Twenty years back, on an unusually rainy evening in March, post the euphoria and madness of Holi at her in-laws’ place in Kolkata, Anupama finally got to see the face of the long-awaited day of her life. Though just six months had passed after she had tied the wedlock with her long-distance e-pal, Aurko, it seemed to her like forever. After months of waiting at her in-laws’ old, cluttered house in the narrow alleys of South Kolkata, an act of putting up with the demands of a conservative middle class Bengali household that had almost made her tear up in ruthless impatience, she was finally granted a spouse visa by the American embassy. She could now fly over, cross the Atlantic, and live with her husband Aurko, the love of her life, in the United States.

Aurko was there for her, loitering with a fancy username in a global chat room as he slowly, surreptitiously floated into her life with messages in her phone and a series of chain emails, which gradually ended up in rendezvous over the phone. Anupama would take deep breaths and close her eyes during her office breaks, during her way back home in the train, trying to see what the memory of love would bring to her. There was a certain hint of decay in every relation she had forged, and at the end of them all, she had walked barefoot over the thorns, alone and lost. Yet, the candle that had prompted her to start living all over again, had flickered fitfully in some hidden nook.She had truly, ardently believed in the words of Lee Montgomery as he had written in a story that in the war of the human heart, there were no rules, no ammunition, no battleground, no leaders, but only lumps in our throats. The lumps, she discovered, had slowly, eventually tempered her; and then, words, pauses, promises and their shelf lives hovered around her until they fell into oblivion.

Anupama had absolutely hated the idea of dating another man in person, yet again. A splash of memories and droplets of rain touched her cheeks as she waded through the crowded subways, the roadside stalls, the luscious gardens and the lakeside of Victoria Memorial, the jumbled images of old friends, lost loves flashing across her mind like a tiresome refrain. She had weathered her share of naiveté, her innocent eagerness of a first date, her shy, hopeful smile and flame of kisses playing on her gently curving lips, the salt of her first tears of betrayal tickling her lips as she bit them in frenzy, the sliver of darkness cracking open through the twilight’s crevices.

“You know, you are an absolute darling as a friend.”

“A ‘friend’?”

“Ok, a girlfriend. I really adore you, and love you the way you are, but I told you from the first I am not yet ready for marriage.”

She cried and pleaded, and then parted ways.

“….I think I am getting attracted to you. So much as to share our desires.” She is pulled in a soaring current of longings, opening herself in layers, like petals, as the night reveals. 

“But we are friends first, remember. And this is no romance. To me, it is a free spirited, no strings attached, mutual liking, I admit, a hard to resist attraction.”

“….You are too good to be true. I really loved you, but I pushed back the moment I realized you were becoming too possessive and expecting too much from me too soon.”

“What do you mean? Did even half of what you had said to me in all these days have an iota of truth?”

“I am sorry, but to tell you the truth, your overt frankness and ingenuity put me off.”

“….You know, I think I found my true soul mate in you. But I am already committed to marrying someone else whom I had met long before, yet I cannot help but feel a deep emotional pull towards you.”

“So you have decided to break up, in spite of how much I have supported you in all these days. Tell me, why did you come in my life, after all? I didn’t ever beg for a man’s companionship in my life, most importantly, one who doesn’t deserve my affection, and my selflessness.”

Different voices cut across her, voices of men she had befriended, men who stumbled on her way as happy accidents turned sour. She drew in a deep breath and remembered them in glimpses as they had walked briefly, hand-in-hand, drowning in a molten pool of their want, until the surrendering was no longer real, no longer cherished. Once and for all, she was about to pull the shutters and bolt them tight, her dark eyes turned away. Aurko breezed through, as her hair became unruly, her face lit up, the nape of her neck tingled, all over again.

“Do you believe in true love? Or in the idea of a soulmate?” Aurko had asked her once, in the midst of the long chat sessions that he would almost always initiate in the weekends.

“I really don’t know if I can answer this. Love is really a mirage, as I have seen it.”

Her befuddled soul had seen the calm after the storm, had known the hollow numbness that had followed her throbbing pain, while she bid adieu to the men she knew, flitting across her memory.

“I have really wanted to settle down with someone who becomes a friend first, and then I would vow to share my passion for her, my life with her”, he had walked on towards her heart, a bit gingerly, unsure of his steps, hoping he was heading towards a direction where their lives would collide, one day soon.

“Let’s not assume I will surrender to the act of loving yet again. We may have to wait for a long time to know if love may boil my blood for one last time”, her voice had quivered under the spell of a doting virtual companionship, a reassurance that there were still impossible, implausible stories in her life’s journey that might play out, hum beautifully.  

“Hey, just called you to tell you I am breathing two hours away from your city. What will be a good time to see you in person today? I will be landing in Dumdum during the afternoon today.” He was calling from a PCO booth inside the Mumbai airport.

