It was the last day of high school. There we were - on the stepping stone to manhood, with a tear in each eye, one foot firmly planted in the future contemplating the glories that could be ours and the means to get there, the other steeped knee-deep in reminiscences that - naah! We just grabbed a seat on the nearest car/bike that chanced to pass by and got the hell out of there! The cliffs of __, therein lay our destination. It was to be a party. All day, all night - boys, girls, and an ocean of hormones and beer - it was our tribute to life the only way we knew how.
It took around two hours to get to there. I'd hitch-hiked off the back of a bike ridden by a vicious young shemale who reeked strongly of meat gone bad - who'd hit the brakes at the very last second with the front wheel poised tantalizingly between my legs leaving me with no other option but to hop on. I do not remember much of the journey - was too drunk to - except that we rode very fast and at one point I'd had to hang on to her leather jacket by the teeth to keep myself from falling off.
Once we got there (it was a solitary, small two-storied house that we'd rented for the day with one large living room comprising the entire ground floor), I immediately hit the bathroom upstairs where I retched up every single thing I'd eaten ever since the day I was born. It took me an entire half hour to get off my knees and onto my feet, flush the little toilet, adjust my glasses - without which I was blind as a bat, and assure myself that I was leak-proof for the present and would not make a mess of myself before company downstairs.
By dint of grabbing on to the rails, I somehow stumbled my way down the staircase. Some rock anthem that was quite unreasonably the rage of the season in those days played about a hundred decibels too loud. A tangled mass of bodies moved in unison with every beat like unfinished Michelangelo sculptures - trying to break free of the rock that contained them. Finding a couch handy near the window, I promptly threw myself upon it face down, and closing my eyes, fell in a deep slumber.
I must have slept for the greater part of three hours. I opened my eyes to more mellowed beats and glassy-eyed, half-awake teenagers. Thanks to the fact that I'd gotten most of the alcohol out my system prior to falling asleep I could open my eyes quite easily and didn't have even a hint of hangover. There were all kinds of people around - people from my class that I knew quite intimately, people from other classes such as the arts class I'd never laid my eyes on. There were people in a state of stupor lying spread eagled on the floor, people dancing like in the Toulouse-Lautrec posters, couples in corners making very, very exclusive kinda conversation that could not be heard outside their realm, and the teetotaler geeks - doing, well - geeky stuff. In short, there was no one in the entire room that I could talk to. I fumbled in my jeans pockets for a cigarette and finding a pack, took one out and lighted it, following which I slipped out the door into the silence of the night.
Outside, amid sounds of the raging sea, the night sky shone like a many splendored thing. As I stood there hugging myself from the chill, I realized that the sky we get to see at home isn’t quite the real deal. With the light pollution not being present to play spoilsport, the stars had a keenness to them that was simply marvelous to behold. You could even make out a faint outline of the milky-way running across the middle of the sky like the backbone of some enormous ancient whale, holding everything together. In the moonlight, the trees looked surreal, contorting themselves in the most grotesque forms from an agony we were all too young to fathom.
“I like that yellow star just above our head the best.” The suddenness of the voice behind me had the effect of making me jump out of my skin. She wore a denim jacket with these enormous brass buttons, leather shorts that revealed a stingingly beautiful pair of slender, ivory legs, and white tennis shoes. In age, she might have been a seventeen who seemed twenty at best but might easily have passed for fourteen. This was no Venus de Milo of the voluptuous curves, but smaller – about five-five to be more precise, with a stick-insect figure styled in the manner of the friezes on the pantheon walls – flat and yet most exquisitely contoured, if you know what I mean. I realized that I’d never laid my eyes on her before.
“In the first place, that’s not a star; it’s a planet – Jupiter, really.” The moment I said that, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. She turned to look at me full in the face, chin jutting out slightly. She had dark eyes that glistened eerily in the moonlight, a small, straight nose, and very full lips.
“Gimme a cigarette”, she said, and before I could dive into my own pocket, she roughly pushed past my hand and fished out the whole pack, plus the lighter, startling me considerably. She extracted one cigarette using only her lips, and keeping the cigarette there, proceeded to light it cupping the top of the lighter using her right hand thereby shielding the flame from the wind, and yet not looking at me once during the whole performance.
