram said, closing the gate.

Everything. But love?

Ram returned to France the following week.

Mathilde was working late, and it was around 2 am. She saw a dim yellow strip of light peeking out of her father's door. She went closer to the door, intending to open it, and heard something she had not heard in two years—the clicking and clacking of typewriter keys. She remembered how much it used to annoy her. But that night, hearing that sound gave her a feeling of relief. She had heard the rattle of keys for the first time after her mother. Her father was writing again.

"Mathilde? Haven't you slept?". Ram saw her standing outside his door. She went inside, pulled the page from the typewriter, and read aloud:

Jupiter and Venus. How unjust their fates. To our eyes, they appear so close, so intimate—about to kiss each other. But in reality, they are separated by millions of miles. Will they ever meet? Will they ever read the poems they wrote for each other? And will they sing the virgin songs they composed for nobody else except one another? Will they ever consummate their eternal affair, or will the universe have to explode, destroying everything, for those two to unite?