I must get ready to show up at a rally for the disenfranchised soon, after I hastily respond to the growling need for nutriment – I’ve not missed the sight of my screen for the past six hours after all. Another transgression of the self-imposed limits on cyber-visits before I move, and the discipline is already too weak to resist the temptation to answer a call coming in incognito.
I take the call nonchalantly. The vibes come through so quickly that time loses its essence. My feigning a need to introduction shows through – or so I think — when I catch myself making a few contradictions here and there, all so sly that I hope escape his radars. Once we are done with the customaries, the lightness of which is a disrespect too all the years that have slipped by, an irksome self-questioning haunts me: should I not pretend to be surprised to receive a random call on a week day after so long? “Is it a good time?”, he asks. I glibly go too far to make a convincing case that it’s in fact a perfect time. Perfect time? Yes, perhaps because I had a foretelling dream the night before that I had negligently washed away with my morning shower. Or perhaps because of the recent e-mail the date of which I had chosen to see as meaningful to me but not to the sender. Did he remember half a decade has passed when the 21st of February fell on a Saturday again? His intelligence with numerals is far beyond that, and to me he knew nothing as well as horridly accurate calculations. Mind you, I bear no claim to fidelity to any memories at all, as I myself had to dig deep into past record to confirm the intuitive symbolism of that date.
In response to what I didn’t register when I should have, he tells me about a serious illness of which he thankfully came out safe. My heart is in fact sinking as I am rather dispassionately probing for more information. By now, my super-woman ego has kicked in, bossing me around to sniff for the reason of the call. “You’re remiss in neither reasoning nor extra-sensory communication,” she cries out, “and so this mustn’t be too difficult to unveil, either by extraction or by implication.” As I try to think of proper questions to lead me where I need to go, I have to pinch myself into consciousness to attend to the subject at hand: “When did it happen””, I ask, and once he gives an estimate of a year, as though I were looking for exact dates, I foolishly restate what I have just heard in different temporal increments with an aloof voice wanting sympathy. Genius! How long is it since I’ve lost that agility? But more to the point, have I ever been such a stranger in the land of compassion? True, in the world I inhabited with him, passion was more woods for the fire than compassion. But from disappointment in his capacity to show compassion on that foggy autumn evening when I was at my weakest, to my replicating a persona of his, familiar to our last encounter, was a long leap I was unaware I had taken. Time was short for compunction, but long, almost too long, for a hefty struggle between that super-woman ego and my human incarnation with all its unabashed vulnerability – one in which I, as what I am and not what I ought to be, was fated to concede. I’m after more facts about his illness, how it affected his daily life and work, and if he’s perfectly well now, and I can feel ‘me’ sitting next to me worrying about a fantasized picture I had carried with me on and off, to run into him in a few decades from now, in the most unexpected of places and times, with me sporting long-curly silver locks, when we’ve grown so distant that any conversation would be moot. He’s talking about the suffering of the near past, and I’m obliviously well into my fantasy world of the far future ahead. Had I ever been any farther from my romanticized mix of passion and compassion? He is sharing carnal suffering, and I am thinking how any memoir would suffer without a decade of his history. I hear diagnosis and prognosis, but think copyright and psychoanalysis.
He asks if I’ve already finished what I was doing, and I reticently respond that it’ll be done soon, all the while asking myself what he thought I’ve been doing. I’m thinking, maybe I should ask him just that, but instead hear myself blabbing. Why I’ve not been interested to juice my skills into a professional practice perhaps has always been of a bit of puzzle to him, but my lame effort in explaining away the career choices I have crossed off my list don’t help either. Worse yet is my light touch on what really gets me going – what makes the whole gamble of getting out of bed every morning, so-to-speak, a worthwhile enterprise. I have disappointed, so much that he feels the need to remind me of my once-upon-a-time plans for a more worldly career to straddle the West and the East. I feel uncomfortable with a reminder of the hilly path I’ve chosen to call mine, and become a tad defensive with a semblance of strength. The all-knowing apparition magically wins over, though. He reveals, in a somewhat socially-grounded courteous manner so natural to his fine upbringing, that the ‘what’ and ‘where’ talk is just a means to conversing. The end was to find the lost connection with ‘me’. Find the lost connection? Was it really lost? When and how? Was what could be lost a connection worth finding again? ‘me’? Which version of ‘me’? … The crossword is making me lightheaded. And the yell is meantime getting louder and louder echoing that the time is up and I’m no clearer than I was when I boasted that it was a perfect time to talk as to what he was after. I feel like giving up. It is seriously taxing my fatigued mind and starving body to no end. But the resolute in me is all too proud and scarred deeply enough with the sharp edge of a need to argue my life choices to let it go without some more try.