She was astonished by the clarity, the sure, unwavering, relentless urgency in his voice which played against the stings of her emotions as she decided to meet him that day. The city was bejeweled crown of torn memories, and in every street, shop or station, her smoky eyes had looked into her drifting shadow trudging in the pursuit of a soulmate, dissolving like a short-lived dream. Where would she meet him in the endless labyrinths of torment that the city streets would lead to?”

“Give me your choices. Near Esplanade metro? Inside Rabindra Sadan? Or, what about Park Street?”

None of the places, which had once engrossed her like a child, had any thin semblance of nostalgia and beauty left for her. They pinched her with further pain, like salt in the wound. He waited for her outside one of the less frequented, new cafes in Salt Lake, which he took enough pains to locate, following her curt directions over the phone. Like two carefree children, they stuffed each other’s mouths with imported chocolates to celebrate their first face-to-face meeting.

He unfailingly waited for hours outside the post office next to her small office building in Ballygunge, and while the two of them walked together all the way to the auto rickshaw stand, an unknowing fragrance hovered around them which had often prompted her to plunge into his arms, hold him tight, never to estrange, but every time she would restrain herself on the verge of exploding. For the two years she had known Aurko before getting married to him, they had only seen each other in person for a brief one month while he was on a vacation in India, after which the insurmountable geographical distance between them became a reality that had consumed both of them entirely. Virtual rendezvous over the phone and on the internet became a daily reality that had kept their sanity.

“Where is all this leading you to? In a month, he is coming again to see you. And in the midst of all this, you are getting transferred to Bangalore. Why don’t you stop continuing this hide and seek and get a life finally, tell him to marry you, right now?” A friend in the office had burst out, playing the role of her conscience.

She doesn’t exactly remember what she told her that day from a neighborhood phone booth, urging him to call her back, but on the verge of hanging up, she remembers saying: “I really want you to take me away from here, far, far away, from this damn city and surroundings. Can you tell your parents today you want to marry me?”  Her eyes were swollen with the wellspring of tears, and love.

“Do you have any idea, Anu, that today when you broke open, it became the happiest day in my life? I was dying to hear this for a long time now, but I wanted you to open up first, rather than me coaxing and cajoling you into a relation you were not prepared to enter still….” A long email of Aurko followed, charting a plan for their “short notice wedding”.

Getting married, for Aurko, was a brief vacation of ten days, three of which he spent in the traditional Bengali wedding rituals, one in their wedding reception, one in the legal formalities of a registry marriage and the three others in a surprise honeymoon in Kerala. While their conjoined feet were kissed by the foamy white surf and the white sand of the beach, Aupama had dug her palm deep into the sand and brought out a fistful of it, scooped tight, in the folds of her palms.

“This is my fistful of want.” She uttered, and buried her hands in the sand again.

At the end of the escapade, Anupama found herself stranded in a suffocating 5’ by 7’ room in the old, narrow alleys of Calcutta, in the company of disapproving in-laws. Aurko obviously was not the most prudent man in their eyes to choose a free-spirited, working girl. She had resigned from her job. Draping herself in starched cotton saris, she would move around the house tiptoed in silence and occasional prosaic words. He had flew away ten thousand miles from her, to his world of office meetings and deadlines, to the everyday occurrence of their crazy, long, untimely, distant calls and correspondences.

On the day of departing Kolkata, Anupama came to the airport, surrounded by her parents and in-laws. Drenched in the morning rain, she bid adieu to the most loved and hated site of her childhood and youth. In an hour, she ascended over the cardboard houses, the trees, the clouds and the skyline, the floodgates of her memories overpowered by the calling and sweet seduction of love, yet to be consummated in mind, body and spirit, ten thousand miles away from her childhood town. The Bengali bride, adorned with a little vermillion mark on her forehead, hugged her teary-eyed mother for one last time before passing on to the boarding and emigration area of the international airport. She waved her silent goodbye to a life lived amidst known people and known surroundings that had gradually become claustrophobic to her existence. Her heart brimmed with unexplained anticipation and anxiety to see how the promise of the uninhibited pleasures of a conjugal life that she had dreamed of in another part of the world turns to reality. The air smelled sweetish and pleasurable.

Her mind ached to unknown pleasures. She imagined herself looking over the cascading Niagara Falls, roaming around the streets of Times Square, New York city, hand-in-hand with her husband. She looked at the two huge suitcases stuffed with endless belongings–heavy silk saris, cosmetics, loads of books, music CD’s, framed pictures of Hindu gods, packets of Indian spices. She was being carried away to a cherished, unexplored realm of love in another continent, carrying an inextricable thread that would bind a part of her being to the city she was departing. She had been the only one in her family to have come all the way, crossing the Atlantic in search of love, a home and companionship. She washed away the remnants of her last days in Kolkata fraught with bickering and anxiety, old friends who had made her life in the city dark and aimless, jobs taken, silly and unworthy, in quick succession which added to her misery. With sure, steady steps, she landed at the John F. Kennedy airport along with an ocean of multitudes of people, clutched Aurko’s arms as she found him, waiting, as he drove her all the way to the new apartment which he had shifted to. This was their new love-nest, harboring mushy, sentimental promises of sweet nothings which she knew, would sink into oblivion one day.

