She was on the shores of the Old City by the Sea watching the sunset. She thought of an old poem her dad had once told her- about how when everything in the world is so beautiful, man alone is vile.

Where every prospect is pleasing to the eye,

Why man alone is vile?

She was sad. She wished life wasn’t so meaningless. She wished for something that could make it worthwhile.

He came out of nowhere and said, “So you like to dig sunsets, huh?”

They had known each other for years. Through school and living in the same colony. But they were never friends. They never got along too well. He’d always had his own thing, and she had lived in her own world.

“I think it’s beautiful”, she said.

“It is”, he replied.

Through a long silence, they gazed at the orange sky.

“I think life is essentially meaningless”, she finally broke down. It was all a little too much to fight within. She started talking without even realizing it.

“How can you say that?” he asked.

“All the mad riots in which people get killed for no reason, the miserable poverty that some have to deal with. Exactly what the fuck is wrong with the world? I thought there were some basic limits of decency which people try and maintain. There is no value attached to life anymore”.

“What happened to you? Since when did you start caring about the world?” he mocked.

“Please. I’m so deeply scared I might end up hating the world like everyone else”, she said bitterly.

He was sad. He didn’t mean to make her feel bad.

“There will always be things that you can do nothing about”, he said.

“That is why it is so effin’ pointless. You can wish with all your heart for the world to be a better place. But it just fuckin’ won’t”, she replied.

He fell silent. He was worried at how much she’d changed. Once upon a time, she was carefree enough to dance on an empty road at night without realizing that there were a whole bunch of boys watching her from his terrace. He felt bad that the girl who danced had to go.

“What happened to you? You okay? You don’t seem alright”, he finally decided to ask her directly.

“I am just insanely depressed and I don’t even know why. It’s come to a point where if I hear one more bad news, I might start contemplating suicide because I really don’t want to live in this kind of a world anymore. I’m cannot deal with this kind of insanity”.

He understood what she meant. He’d known it too. When the terrorists attacked the Island City in 2008, they were all in high school and it had shattered everything that they thought about the world. It had affected him deeply, and he too had thought of the meaninglessness of life.  

“I used to think life was meaningless too”, he told her.

She found it hard to believe someone else had been where she found herself. But she believed him when he said that.

“Well, what changed then?” she asked.

He fell silent again. And this time, he was looking at the sands getting washed by the waves.

“It is impossible to value anything worthwhile if you think that way. Heck, it is impossible to value even your own freedom if you think life is meaningless. And yes, even through the murderous madness of the world, there are things we must value”, he tried to explain.

She wished she understood what he meant. She wondered if it would ever make sense to try and preserve a few things against the violence of the world.

“I wish I knew a way to do that”, she said.

“There will come a point when you will be glad you were born. Trust me”, he told her definitively.

“Has it ever happened to you?” she asked.

He nodded. “I used to teach a few kids when I was jobless for seven months, after college and before work. Once, a little girl smiled at me before leaving the classroom, the kind of smile you might see two or three times in a lifetime-like when a moment lasts for much more than a moment- that kind of a smile. I don’t know why, but that day I was happy I was alive”.

“Wow, that beautiful, huh?”

“You have no idea what smiles like that can do to you”, he told her.

She fell silent. He gave her a lot to think about.

“You know what? You’ve got to fight it. There will always be things that will threaten to break your world apart. There will always be these things that will make you feel hopeless. But you’ve got to fight it. Fight it so hard that your very existence is an act of rebellion against the meaninglessness of life. I won’t pretend it’s easy. It’s a state of perpetual tension. But that’s what it takes to feel alive. It takes that much to value life”, he told her as the darkness crept in.

“I didn’t know you had so much in you”, she said, surprised.

“You don’t know a lot of things”, he mocked again.

She sighed. “Well, yes, maybe. I’m glad there are people like you who figured it all out”.

He smiled with an innocent pride like only a child can.

“I’ve got to go”, he said.

“Well, goodbye”, she waved.

“Will you promise me something?” he asked.

“What can you possibly want from me?”

“Promise me that through all the impossible pain and blood in the world, you’ll always love sunsets”, he said.

She was befuddled. She doubted if she could. But then she remembered a beautiful sunset she once saw at the Island City.

“I will”, she promised.

“Take care. Stay gold”, he said and walked away.

Years later, when she wrote about him, she called him ‘The Rebel’.

_______________________________________________________________

Old city by the Sea is Chennai.

Island City is, of course, Bombay.

‘To dig sunsets’ is from S.E Hinton’s novel, ‘The Outsiders’.

‘Stay gold’ is from a poem by Robert Frost.

The idea of existence being a state of rebellion is from the book ‘The Rebel’ by Albert Camus.

The girl is me.

The boy could be anyone who dared to value something in life. It could well be you.