Things Left Unsaid

Twelve years since I last saw her. She didn’t even smile at me or wave a sweet goodbye when we parted at school. But then again, she never did. Fysti had always been like that to me. And today…

I was sitting in Fysti’s living room, an artistic cozy den, its white walls stamped with many of Fysti’s paintings. The marble floors looked very slippery and the patterns on them made me dizzy if I stared at them too long. Or it was my insides going dizzy at the thought of meeting Fysti after all those years. I waited impatiently for her, wondering if she would at all recognize me or pretend that she didn’t. I stared at my well-polished shoes, wishing they shone even more so that I could check my hair before she came in. I took up a sandstone showpiece from the centre table an examined it from all angles. It was a curious shade of green but what it was, I couldn’t tell. A swan from the left and a rather distorted face of a boy when I held it close to my eyes.

Then she came in. And I held my breath. She walked in the same way, fumbling a little as if she were carrying heavy weight. She looked quite like the old Fysti, only more mature. Her nose looked sharper, I wondered if it twitched when she laughed, like before. She was wearing a pale mauve shirt that had spots of gray all over. I couldn’t decide if it was the pattern of the shirt or the result of Fysti’s painting. The skirt she donned was long and flowing and the silver sequins stitched on the midnight blue gave it a mysterious appearance. She smiled.

And I fell in love with her. All over again.

I rose up from my seat and stretched out a hand. We shook hands for the first time. ‘Remember me, Fysti? It’s me, Neel from school. We were in class together for seven years. I used to sit behind you, remember the time when you forgot your pencil-box on a History exam day? Remember the blue ink pen you wrote with? It was mine, I mean, I gave it to you.’

The smile broadened a little. She said, ‘Er…I can’t recall the pen incident but yeah, I remember you. Neel...Neel Embers isn’t it?’

‘Neel Suden actually. ‘

‘Oh yes.’ She ushered me to sit down and she herself sat down on the couch in front of me. I noticed she was had a beaded necklace around her neck. The beads were wooden ones, or painted to look like so. They looked faintly familiar. Fysti looked up at me, I felt my senses going numb. As I stared back into those perfect eyes, she said, ‘So…come to visit an old friend? Did you have a dream that I drowned? It happens sometimes you know, when you dream of old acquaintances all of a sudden to wan to meet them and see how they are doing.’

She began examining her silver nail-polished toes. I could see that she didn’t remember much of me and didn’t know what to say. I clutched my corporate leather bag and wondered if I should get on with the business I had actually come here for.

Russet Remistone was getting married. I was to deliver his wedding card to Fysti. Russet was more than glad when I told him that I would happily do his favour.

It was my excuse to visit a place I would never have the courage to otherwise.

‘Thanks man…I don’t think I could face her before the wedding, you know it’d bring up the wrong topics at the wrong time. She‘s a really nice girl and all, and she probably wouldn’t be upset or anything. But I haven’t seen her for six years now, maybe she has changed. She is a painter right, painters are frightfully romantic.’ That’s what Russet had told me and I wished with my entire mind that all painters were romantic. Even with old classmates they had ignored in all their school years.

Fysti coughed politely. I realized I hadn’t spoken yet. She said, ‘So…are you in touch with the others? Still go to get-togethers they arrange at times when I’m always out of station or down with a fever?’ In the pale electric lights that hung over us from bamboo-work lamps, her hair looked less black and more brown.

I said, ‘Yeah, I have been to all the get-togethers in hope of meeting all my old classmates. I have come across most of them in all these years, Kyjo, Luvr, Slim Sam, Bonia…only I hadn’t met you. Once I tried to go get a glimpse of you in one of the Art exhibitions but you were to busy with guests.’

She was still smiling, staring at her fingernails. Those delicate fingers, so long and sculpted, they looked as if they were made for wielding the brush on canvas. I was arranging a nice wordy compliment when the lights went out. Fysti let out a groan and said, ‘Damn it all, it’s not even eight today. They’ll have this until nine I’m sure. Hang on Neel, I’ll get some candles.’

I hung on as Fysti went to get the candles. Like an album being flipped before my eyes very quickly, snatches of school days memories flashed in my head. Fysti frowning at me at the Farewell when I asked her for a dance, ‘I don’t dance,’ she had said icily; Fysti thanking me vaguely for the flowers I had got her on her sixteenth birthday; Fysti holding Russet’s arm and giggling at his jokes; Fysti saying, ‘Russet, leave that Suden boy alone, let’s go have fun at the Fete.’ Fysti frowning, Fysti sighing in annoyance and Fysti beaming —Fysti’s face in different forms visited me. Oh and the beaming faces were only in scenes where I, like a fool, stood watching her with Russet.

The present Fysti soon came in. Her smile looked unreal in the candle light. I feared that she remembered the time, the only time I had ever asked her the one dreaded question. It had been a month before our school Farewell…

‘Fysti, there’s something I’d like to tell you.’

She adjusted her tie s she often did to show annoyance and disapproval I was used to that and her slightly frowning face. ‘Ok, but be quick, Russet is waiting for me.’ I knew he wasn’t, I had seen him in the football field, absorbed in a game. Fysti probably had the wind of my arriving speech and was hinting at her answer already.

I took a step forward at her and tried putting on the carefree smile Russet always gave her. ‘Fysti, I love you. Believe me I do. Do you love me too?’ I had practiced the line, the smile, and everything for the past three days and the entire past hour. I had even my reactions ready, both if she said yes and even if she said no.

‘Are you sure you’re all right? Cause you can still rephrase your question and spare yourself from all the embarrassment.’ She was scowling intensely at me; her beautiful black eyes trying to pierce my face.

