Wildlings

In his world: 

       I already sensed that my patience would wear off one day or another. And he stroked my visible embers, which ignited the buried ones longing for an outlet. He cussed at me, and I heard it as he desired, though I was standing in front of my hostel room, opposite his, at least twenty feet between us. It shattered my convene with her on the mobile. Asking her to wait, I safeguarded the mobile in my pocket and raced towards him. 

I was aware of Siva's problem with me, with my renewed relationship with Bhagavathi, but I asked him anyway. He started mouthing the accusations around cussing, which I tried to rationalize. In no time, we clenched our fists and teeth. I had tried to recall the brawl. Who unleashed the first blow, and at which point of confrontation? I cannot remember that, or we both preyed on each other at the exact moment. Our faces remained free from our angst while the ribs and chest took all the blows. 

Very few audiences were on our floor, who belonged to other classes and were not a friend of either. They stood still, watching us because they were distant or just liked it. That must have relieved them a part of their suppressed anger if they had embodied themselves in one of us as the other got hit. 

And we stopped, disregarding our want for it as neither of us had conceded nor had seen the other bleed yet. His collapsed dhoti at his feet pulled the strings to stop our fists. Gathering it, he clumsily covered him and slid into his room beside us. He had it draped in a moment and followed the provocations from the room accompanying the clutter as he rummaged for an alternative to his fist and took a plate. Having found mine in the sharp edges of the slabs in his room, I stepped inside only to be parted by our friends who had arrived on the spur of the moment. 

As I went to my room, reminded of my mobile, I took it to see her name, and below it was the added time of the brawl while she heard those cuss words, blows, and proclamations. After an apology, I told her the happenings of which she just inquired whether I had any bruises. No blood, but there was this pain in my ribs. And as she caressed it with her words, we fell into the trance of a nasty, wild intimacy. 

Blinding lights and the worrying intonations made me sit up from my slumber. Through the window, I saw the dawn peeled layers of darkness. As I tried to shrug off my sleep, my roommate - a close friend of Siva, sitting on my cot wide awake, said in a hollow voice that he met with an accident on the way to his hometown. Before I strained my eyes, he told me he was in a critical state. 

How do you tell your woman that the guy she once loved is dying? Along with the beams of the early sun came his death and my resolve to inform her about it. All it elicited in her was a curiosity surrounding the ways of a stranger’s death. Though I revealed it without any caution, her probing was so calm. Her indifference to his death gratified and liberated me from the distress of consoling her. And even I was delighted by the unforeseen, looming meeting with her as everyone from our class had already planned to visit his hometown and pay their condolences. 

Weeping and the shed of demise guided our friends to his home. At the centre of it stood a morgue freezer. Inside it, clad in a golden jari dhoti, he lay calm and pale, drained of blood. While I touched his chest as a mourning ritual, his grandmother, with a plate in one hand and a rolled-up ball of rice, in the other, asked him to eat it. She turned and asked me to eat it at least. I choked from a sense of my Adam's apple enlarging to the size of that rice ball. 

Her maddening fragrances, imbibed with the sweat, expelled the pungency of the dead from my mind. Or I thought so. I pushed her to the edge of the window seat as I tightened myself to her, and we appeared conjoined. Sunlight and the shadows danced on our held hands as the bus steered off the bumpy path to her hometown. 

"Are you okay?" I closed my other hand on her knuckle. 

“Yes! But why are you asking me this again? I do feel bad for his parents and nothing more,” she uttered, with precision as of teaching those words, staring into my eyes. 

“And, why not for him? Even I could not get this off my mind. You loved him not so long ago." 

“I did, but not after I came back to you. What do you expect of me?” 

Her indifference nauseated me, as well as the gratification I had from it before. 

In her world: 

    I let go of my conscience when I started seeing Siva while I was already in a relationship with Paandi. One could love either impulsively or with their conscience. I served my impulse of loving them both. And I left Paandi to be with Siva not because I loved him more but because of my inability to confront my desire. 

A few months went by before I came back. Though my integrity was soiled, I did not betray my impulse and conscience. This time I knew I loved Paandi more and it felt right to me. And he did not turn me down because he knows what it takes to resist what you desire. I had seen that in him while we were in the canteen and behind our table sat Sarah, the woman he just likes as he says. I saw him tremble just hearing her name. He wants to turn back, look at her, maybe sit close, talk with her, and hold her hands if she permits. But he fights his urge and wins over it. I cannot because I would do whatever he resisted. Though we might act differently, what is seething inside us is all the same and makes us even closer. Not that I want to justify my unstable mind and the actions stemmed from it but sometimes you won’t be able to do anything apart from what you shouldn’t be doing. 

