The colour of the sky was an impossible and ostentatious pink; that only artists with more nerve than talent, or children with unfettered prejudice, can paint. The colour of the sand was an uncertain grey that only artists with a timid soul, or children wishing to punish a parent for being forced to paint, would paint.

They walked in silence along the abandoned beach; the two of them: the stocky older man in his mid thirties, with the buck-teeth, and the sardonic expression, and his younger friend with the curly hair and the crazy sense of humour. The fading glow of sunlight on the low-tide water lay like tinsel on the sand. The beach was bare, even of the little crabs, at this hour. The only signs of an uncaring habitation were the tins of cola and empty packets of condoms lying at the edges where the rough grass attempted to encroach upon the sand.

The young man thought of the beach as it was on the previous day: it was warm then, and the water was playfully lapping at their feet, like a little puppy licking a favourite friend’s ankles. She had also been with them at the beach then; her jeans folded up to her knee, her hair tied loosely at the nape of her neck, her shirt open outside the jeans.

Before they realized it, as people do when the walk is more important than the point you are walking towards, they had gone beyond the sandy beach to the rocky stretch where the rough stones had replaced the fine sand.

He had seen her wince as she stepped on one of the rocks with the sharp cutting edges of the shells which were now welded to them. He had said a princess like her should not have to walk on thorns, and had offered to keep placing his hands on the rocks as she walked, so that she could step on the back of his hands, her feet safe from the edges of the encrusted knives, which were the cast away armour of creatures long dead. She had laughed, not sure if he was serious.

But the older man knew. As he also knew that on the young girl’s honeymoon, she and her husband had gone to Goa, and that while she pranced in the water, her husband had walked along the beach, his fine linen trousers carefully folded to keep them from getting dirty. Even today, he had refused to come down to the unkempt and wretched beach, preferring to read inside the air-conditioned hotel room.

She asked the young man to let her begin her ‘walk on water’ as she called it. He had gone down on his knees, begun placing his hands just ahead of her, so she could actually walk on the back of his hands. After a few steps she thought he would give up and ask her to stop; after ten minutes, she wasn’t sure if he was just being melodramatic; after several hundred yards she began pressing down her foot hard, waiting to hear him cry out, or to feel him wince.

He just smiled.

He asked to hold her left foot up for a moment, at one point; only to wipe the sweat running down into his eye. He did not know if she noticed the streaks of crimson on his palms; the older man was the only one who heard the echo of the young man’s pain in her eyes. After a few steps, she stumbled, or pretended to; as she reached down to steady herself, her hands rested on his shoulders, her face just a few inches from his. He could feel her breath on his face, see the swell of her breast where her shirt collar fell open; he did not notice that she took perhaps more time than necessary to recover.

Once again, he felt the constriction around his chest that he had felt at the time.

Very quietly, the older man said to him, “I notice that your aura is very red”. It was not something many people knew, or that the older man told many people about. His ability to ‘see’ auras around people: a blue aura indicated despair or sorrow or melancholy; a green one, peace; an orange or yellow aura expressed the inner joy and brightness a person was feeling. Red was the colour of passion. And of desire.

# # #

Much later, in the evening, the three of them were sitting on the swing-seat set up on the lawns. It was large enough to accommodate them comfortably.  The older man sat with his back against the backrest, his legs swung over one side. The young man was sitting with his back to the armrest on the other side, his legs stretched out on the seat. She lay on the swing seat, with her head against his knee. Occasionally she would ask him to bend down and repeat  something he’d said, unable to hear clearly over the sound of the waves now crashing against the shore as the tide came in.

They had almost forgotten her husband was there, until they heard him call out to her from the balcony overlooking the dark garden. He was silhouetted against the light from the room, and his turning his head in the other direction to call her again suggested that he could not see much of the garden. “I’d better go” she said, but made no move to get up. After a few moments, they heard the husband call out again. The young man knew it would be just moments before he came down to the garden.  He put his hand under her head to help her get up; at that very moment, she reached up and put her arm around his neck to raise herself…or to pull his face down to her open mouth.

