Memoirs Of Fragrance


He says he and his wife are fine. That she is amazing and is growing happier by the day. That they will plan a baby in a few months after having shared a relationship of precisely one month with this woman, through a marriage arranged by his family. I did not attend the wedding, though vaguely he did invite me. He says he’s happy! Of course, it is beyond my comprehension what happiness might mean to different people. Now, I feel such emptiness in the space between him and me. I can’t even remotely perceive what happiness might mean to a man I once so dearly loved. Probably, still do. But the immortality of that love has sunken to a void, a space none can fill. A space I keep striving to fill, a space that sometimes feels replete, only to realize that there is a pot hole through which everything pervades and vanishes and ceases to be. Enlivening a void yet again.

So, he says he will send me pictures of the wedding. How ignorant he is, of another heart and how sharp the knives he’s polishing. I’m curious. Of course I want to see the pictures, see within them, see beyond them, between them. To identify with the reasons for my absence in them, why was it the logicality of nature to keep me out of those records, those memories? Now of course someone else’s memories.

I knew he wore a black suit that day. My eyes longed to see how he must have looked. His tall slender figure, strong limbs held within a soft skin. How black suits him. The fair translucent glow on his face, a glow of spirituality, the kind they say comes from the fear of god. Probably that’s why my face doesn’t glow, for I love god, not fear him! He has stark sharp features, full lips, a strong protruding nose a very prominent feature of his face, dark thick eyebrows and eyes that whisper impeccable innocence. Clear, honest hazel orbs carrying the innocence of a child who never grew up. He held the gaze of a little boy who fancies his mother as the woman of his life and looks upon her with impenetrable truth. For years he held the same gaze for me. I was his lover, his confidant and his only friend. But I still lost, for I was not his mother.

I wonder how he gazes upon his wife now, with intimate desire? Which we carefully played with on very fragile and delicate chords, or does he view her with the sheer respect of the fact that she was his mother’s choice or then, with a love that sometimes emerges from the sacrifice of your own desires. A self created love, a plastic love, a choice less love, and a love that must exist, as without it there is no scope for a better love.

All those for whom he had sacrificed, he had knowingly burnt my heart to ashes and drowned them into the sea. So that Mother Nature could guard it more preciously than he ever could. Not realizing, that the nature of the endless sea of life is full of storms, winds, miseries, heartbreaks and more heartbreaks. But he was ashore like a cozy nestling in his mother’s boughs, a mother unwilling to bequeath his youth to her son. She’s only ignorant that all those she bears in her arms are not all birds without wings. I wait to see the fate of the woman who tore my love apart. The fate her still younger ones will dawn upon her. She does not hear the flapping of their little wings. They will soar so high one day that her arms will fall short of love to bring them back.

I am still a friend to him. I pretend to be, my only way of self-acceptance attained through self-inflicted torment. Lashing my mind constantly with the aliveness of his presence in my life and yet his absence. His concern for me, like a perpetual reminder to myself that I exist. He says he prays and hopes that I am fine. Fine. So fine that my life lost texture, lost colour. Fine like the still waters of the night, no one knows what breathes beneath them. And he says he prays for me, to that god he fears? He prays but for his own fears. Fear of loss, of known submission to what his heart never willed, fear for the pure finesse he gave to an edge he cut so sharp. The knowledge that it would pierce him, cut him, saw his heart to a million pieces, knowing that his fear would squelch upon his flesh and blood. He prays to lessen his guilt, to cleanse himself off a sin he does not like to think he committed and cannot blame his mother for. He prays, but for his own salvation. His mere mortal human self and this vacuum called love.

Even today that vacuum engulfs me, miles away from my country. By the countryside of a little French town, I build my paradise of escape; and wish to fade into oblivion. Here I study, paint, write, and record a sort of visual journal. A record of some more vacuums. Now I’ve have acquired the art of viewing things from outside the sphere. Though I still retain squeezed fragments of that emptiness that ache, that pain. Still feed its appetite and fester it in my heart. Now as an infrequent visitor to that feebly familiar feeling, I record it on a cold teary wintry night in France. It snows upon my heart, hardens me and freezes me to a realm of time in which I now belong and I must not light candles of memory to thaw my soul.

Miles away from love came freedom. Freedom from a captivity love sometimes creates; soothing with its soft tentacles the prey for love is hunted, perfect for that meal that given time. Like slender fish you slide into its arms till you realize you are dissolving. Your being is becoming one with another like object and you’re loosing your individuality. You’re getting consumed and it’s going to eat you up and eat you out. But you like the taste of pleasure, its warm open arms tempt you as it embraces you and cradles you in. Agreeably you let your self be consumed, too lured to discern your loss. And when your object of desire eludes you and craves another convenient prey, you awaken from your romantic slumber. Awaken to realize that the sea is too cold for survival; the scales of your skin are so smothered by a deluging love that you can barely breathe without it. That you need to evolve into another being, to adapt all over again, to mould, to survive.

So here I am, surviving, now in a different land, in another time zone. The cure for my pain is that it should return and submerge back into the roots it took birth in. That one-day, many light years away I want to watch you awaken to a dawn of realization. The pain you caused, the pain you still breathe in your silent moments, when your mother is no more to shelter you, when your plastic life is over and you open your eyes to a real world with your own saplings ripening under your nose, with a wife you have now come to terms with accepting as your own, but you will still live a void. The void you thrust beneath many hard layers of practicality will one day glow like lava in your being and an aching agony will be the echo of that void. Devoid of my free form, transcendent now in another era, a time you wish you could dwell in but this abode is a labyrinth now unknown to you. I too pray for you. Pray for your moment of eternal awakening in which I will seek justice by denying you forgiveness from a heart that still wanders into yore reliving wounds that still bleed. Not that I hope to see tears in your lovely eyes for I still adore them in ways unknown…

But as someone aptly said “Somehow we forget all too soon the things we think we’ll never forget”


France, Feb 2006.