At this point, for reasons I know not, some quick identity questions pass me by, and before I could catch a glimpse of how to verbalize them, I hear myself instead deny any memories he so enthusiastically recounts. Is it the stubborn nineteen-year old one playing the nostalgic verbal game? That one-time skill is lost beyond redemption, as I now have to really canvass hard to find apt words in my mother-tongue. The shame is so enormous that no punishment of the unforgivably unforgiving super-woman is enough – I feel the shame with or without her. I’m coming very close to just declare-defeat-and-leave-the-ground when the ‘who am I?’ question strikes some cord in my mind. Alas, it’s not landed in any proximity to the verbal cord. So I can’t say it. I can’t say what I have become in the half-decade past. I can’t say that it’s been half a decade of a fast pace to get away from old definitions of attachment, from understanding futile longing as an ineliminable part of affection, from giving undue credit to vagaries in the interpersonal department as indicators of astuteness, from imagining an Eastern female identity as diametrically opposed to a Western one, from putting a mask over desire, a lid over rage, a smiley face over fear and an adult face on the childhood-like joy of some unique moments of life. I can’t say anything about any of those long days and nights training to get the pace up to be where I would be happy to be today. I’ve already given up on serious words, I know that, but I can’t get some silly –well, silly for his taste – imagery right either. Why can’t I just say, look, friend, I came a long way to give up on my super-long defined curls, which I, as well as the world around me, had long perceived as something with which I had identified as my external feminine image, for a short boy cut? I’m dithering. Some more small talks here and there, and I now have to sputter an annoying piece of rather long hair. I softly touch my head with my free hand –where did this long strand come from?! Why can’t I deliver the message that his ego is perhaps waiting to hear, after all this time – that no, no-one managed to set the same fire here, but no-one managed to lose the respect I had for compassionate souls in the course of a few hours on a foggy fall evening either … Or is that what he can’t wait to hear? Perhaps because the men and women who have all made me the woman I am today all – as friends, partners, relatives, acquaintances, strangers, insiders and outsiders, in all different places I have lived and traveled– rose to where they stood, for the time they stood there, as I was old enough to watch them wary of human weakness and all that, whereas with him I was demanding the divine — more than he was ever able to give.
That I cannot say any of that is less an oddity if I let my soul rest in its rightfully fragile incarnation. But if I could ever live up to the super-woman’s expectation is ‘still’ an itching question.
The end is coming, I can feel that, even before the contact exchange gesture, that is, if I wish to have his. I stand no farther than a hand’s stretch from my keyboard, but I can’t punch in the number he gives. I am in denial of his account of my memory, literally and figuratively. Yet there’s no denying the other way around. Is it perhaps because for a half-decade, I’ve shunned calculative suitors and embraced spontaneous lovers all the same with a mental prototype that bears his name? Or could it be that for a half-decade I’ve stayed wide-awake to watch the greedy in me who can hardly resist the high-power brains of his particular type, all the while checking my pulse to make sure it responds to spontaneity and ‘never again’ to calculations in the interpersonals?
We have to hang up. He has a household to return to with youngsters waiting for his attention, I think, and I have a rally to walk to, I’m sure. But instead, before I know, I’m seated at my desk, asking for the rally of words to come rescue ‘me’ from ‘me’.
-The End