But that day, I wouldn’t give up. I played with the idea of suddenly kissing her, like they do in movies, but the closest my guts could get was another attempt to smile dashingly and to say the stupidest thing one could say in a sacred moment like this. ‘I love you and I know you love me too. You love me more than you love Russet. Come on, don’t keep the truth bottled up inside you.’ And then, my adrenaline made me hold her hands. A mistake that possibly shook the foundations of the Andes.

She stared at me for a while—

‘Are you all right?’

Wait…who switched on the rewind button? Fysti was supposed to cannon some very unkind words at me and Russet would be back from the football field…wait a minute…I blinked.

I was not in the school hall anymore and I was not the miserable sixteen-year-old Neel anymore. I was still miserable though. Twenty-eight and miserable. And I was in my girl’s house. Fysti stared at me and repeated, ‘Are you quite all right?’

The candle light was slowly gaining brightness. I said, ‘Oh yes, I’m fine…just caught up in old memories. Sorry.’

Fysti sighed, but thankfully not in annoyance. ‘Memories… strange things aren’t they? Nostalgia, even stranger.’ Her voice was soft like the candle light. She sat down again, her eyes cast down.

‘Yes, as strange as the mysteries of love, don’t you think?’ I said, trying to sound as romantic as I felt.

Mysteries of love…from the distant gaze on her eyes, I guessed the words stirred something up in her mind. I straightened up and put my face closer.

Fysti almost whispered, ‘I never met him again. He left for Sweden and since then we’ve been out of touch. I wrote to him over a fifteen times, but the letters came back. I tried looking him up in the directory but I found the wrong Remistones only. Any idea where he is now? Russet Remistone I mean.’

I considered the question. I guess I took a lot of time. She continued, ‘You know, we were so nice together. He meant so much to me…I don’t know what happened. I hope he’s all right. Even after all these years, I sometimes think I it’s all over. It really scares me, you know…. It’s not like we broke up or anything, I suppose it is the most absurd thing that could have happened. Instead, we simply drifted away…like sea shells being carried away by waves in the wrong directions…’

Frightfully romantic. Russet’s adjectives came to my mind.

She was speaking again, ’I know that we’ll meet each other again someday. I have a hunch that it’s going to be in a sea-beach you know, when the sun is setting. Russet probably has the same haircut. I am sure he does...’

I didn’t bother to correct her. Russet had changed a lot since his Sweden years. His hair was long now and he wore spectacles that made him look older and wiser. His bride-to-be, a tall horse-faced school teacher who loved lemon tea at all hours of the day, called him Owl affectionately.

‘…And sometimes, I can almost feel that he’s thinking about me. Wondering what I am doing now, if I have a boyfriend…Of course, I don’t, by the way. I don’t think anyone else should come between us, besides why break someone’s heart? I mean the fact that Russet and I are going to meet is inevitable. It’s carved on the ocean floor…only sometimes…’Fysti’s words struck me like poisoned darts.

Wrong topics at the wrong time. Here I was, sitting with my ladylove, staring at her dreamy eyes in candle light. Why couldn’t I hear violins being played as well? Why…because my ladylove was rapt in her thoughts and dreams I knew could never come true. Here she was, in front of me, talking to me for longer than ever. Here she was telling me in her honey dipped voice how much she missed her Russet, entirely unaware that he would be tying the knot with someone else only three days from today. And here I was, wondering what I should do about the invitation card that lay inside my bag, between my Geology books...

‘Neel, I am sorry I got carried away, would you like some tea?’

‘No, that’s all right. I know how it feels to be wishing that someone you adore was yours…to think of that one person you have loved for all these years…I know how it feels to be away from that person, wondering if that person’s ever thinking of you.’ I was looking into her eyes sincerely. The candle light flickered in amusement.

She got the wrong hint. Her voice was full of defense now, ‘What do you mean? Russet and I belonged to each other. We think of each other all the time. I do, and I know he does. It doesn’t take letters or phone calls or candle light dinners to show your affection for someone, it’s what is in your heart, it doesn’t take flowers or chocolates or Valentine’s Day cards to prove your love.‘

So does it take wedding cards? I questioned my conscious.

‘You know,’ Fysti carried on, ‘Russet once gave me this.’ She was showing the beaded necklace. ‘It’s Love Beads. He brought it for me from the Andaman Islands. As long as true lovers wear it, they’ll always be with each other…in our hearts and in our minds. I have never opened mine and Russet hasn’t opened his either. I know that.’

I didn’t remember Russet ever wearing a beaded necklace. However, I recalled one such beaded necklace on his fiancée’s neck. Or perhaps I was imagining too much.

Fysti sighed again. It sounded a trifle annoyed. ‘Tea?’ she offered again.

I smiled, not in an attempted carefree way, but in my own way. ‘No thanks, it’s getting a little too late. I’ll be off now, Fysti.’

She looked pleased. I memorized her face; a smiling Fysti was what I wanted to be in my memories and my frequent dreams from now on. She rose from her seat, led me to the door, and said ‘Take care, Neel. Nice of you to drop by. If you ever meet Russet in those get-togethers—‘

‘I’ll tell him about you. Your address, your phone number and your Love Beads.’

‘Thanks. That’ll be wonderful.’

‘Goodnight.’

As I stepped outside her house, I wondered why I still had Russet’s invitation sitting idly between my Geology books. Maybe it was because I still loved her like mad. Or maybe it was because I didn’t want the Love Beads to be torn out from their string and be scattered on Fysti’s marble floors.