THE FELLING
The headlights of my car blinked wildly in the middle of a foggy night and I thought my head couldn’t bear it anymore. The thoughts were quicker than the blood that rushed down my palms and temple. The attempt to patch up things was suicidal. The process to wrap up endless arguments was fatal. And here I was, bleeding from head to toe due to the accidental crash of my car against an advertisement board. I could perfectly make out the smirk on the face of the ad that said, ‘You made me … but I destroyed you.’
Last hour I was happy, drinking away to everyone’s health. I bore every obstacle in my way and paved my eternal fame all these 26 years. I drove every lane that said you can’t drive around here. I made sure the lights of my headlights reach out to every minute object entrapped in a foggy night like this. Yet today I stand as a failure – to all those people who trusted me and to all those pure feelings that completed me. I became the greatest fall of man after the fictitious Adam and his eternally faithful Eve. As I push my hands hard against the gear, trying to pull it off in a reverse …. My burning thoughts become clear, powerful and they come back in a reverse of some inflicted reverie.
I had a wonderful childhood with friends and pests all over, a motherless and a bleak youth and an eternity of pain in my professional days. My dreams would give way to strange versions of my mother’s accidental death until I wake up and go for my college. My days would snap by in the hunt of the truest realization of the recurring dream. And I would take refuge around a stupid friend’s original version of being in pain for lifetime, or by simply eating away roadside munchies every now and then.
Not forgetting, I underwent what scholars of love in today’s age say as bad communication …. Resulting in a historic fallout. Twelve years of juvenile love and the sudden entry of a prodigious woman who took my dreams and broke it against the floor and later showing deceiving eyes of false innocence beneath. Satan allured me to taste the fruit of the forbidden tree when I just thought my girl wasn’t much of a comfort and an advisor to me. The omen bore the signs of a charming girl and allured me everyday to listen to the chirps of a daydreaming mockery of domestic hardships. And the fool in me fell deeper and deeper for the chaos to occur.
Mother told me Jenny wasn’t using me like people often do it to themselves and that she would come to me when the time was right. But me the fool thought it was right for me to steer my own ship since she wasn’t here helping me and already became an angel to the coward we call God. Jenny waited for me but I already had fallen prey to that black widow spider. The teeth of gluttony took me inside along with the other 3-4 guys who went inside in search of salvation but never came out. My eyes were as blinding bold as are the headlights of my car today. And my heart would bleed inside the same way as I am dripping today. But I falsified the pain by thinking who cares, I would heal myself tomorrow. The silence of the night reminded me of the many uncomfortable nights we spent together alone and speaking of nothing but daydreaming mockery of domestic hardships.
Nicole became the true friend who was more than a friend to me and my palms itched when she proudly portrayed her sexual experiences. My only secret pledge to her was that I don’t wanna destroy her image of a true human being before me. I always found her a cozy friend and not a human being carrying a pair of breasts and a hungry vagina beneath. But she took some minutes everyday to destroy me and send me back home demoralized. She made sure that she was the only thing I ever had in those lonely days so that her master – Satan’s aim of felling me was ever made sure.
And then in my 24th year I realized that though Jenny was still there for me to take her but she was more than plaintiff for a self made man like me. I’ve taken chances in the past which fared me well and I wanted to take this last chance of letting her go. Nicole wasn’t the simple friend for me anymore. She did things for me and helped me from drowning and her efforts needed to be paid back. So I took a step ahead and told her exactly what was needed to be told. She held up the telephone, crying out of surprise. That was it….. for some months or so. Jenny was hurt beyond expectation and she felt her friend’s statement on futile long distance relationships was true. I killed two birds in the bush with my indecision.
7 months after that I had a message from one of them. Nicole. She explained to me that she missed her best friend like anything all these months and wanted him back whether in the shape of a friend or a lover. I took 2 months to clean up the mess and brought her back to her true self. I assured her that everything was more than okay to feel this way and that we must trust each other from now on and take the decisions. The month of January was elevating for me, for I was promoted to the post of Regional Creative Director of an ad agency for a shit of an ad that spoke of the first non brass Tupperware in
Last week, when things were going strong Nicole called me up again. ‘Hi. How is life going? Listen I’m really sorry but I have to tell you this. He is back in my life again, and I think God has written him perfectly made for me in his script. You showed me true friendship and you showed me true love and I could learn the two no better from any other person. But he has let go of all his past malpractices and has finally succeeded in becoming the regional head of Judiciary of Karnataka. He has undergone a lot of hardships to achieve his goal and I think I should choose him again, though you may call me a fool. You may call me a deceiver and that I played with you but my life is pretty cheap and I won’t let you ruin your life for me. I’m getting married this Sunday against all odds. I want you to be His man of honor. And just don’t hate me and come over if you still love me. And I still believe you have the power to sweep our fragile love story under the rug. ’
She was saving me? From becoming a part of her upside down life? But I thought we instilled faith in ourselves already to remain faithful no matter whatever comes…. I thought we saved ourselves already.
I thought for the last time maybe she would change her mind … So I caressed my hair and pat my shoulders and went to her marriage ceremony with the aim of crashing it completely. Like revealing her sexual life or something more painful to her father. I knew I had to gamble for my profit and her loss.
But a single look of her smile and her hands hung upon her would be husband and I changed my plans. I went past the drowning crowd and greeted her husband with the best warmth I ever traveled and collected in my life. Saw the bright light in her eyes to see me agreeing to her plans and I couldn’t say anything more than, ‘I lost it’. Everyone else thought this to be a statement representing my clients or my bets on some corporate market scenario.
‘Sir, would you like some French wine and scotch?’
‘Yes. Obviously today,’ was my reply.
I drank to everyone’s health and in the end I was so drunk that I let go of all my pains – my mum, jenny and Nicole after all. The wedding people arranged a cab for me but I reluctantly went in my car in order to enjoy the loneliness of the roads and the night.
That was the time when I met the screeching truck at the middle of a road and I went headlong into one of my advertising banners. The thoughts came back as I sat cold in one December with my body draped in blood.
I won’t die today because that coward above us called God would want me to see the end of my dreams before he would destine my end. Some person will come anytime now to get me out of my car and hand me over to some specialist hospital. But this was almost the perfect end to my life and I so desire to preserve this moment in the memoirs of my puny life.
‘Thou shall not die. Yet thou shall not live.’
Tathagata Ray
12/5/2009 4:57 PM.
.jpg)