Just from the vigour they spoke, which I heard through that long call, I saw how violently they would have fought. For one loves me, and the other hates me. Civilized, educated, everything merely to fight like savages and mouth such hostile words. His body had turned red by the blows. He smiled while he showed it to me. 

I beheld the trace of his violence, which was there even after that fight, as we devoured each other through words. I see him unbridled, not fighting anything in his head, only during such moments. Else it is all about conscience, asking me countless times why I did not grieve over a death of a man whom he fought with the day before and whom I had no feelings for since I left him. Always ruminating about one or another. Once, he accidentally saw a picture of Siva while I was showing him the junkie-collectibles in my purse. And I never knew that I had it till that moment. Frenzied, he rammed my head with questions, “Do you still love him? Do you still love him? Just tell the truth, whatever, and go away from me!” until I threw that photo away.  

And then he let go of my hand on the bus on our way back from Siva’s home because I was unmoved by his demise. 

I get that. You visit his home, beaten down by the emotions of looking at him dead and their family, and you start feeling guilty. But how does he expect the same from me? I cannot act what I don’t feel. You love and grieve over somebody, or you do not. There is no middle ground where you could go either way. At least for me, there is none. It irked me initially that I didn’t grieve Siva’s demise as much as I thought I would but that’s how I really felt. 

He had asked me to wear the red shalwar. We had this custom of wearing our favourite dress of the other whenever we met outside college. On the bus, he never said anything about it and even threw my hands from his hold when I said, “I did, but not after I came back to you. What do you expect of me?” 

“Nothing! You can feel however or whatever you want to. I was just curious.” 

“Then, why did you let go of my hand? For nothing?” 

“I just felt like.” 

“Would you feel the same if he is alive and I do not care about him? Won’t you hold it tighter, then?” 

“I never asked you to stop caring about him or anyone.” 

“Then, do not say you are not upset with me not grieving him. What is all this about?” 

“You loved him and left me to be with him. When he has a fatal death, you sit happily with me. Is this your idea of love? And what will happen if we fall apart, and I die? Will you be like this?” 

“If in the current situation, No! I would go worse than ever. But I do not know what will happen as time passes. Not just what we feel about each other now. We can say that nothing would change between us. You know it is a consolation, we tell ourselves.” 

“Then, what’s the purpose of staying together for a while if, in the end, it yields to nothing?” 

“Aren’t we happy now?” 

He was silent till I whimsically asked him why he is sitting in a women’s seat beside a stranger and what’s his name. 

“If you were with your friends, I would have left by now. After I see you reach home, I will leave.” 

I pleaded and pulled him down by his wrist as he stood to move to another seat. And we never talked for the rest of the travel. I never wanted to talk with him after he walked me home from the bus stop and went away, saying nothing. I never did, and neither did he until yesterday. 

On the field, they met: 

      Their excitement took hold of their thoughts as their buses neared the meeting place. A meet after six months from the day Siva died. The day on which they drifted apart from each other. Having reached the spot, Bhagavathi texted him and took a seat. A few minutes passed before he waved and sat opposite her. She was wearing red, him grey, their favourite of each other, but neither had discussed it prior. And that brought smiles to both of their faces. That would not be the case if either or both wore a different one. Their dresses rustled in ecstasy as they prolonged their good time together. 

Holding, NO! squeezing hands, they proclaimed their love for each other. As happy as their ancestors were when they invented fire, they cursed the hotel for chaining their innate tendencies. 

She started with how she deleted all their pictures on a random day and asked him whether he got those. With a stern face, he lied that he had deleted it too, and they erupted in laughter. She talked about her frequently absent father. Of the extended time she spent with her mother and sister during weekends. Of how she would have texted him first if they were in a different class, and she does not get to see him every day. The books she read, the threatening rate at which fascist forces gained momentum in mainstream, a black shirt that she liked at the shop, but short of 200 rupees to buy it for him. 

He talked about the days he stayed in the hostel during the long leave. How puzzled he was seeing his dysfunctional family fight one another in a minute and discuss what they should have for lunch the next. About the umpteen moments, he wanted to turn towards his side in the class and apologize to her. Of the upcoming semester and the need to score high to balance the deficit of internal marks. About a new friend from the college club whose innocence reminded him of his childhood. 

Throughout it, they deeply felt what the other went through while retelling their joy and sorrow or even the mundane. They came out and boarded the bus to her town. Along with them, the sunshine sneaked into the almost empty bus. He asked her whether he could sit in women’s seat. And she pulled him by his shirt collar, thus bursting open a button and a shared chuckle. 

The bus started moving, and their interlocked hands looked like they were praying for something. 

THE END