Ode to Old Loves

I wandered as lonely as a cloud…

The other day. Yesterday. Many moons ago. Everyday.

Weightless, fluffy—yet, anchored down by gravity.

In my meditation, I use a brilliant visualization technique for grounding—I imagine myself tethered to the earth with light cords. I always end up visualizing myself as floating in space on my chair, bobbing like another Little Prince, linked to a small earth.

I wonder whether I see the earth below my feet as small. Barely enough to stand on. Do all of us come with some earth apportioned to us? A little piece of land to put roots into? Or are our connections as imperceptible as light cords?

I wander a lot. Aimless and restless, over hills, valleys, forests and city-scapes. Or purposeful and sure footed—getting somewhere, doing something—carrying life, rainbows and messages for banished Yakshas.

I meet other clouds and I slide by them, rubbing shoulders sometimes, rumbling and thundering, or quietly, forming hares and dogs.

Wandering. Alone. Lonely…

And I meet you every now and then. Wandering like me, no doubt. Moving, driven by invisible tailwinds of your life.

We meet for a while on some temperate latitudes and sail together for a while. For those perfect days/hours/moments, where the skies are pink, sun is bright, valleys are green and water is white. We connect and create magic.

Then wild elephants of fate and fears drag us away. Are we willing riders? Was life meant to be a string of humdrum events interspersed rarely by bejeweled moments? Are zealous Gods measuring out enchantment in teaspoons?

We play hide and seek. Wrong time, wrong place, right moment…

Remember the time I wrote you a letter in response to a matrimonial ad you had put up on the Economic Times?

I was 19, in some Germaine Greer-esque fugue and was suffocating in Madurai. From your letter, it seemed like you were a world-weary advertisement professional, sensitive and despairing of finding your romantic ideal.

I wrote to you as a lark—an expression of my new found MBA empowerment and a thumbing of the nose to the ridiculous small town social restrictions. You responded with romance and intensity.

Frankly, your response scared me. It seemed too grown up, too big city, and too alien. I simply never wrote back.

But a sticker you pasted on the letter stayed with me for a long time—a little cob of maize and the words “You amaize me.” It stood in good stead during some very dark moments of my life later on.

Universe is clearly a failed comedian, with all its messed up timing. And when the timing gets right, then the moments fail.

Remember that cycle ride we took around that idyllic lake on a small hill on a rainy, cold day? Remember that day?

Eucalyptus scent in the air, rolling mist on the lake’s surface, glittering rain drop pearls on the cold cycle bars, that ridiculously small and rickety cycle on which we were going doubles, and that solitude for most of the 7 km ride, except for the occasional mocking of friends who sped past us.

Balancing on the cycle, balancing our tender hearts, and balancing our milieu. We eventually lost our balance, of course. I was perhaps obnoxious; you were perhaps immature. Our wild elephants were inescapable.

We marched on, in step with other clouds, catching up with the Cumulonimbuses. Tender hearts are cheap—mainstream milestones are precious. Where do the romantics go to die?

I sometimes wander into wrong territories, chasing moments.

Remember that time when someone else, not you, took me to my first Chinese restaurant?

Remember that waiter who, obviously gunning for an extra tip, used a tissue paper to dim an already dim overhead light?

The food was great, the mood was right, the time was perfect—where were you? All I am left with are his hurt eyes that come back to haunt me even now.

Where is that paradise where desires and hearts meet and live in eternal bliss? That surely must be the place where honor and compassion govern the actions of men and mice.

Remember those little flower arrangements I used to make for you from the flowers picked from the neighboring gardens? Remember that article on anger management you gave to me? Remember the time I hero-worshipped you?

I remember a time when you completely betrayed my trust and threw me out on the streets. I remember it was the time when you also added insult to the injury by saying, “Forget all this—get married and settle down.”

Misogyny, meet the cunt.

Thank God I’m a cloud and I don’t get weighed down.

Then I met you, the poet. Remember the time you told me, in a restaurant in Ballard Estate that no longer exists, while I was in raptures over the sizzling brownie: “This reminds me of a T-shirt line I once saw: It takes chocolate made from a bean grown in a tropical island 30,000 miles away, picked, dried, transported by ships, powdered, processed and packed, for Jane to have an orgasm. While I’m right across the table”?

When riddles replace frank talk, when clever yet ambiguous innuendos fill the space of relationships, only satire can result from it.

Were we scared to talk our minds? We definitely let our fragile egos interfere.

You called it an unequal music. I guess you were right. Storms blew us apart causing a lot of damage in their wake.

I was a desolate cloud who had lost her way when I met you again: Remember the time we got lost in another small hill? Remember how we argued over dry culverts and brown roots?

Remember the time we watched an owl on the tree at 2:00 a.m.? Remember when I asked you, “Do I talk too much?” you replied, “No, I talk less”?

Stupid clouds, raining on a slope! We caused many monsoon waterfalls that went nowhere and dried right after the rains were over.

I tried wandering away, you know. I went the farthest that I could, the alonest I could get and lostest I could manage.

What arid years! What a series of strange life experiences in nameless, faceless towns and cities!

I walked alone and with strangers for almost a decade before I got on to the road that leads to home. I keep meeting you—on trains, in the jungles, and in cities. We meet and we slide.

I guess this the way of us clouds.

I sometimes wonder, if in an alternate universe, one can hang up one’s cloudy boots in exchange for a more solid existence.

I wonder whether I would meet you there.

“Do I know you?” you might ask.

“Over many lives,” I might say.

“Shall we walk?” you might ask.

“As far as we can see,” I might say.

We might make perfect sense to each other; we might catch our moments in perfect unison; and we might walk in perfect harmony.

There may be music, poetry and future. Or just a more harmonious, magical present.