Later, he let his tongue taste the salty wetness of her saliva on his lips. 

# # #

“Aah, so you are from the XYZ family…B’s eldest son, aren’t you?! We have known your family for years!” she exclaimed with the intimate familiarity of people in small towns who knows everything about you purely on the basis on local hearsay. “But nowadays all of you have gone away to the big cities…who wants to stay here anymore, no?

“And she…your friend from school, she also got married and went away. And now there is no one from her family left here…in fact I don’t even know if there is any family left.”

It had taken all the patience he could muster to listen to her until she got around to telling him about her. “…,yes, you know, she cried out your name, as she screamed with the pain of labour”, the nurse at the hospital eventually told him conspiratorially, “but I don’t know where they are now”.

He had made no attempt to find out where she had gone since she and her husband had gone to the US after that weekend at the beach. What was the point, he felt. She would never leave her husband for him, she was too conservative in spite of all her stated iconoclasm; and he loved her too much to let marriage kill it. And what was the joy to be sought in maintaining an uncertain relationship by post, a relationship held together by the mere glue of postage stamps?

Until six months ago, when he met his older friend again after years. And the friend had asked just one question, “Why have you never tried to find her? Did you not hear any of the words she spoke to your lips that night? Or have you never tried to understand their meaning?”

He had then begun to try to find her. He had followed rumours across Europe, heard mentions of Singapore in stories his friends recounted of chance encounters with her or her husband at airports, and been betrayed more than once by invalid telephone numbers given by well-meaning friends. And then he had heard that she had returned to the small town where they had grown up, for the delivery of her child. To the town where they had schooled together. He knew there was only one hospital where she could have gone for her delivery.

Now, finally, he had been able to find the nurse who had actually attended the delivery.

“The only one who might know where they have gone is Mrs P. She must have taught both of you, no?” the nurse said, as he thanked her and was leaving.

He followed the trail to Mrs. P’s sepia home. Every object in it as old as herself, and as faded.

‘Yes, she thought one day, you might come back here to ask about her” Mrs. P. said, “although she never told me why she didn’t get in touch with you directly”. He did not believe he owed her an explanation about how he himself had made sure there was no contact, after that weekend.

“She left her note book for you….now, why she would leave it with me, or why she would expect you to come here looking for her I don’t know…but then both of you were so unusual, so unlike all the others. I wonder where I have kept it…” said Mrs. P as she puttered about, rummaged in her bookshelf and her desk. ”Oh dear, someone seems to have torn out some pages…such a bunch, these servants…” her voice trailed off as she handed the bound notebook to him. It was in the familiar handwriting. He turned to the last page before he looked at the first. The last few pages in the notebook had been torn out. The last words which he could read at the end of the remaining pages were:

…I wonder if I will ever see him again? Will he ever hear my unspoken words? Will he understand why he had to come to me? That he had to learn to speak. To not allow the crimson threads to write the lines of his destiny.

That he had to learn that unless you speak, your thoughts remain unreal, impotent, unborn. Is it possible that he will actually come to see Mrs. P some day, and discover where to find me? The rest of what she had written was on a page no longer in the notebook.

He walked away…and aimlessly for a long time.

Late in the evening he was sitting in the public garden when a man selling roasted peanuts came by. He had not realized that he hadn’t eaten all day. He asked the peanut seller to give him a packet. He paid the man, and got up, pouring a few nuts at a time into his hand and munching them. 

In the darkening evening he did not notice that the warm peanuts were packed in a cone made out of a sheet of paper torn out from a notebook. Nor did he notice that the handwritten words on the page were:  Will he find out that my address is ……? Will he get this message? Or will he never come back to this small town at all?

# # #

Neither of them knew that you can go back to any place you want. Except the one you yourself walked away from.

 END

Copyright 2007 Anand Halve
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