“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing

and right doing there is a field.

I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass

The world is too full to talk about.”

― Rumi

15 likes and 2 comments. I was about to “Like” it too, when I stopped myself from committing the blunder.

I remember the last time, we spoke to each other….the time, date and her dress. I remember every minute detail. We promised we would behave like ‘adults’, reminded that ‘we were not meant to be’, cried our hearts out, knowing that ‘life would not be same again’. I have to keep my promise. She was doing a brilliant job of it. I could do it too.

Mitali and I, have known each other for 5 years now. Our first meeting has no special memories, except for the fact that “we met”. We bumped into each other in the park where she had come with her adorable daughter and me, well, I had come to escape my miseries. I remember her to be extremely chatty, a quality I disliked almost instantly. I have this thing, with people talking non-stop and I hate to admit it is jealousy. Here I’m, fumbling for the right words to express myself, and there she was talking nineteen to the dozen. “Oh! I hate her”. I made up my mind and was about to leave the park, when she asked me the most dreaded question…. “Can I have your phone number?”. I mean, how, how the hell can you ask for a phone number of a person you have just met. I would rather choke myself than act in such a boisterous manner.

I tried to evade her query, but she kept coming back to the topic again and again. Ah! Fine! You can have it, I said defeated by her charm and punched in my number into her phone. What I thought was a riddance, was actually a beginning of twisted tale of fate. Of course, I didn’t know then….

It was, by now, an established fact that Mitali was a chatter bum.  She was well read and liked to keep herself updated with the latest news. All of which was promptly, whatsapped to me. And, if it was a juicy piece of gossip, she would call me up and inform me about it, as if my existence depended on it. Like seriously, I could live without knowing why Hrithik divorced Suzanne or how Sarita devi was wrongly treated during some championship. But, then she was “Mitali”, how could she sleep stomaching this ‘important’ piece of information  without sharing.

Our meetings frequented, so did our phone calls. Love her or hate her, but you can’t ignore her, that was Mitali for you, and I was slowly warming up to her. Slowly but surely. I don’t know if that is what you call as chemistry, but I could read a lot in between the lines, Mitali used to blabber whenever we got a chance to meet. I could sense something was just not right in her marriage.  This blabbering, this untimed laughter was her pretence to hide her inner most feelings. She was as empty as I was! People who share the same suffering find solace in each other’s company, nothing could have been more true in our case.

I probably wouldn’t have dug any further had my eyes escaped the bluish mark on her arm. She had been smart enough to cover it up with lots of makeup, prolly a whole stick of concealer. After many unsuccessful attempts to dodge it, she finally admitted that she was a victim of domestic violence and was foolish enough to believe that “she deserved it”.

“I’m what you call as ‘cold’ or ‘frigid’ in bed”, she said. “You know that feeling when you are in bed with someone only because you are supposed to be, not because you want to…?”, “I feel extremely disgusted when Shravan touches me…no, earlier it was disgust now it is an empty feeling…I just want him to finish his business and get over it. Not that I hate him or anything like that….just that I don’t feel turned on when he touches me…”. He was patient….but soon it wore off…!

I didn’t admit then, but I could surely connect with what she had to say… if there is no reason why  you feel connected to someone….there has to be no reason to why you feel disconnected with someone… the feeling, the chemistry and the biology is just not there. No reasons, just like that.

Coming from an extremely twisted environment ,my moral bone was never ‘the bone of contention’, I had this simple funda of life….if you like someone…you like someone PERIOD! You don’t have to defend it, you don’t have to find reasons…. And, then there comes a person in your life, when the  rights and wrongs of life seem so blurry. Just being with that person feels so right that…. That you feel like telling the society and the people around you to go and fuck themselves. Who are they to judge a person’s life anyway…

Yes! I felt that for Mitali. I wanted her…and I wanted her so bad. If I had to fight the world for it, I could have done that too.

Mitali took her sweet time to realise what was going between us, was a little more than friendship… She took the long route…realisation….denial…and then the break down to admit…she was madly in love with me…

It was her home and a wintery afternoon, when we kissed for the first time….

I had to shut her blabbermouth and kiss was the best way to do it. It stunned her and she resisted it for a while, before giving in…. my hands rested on her tiny waist as  I kissed her hungrily…She was an eager kisser herself and with that we lost the track of time and place.

“Mummy……Aunty….What the hell are you guys doing”….. yelled Mitali’s daughter.

It literally shook us up! And, we came back to our senses.

“Nothing beta…something went into my eye…and aunty was removing it…”, Mitali stammered.

“Oh, Thank God Mommy…I thought you guys were gays or what….ha ha ha”, She laughed.

We laughed at it too…..and then on ourselves!