1
Stumbling across an old cardboard box in a musty attic of her late mother’s house, Tanisha found a book with a big space in between its pages. The flow of sensations she experienced was discontinuous and random.
The word ‘random’ is borrowed from the old French ‘randir,’ which means: to run fast, at a great speed, and in an impetuous headlong rush. Tanisha felt this randomness as an unexpected tint of a leathery smell galloped through her olfactory chamber, and the pale white inscribed cover slid out from the book. The change was so unrelated for her that she got trapped for a second in a discontinuous continuity of the flow. She stayed stationary, facing her ignorant younger self. The Inscription was read as: “Ex libris Aakash.”
Initially, the written words were not so clear. They were standing up between her mature age of twenty-nine and the ripening age of nineteen. She tried to map this randomness to her fleeting ignorance. But it was the gushing pain after all that emerged from the inward tussle between the two forces that pushed her memories into the present, giving a start to her confused meaning of things she was timorously holding. Then she remembered. These were all love letters written by the person who was as timorous as her fingers grasping them right now. But why were they in the attic of her late mother’s house, almost concealed among the motley items? And did she manage to recollect everything associated with these letters? The whirlpool of questions was indistinct in her head, like a jumbled string of balls. Instinctively, she tore the cover and leafed through the pinned papers, which were still intact. She began to read a few highlighted sections:
“Dear Tanisha,
I am writing a story. But the weight of the things! I am at a punctuation and do not know how to let it go. The male protagonist finds himself in the trepidation of love with his counterpart, whom he had conversed with only once. And when he expressed his feelings to her, she immediately declined his offer, an offer about just knowing her more! From then on, it has been a cold, dormant tension that clearly has not been resolved. He is at a stoppage, bashing his idiocy of directness and meta-honesty. What do you think—are there any glinting signs left for the story to move forward?”
She continued reading some other random sections:
“…I want to see and feel everything about you: your bitterness, vulnerability, confidence, violence, sadness, tears of liquid gold, movement of your eyes, melancholy face, tender breasts, delicate limbs and its flesh soaking in my mouth, your lips, and everything what is inside and outside and all in between of you; the list is endless. However, compared with the human lifespan, it will eventually fall short. And a preposterous doubt starts to withhold me: Will I be able to hold your hands till the very end of my last breath? The anticipation of my unpreparedness is unbearable for my confidence, and fear soon emerges out of its shadows. I do not deserve you in the face of infinity, and my definite love for you gets slashed by such an imaginary anticipation of indefiniteness. Such discovery is unbearable, for distaste starts to percolate in the vessel of love. How I admonish myself there on! I cannot bear myself. I Hate Myself, Tanisha, I hate myself…”
As she was reading the passage, the discontinuous medium had already mixed into her past, and she was floating in the continuous continuity, the slowness of time that was bounded by her past interconnectedness. Randomness was converted into continuous continuity, and the meaning of the entirety was imbued in the overall flow of things. Her dizzying eyes now saw the golden light coming through the dormer, striking the papers and leaving the darkness where the way to her past lay: the stairs. On her fours, she carefully crawled the way down and made a few arrangements.
“Already?”
“No, I mean yes, Papa! I will be out for a week; please take your medications on time, I called Ajay, and he will be here by tomorrow morning.”
“Work?”
“Yes, Papa.” She kissed his wrinkled forehead with her soft, affectionate lips.
“At least wait for your brother. How long it has been since you have met him!”
“I am not going anywhere; I will be returning soon.” She clasped his hands and looked at his innocent eyes tenderly. She firmly gripped the luggage bag, and off she drove to her callings, to the unknown. She did not know when and where she was about to go. All she had with her was her car, a bag, and a few burning questions about Aakash.
Honestly, this behavior is baffling even to me. Why would Tanisha decide all of a sudden to meet Aakash, whose whereabouts she did not even know? Maybe I can garner a few speculations, one being that, although she did not know where precisely she was heading, the few passages of letters stimulated her to ingrain herself inside the field of continuous continuity (the nature of the field is predicated on the questions of the past, an investigation). But this reasoning will not satisfy either of us. Currently, we must leave it as an open-ended question where the answer is potentially subdued in her memories, and only by investigating her past would we know the actual answer.
Of course, by now, she remembered exactly what Aakash had been going through. He had an idea that intoxicated him and blinded his eyes to only able to see a few things about her, and the rest of her parts were all inundated as a periphery of his vision. The one thing he saw very clearly, as he mentions in the love letters, was the movement of her eyes. But he saw something even more profound: Her sadness. When he first met her, he instantly noticed her sadness glittering in her eyes at the backdrop of her smile and laughter. And soon, he realized he was trapped in the movement of love. So, how did the correlation between love and sadness create in his head? How did he begin to see the potential love with her sadness? This association could only germinate, as he thought, from his own individuality, from his own symbolic love potions of ideas, and since the relation was between two things, it also gave him the frailty of the association, like the distorting stillness of birds when they flutter their wings. The sadness in her eyes also fluttered here and there, distorting the clear image of love he anticipated. Her sadness was the affirmation of his love. However, the fluttering of her sadness disappeared into the jovial sky. He could not bear the unsafeness of exposing himself with the perturbation of his image of love and chose to put the matter once and for all in the poetic bin so that next time when he would see her, at least the traces of a few remembrances of his past life would become the marker of his movement in time. That he went past the matter even after not forgetting her. The distaste he expressed in earlier sections of his letters turned into some sort of resilience.
With everything crystal clear in her head, Tanisha continued to drive the car. Still, we do not know why she was moving. Or do we?