“You know what your problem is?” she continued, staring back at me. She was holding the cigarette lightly between her forefinger and her middle finger, smoking in small and exclusively oral drags. “You’re too goddamn scientific for your own good. You have to break everything down into these neat little packets - one that contains stars, one for the planets, another for asteroids, and yet another for comets and stuff. You have to have a bunch of dead people telling you stuff through books for you to know whether a thing is beautiful or not. You have no spontaneity. All you’re left with is a handful of packets and a head full of shit.”
Then, after a brief pause – “Here, let me help you.” And, saying this, she took off my glasses before I could protest. As a recap, let me tell you that I’m very, very shortsighted without my glasses. All of a sudden, the world around me became a blur, and all that remained were the tiny pinpoints of light above me, the city lights in the distance, and those coming from the windows of the house.
“Hey, its stars everywhere!” I said.
“Atta boy, way to go! My, you’re catching up fast”, she shouted enthusiastically, exactly like the nursery governess who, after a long struggle had finally got her charge toilet trained, and was viewing the results for the first time. “Here – let me give these back to you. I don’t want you to go bumping into things after all.”
Having regained my eyesight, I decided to make a fresh start of it. At that time, I was single and she was wholly beautiful. Did I need a reason? “So you are - ?”
“Shh, no names!” she said in a whisper and put a finger gently on my lips. She did this with such earnestness that I could not help but smile. She too smiled a little, trifle nervously though.
“So, you’re in science class, huh?”
“Yeah”, I said. She nodded, signifying that she’d known it all along.
“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I actually love science. The quest for knowledge, it is the only other thing you could die for.” I dared not ask her what the first was. “So, in all the science that you learnt, which part did you like best?”
“Mm, well, the special theory of relativity, I guess.” Which was true, really. I’d studied it from pure fascination, all by myself, long before I’d been taught the mathematics needed to fully decrypt it. And once they did teach me, the theory rose not a little in my estimation.
“Tell me about it.” And, so I did. Had anyone else asked me under different circumstances, I would not have bothered. Most people, when they ask you for something like that, do it only to poke fun at you or call you a bore behind your back. But here was a girl you could even read out the telephone directory to and feel ecstatic about it. Back in those days, I was considered to be pretty good at stuff like these by one and all, and as I’d never had a sincere audience before, the words came out all by themselves. She had this way of getting your thoughts before they took off from your lips. There we were, strolling in the moonlight under the trees in a tiny world completely ignored by the passage of time, speaking of things we neither of us fully understood.
About an hour later, when I’d finished, we were both silent for a while, not daring to look into each others’ faces. As an afterthought I added, “You know the best part? This entire theory is not about learning; it’s mostly about forgetting things that you’ve learnt so many times over all your life that you take them for granted. Like, if I say the sky is blue, it has to be blue for you as well. But for all I know, you could be living on Mars where skies are orange mostly, or on Venus, where they’re yellow. So, if you tell me that the sky is purple, I tell you that you’re a freak, or colourblind at best, for I have gotten so used to a blue sky I could not conceive of any other. But maybe, you’re from another planet, or maybe in your language the word purple means exactly what blue means to me. So here we are, two normal people, each equally correct in his or her own way - yet so different, and probably loving it as well.”
The piercing cry of a nightjar. That scared the wits out of us. “I’m scared”, she said simply, her eyes as big as billiard balls.
“Yeah, me too.”
“Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.” And holding each other by the hand, we pitched forward blindly towards nowhere in particular; stumbling, falling, getting hurt and yet not daring to look back, her hand slightly moist, but warm and comfortable all the same. We finally stopped in a little clearing by the edge of the cliff, out of breath and panting angrily into each others’ faces. At last, she threw her head back and stretched out on the rocks. She undid her shoelaces and jerked her feet with the effect of sending her shoes flying through the air.
“Hey, you gotta take off your shoes as well.”
“No way”, I said. “There might be bugs around.”
“Don’t worry, they’re no more eager to bite on your stinky feet than you are to bite on theirs. Come on, be yourself for a change, without giving a damn about what happens next.” And saying this, she roughly wrenched my shoes off, not bothering to undo the laces or anything. She had this way of taking whatever she wanted without bothering to ask - not in a bullying way, but quite naturally, as if the whole world was one big extension of her body. And, it felt surprisingly peaceful to sit there on the rocks with the wind blowing in between your toes.