                      ***************************************************

Twenty years in different cities in the US, they had stuck to each other like pond and muck, having their share of fights and making up, an agonizing miscarriage and the blessing of parenting a son, Ishaan. Through the mist of time, Anupama looked into the wayward journey of her life, the episodes of separation binges and the mad haste to leave behind Kolkata. All these years, her visits to the city with Aurko and Ishan had been hasty and scheduled, while her parents had grown old and frail, relatives forlorn, her in-laws more surrendering, recoiling. She looked into the grey streaks of hair in the mirror and smiled wistfully, recollecting the memories of the day of her arrival in New York, with all the pristine promise of innocence, the sweet seduction that it carried, which lost its allure in the merciless hands of time.

Following the demise of both set of parents, they both agreed to take a sabbatical, to visit Kolkata together and sell off Aurko’s old, dilapidated residence in the city to some local promoters, which had now been a liability. After Ishan’s High school graduation, Anupama desired to visit parts of India with Aurko which they had never considered exploring before, in their relentless pursuit to stay back in America. Counting their last days in the house in Kolkata infested with moss, insects and memories, Anupama trudged past the streets, venues, buildings, old roadside cafes and restaurants of the city. Those were the places she had shunned visiting, and even detested exploring with Aurko prior to their wedding. Years of alienation had its own blessings, it seemed, as she swept past them, stopping for minutes to take in the trembling mixture of memories, but her heart was now numb to the sting they had caused years back. Aurko, transformed to a much mellowed, reticent man in his late forties, had smiled to know of this reconciliation, wishing to recline, relax and reminisce their lost days as he traveled along with his wife.

One hot, humid afternoon, she was roaming alone in the narrow, serpentine alleys of College street, stopping by the little bookstores for her favorite collections of poetry. In one quiet corner, she discovered a girl in her twenties, with a petite, slender feature, with tousled hair and furtive, kohl-laden eyes gleaming with the pearls of her tears. She was walking with slow, steady steps, in a trance-like, lost demeanor, her silken scarf rustling in the ground like the drooped wings of an angel. A couple of books clung to her bosom, clutched with one hand, while the other hand held a smartphone close to her ears. 

“Is that what you have to say, in spite of how much I have supported you all these days? Why did you come in my life, after all? I didn’t ever beg for a man’s companionship in my life, more so, to one who doesn’t deserve my affection, and my selflessness”…..Anupama heard her utter, in the midst of muffled tears. A few more words, drenched, lost, and then she hung up the phone. With the corner of her eyes, she glanced at the girl, took in the salt and prick of her pain as she kept walking behind the girl, a shadow of her own past, twenty years back in time.

“Excuse me, your scarf is drooping to the ground. Thought of letting you know.” She chirped in, now facing the girl.

“Oh, thank you. That’s kind of you”, she looked back at Anupama, trying to fix the scarf by tying a knot around her neck.” Her books fell on the street, scattered, and they both stooped down to pick them up.

“Hmm, Pablo Neruda. I have loved his poems, too!”

“Yes, I also bought collections of Rumi, Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath today, they are in my handbag. Wanted to gift the best among these to someone, but, ……forget it!” She took in a deep breath in an attempt to swallow her words, as they continued to walk together, all the way to the Central metro station, introducing themselves to each other. Anupama was touched by Trina’s friendliness, grace and fluidity of her persona. She was a final year Management student, in love with poetry and writing.

They trudged past the zebra crossings and the footpaths, breathing in the smoke and soot of the maddening traffic passing by. The city was beckoning her again in its incomplete syllables and half-torn love songs.

“Everything is just the same as before. The loud, menacing buses, the screeches of the police horns, the smell of the roads”. She said.

“And how do you gauge this feeling of similarity?” Trina asked.

“Well, I have been a migratory bird of sorts. Have been in and out of here for the past twenty years now.”

“Well, as for me, I think I would be leaving Kolkata soon. I’ve had my share of break-ups, failures and dejection here. And once I do, I would wish to leave the city once and for all”. Trina paused and bit her lips.

Anupama handed over her card to Trina. “Do call me. I am in the city till the end of this month. I could tell you stories.”

They walked all the way to the stairs that led to the metro station, waving goodbye to each other as they parted in different directions, dissolving among the multi-faced crowd in the platform. Anupama managed a seat inside the train and wiped the sweat of her face with a tissue, trying to settle with the books she had bought some time back. In her left hand, the poetry collection of Pablo Neruda gleamed in a red hardbound cover. “Oh no, what a pity! This is Trina’s”! She muttered helplessly, as the train sped past, crushing the dark crevices of the city’s underground. “How could I forget giving it back to her? So stupid of me!” She sighed, and was determined to return the book to Trina once she called. Or, would she care? She was returning anyway, with the deep, tender, heartbreaking pearls of Trina’s life that was whisked with the demons of her own past, with her own fistful of want, nurtured within the core of her being.