Lighting a pair of cigarettes, she handed one to me. “Hey, we need to make a fire”, she said. “Help me gather some wood.” We scourged the landscape picking up twigs and dry leaves, occasionally bumping our heads together going for the same fallen stick all at once and laughing like crazy. Twenty minutes or so later, we were back with our booty. With our back to the wind thereby effectively forming a screen we, after a painful struggle, did manage to set it ablaze. There we sat - not side by side, but on either side of the fire, devouring each other with our eyes; watching our forms shimmer in the firelight and the world around us blur, swaying in rhythm to our breath, our naked feet occasionally touching. Her eyes lit up the night, glowing like a cat’s and she had this odd, animal smile to her lips. Time, language, age, sex, culture, race – everything seemed to dissolve in the flames. We spoke very little, and whenever we did, it seemed to end in wild laughter that oddly contrasted with the silence around us.
At last, the fire died down. She rose, trifle wearily, and we walked all the way to the very edge of the cliff. She looked down at the sea some fifty feet below us. “It will soon be dawn, and all of this will be over. It’s a pity you cannot take it all home with you”, she said. “Look at those waves glistening in the moonlight. They look awfully nice. Know why them waves destroy themselves on those rocks like that?” I said I didn’t know.
“It’s because they’re too beautiful to live forever. If you didn’t stop them, they’d grow on you till they’re so big and so beautiful, the world will no longer be big enough to contain them.” I too watched and waited for it to set in.
“You’re beautiful, too”, she continued. I did not know what to say to this, so I merely muttered something to the effect that so was she. “I know”, she said simply, and not with a hint of pride. It was as if I’d read out some empirical fact straight from the encyclopedia. “We too are like the waves down below. We go about our business, seeing all kinds of stuff, and then we hit this dead end. Whenever things look too good to be true, you have to get out before they grow on you and smother you. It’s not within our rights to be quite that happy as long as we’re a part of this world.” She brushed the back of her hand against my cheek and let it fall gently on the lapel of my jacket. She let it rest there for quite a while, as if undecided what to do next.
All of a sudden, she ordered me to close my eyes. I turned round to face her. I was standing with my back to the sea, my feet precariously poised on the edge of the cliff. She was there right opposite me, looking directly into my eyes. I did as I was told. She kissed me once, not on the lips or anything, but on the forehead – right between the eyes. It wasn’t exactly a shove; more of a tender caress on the left side of my chest, and I had a weird sensation of weightlessness as the ground slipped away from beneath my feet.
*************************************************************
I am forty now. I live in a tiny apartment all by myself. I keep changing lanes, not staying on the same job for more than two or three months at a stretch. In the past one year, I have been a freelance writer, a math teacher, and a graphics artist doing advertisement banners. I look much older than my age in years and smoke far more than what’s good for me. A strange weariness follows me wherever I go. Perhaps the happiest time of the day for me is just prior to falling asleep at night, when I take advantage of the quietness to slip out of the present and take a walk in the past.
I still go to visit her sometimes. She talks to me from the other side of the glass over a telephone in that maximum security prison about books she’d read, thoughts she’d had, etc. Sometimes she is content just to listen, smiling all the while, especially when she’s too high on the medication they keep pumping into her all day long. She doesn't seem to have aged a day since I first saw her. But no matter what we do, it invariably ends in her darting off her chair and lunging forward at me, trying to rip me apart, and then the prison security coming in and dragging her bodily away.
It had taken me over a year to recover from the fall I’d suffered that night towards the end of high school from the edge of that cliff. In fact, had it not been for this rock jutting out from the vertical walls that caught me in mid air, I’d have been a goner just like the others. I spent the next six months or so entirely in bed, with my neck in traction, my left leg suspended from the ceiling above. There were three major fractures and four hairlines. Plus, some hemorrhaging of the head. When they’d finally caught her, she was convicted of 11 cases of homicide and a twelfth attempted murder. She never denied the charges pressed against her and the trial had been a nominal affair. Mental derangement had saved her from the gallows and since then she’d lived in solitary confinement in that same prison cell, with no hopes of ever seeing the sunlight again or walking barefooted by the sea.
Oh, but don’t you know, I’d die for you gladly – I swear I would, if they’d only let me live.
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