Young Writers Society

“What did you say I always do?” I asked him though I had heard him state it clearly in his soft almost feminine voice. I just wanted to make sure he meant what he said before retorting.

I didn’t want to make fun of myself before him. He was a person I idealized to the point of obsession. His each and every word carried undeniable proof of his knowledge, his passion for truthfulness and such weight that I just couldn’t stop dreaming of attaining such heights of enlightenment. But his words were blunt knives. They thrust into the weak points of a person and dug deep holes leaving a bleeding spot. He didn’t differentiate between friends and foes while commenting on them. In his eyes they were all alike. Or so he had told me.

I spent all the time I could – near him, with him – and so became victim of his overbearing nature and frequent attack of blunt truthfulness. I was a prideful person. Prideful not vain. Except for him even my little bit of pride gained his disapproval: almost every time when he got his finger on any such event unfolding, with me showing my tendencies, he hurt me unknowing or knowingly to a great extent.

Even then I didn’t cease in my stubbornness of being near him, around him all the time I could manage just to be near him when he made heavy comments on enlightening issues. You could call it my scorching thirst for knowledge or my need to get a good whipping for being prideful.

In beginning his words haunted me a lot and didn’t allow me to sleep all night, made me toss in my bed till dawn. But much worse than his taunting and blunt sketches he made out of my character were the truthfulness in them all to an unbearable extent. Though with time I ceased to take his words personally as an attack on my pride and started reflecting on myself and my life, still his words left a distinguishable mark on my conscience. With time, my bleeding heart with a lot of holes made into them quite ruthlessly became immune to such attacks.

However, sometime this man became too much to take in. After all there was an extent of something one could bear.

And this was maybe such a moment.

“You heard me, I know.” We were sitting in his simple looking drawing room which had only things that were needful. No lavish taste, no artistic expression – just a simple four cornered room with a wooden table in the center of the room, laden with a book, a pen stand with a pen and a pencil and two glasses of water (which the old housemaid had put there after my arrival); an old sofa on which we were resting at the moment and nothing else. Simply nothing. The large space of the room told a tale of sadness and loneliness. It appeared to me to be suffocating with being alone for a long time. I even mentioned it at some point to him that his house – as the rest of the house was just like this room – made me gloomy. He replied with an unreal smile. His eyes touching, caressing each corner which it could reach followed by a shrug. He never denied it but just accepted it as it was.

I had met him my sheer luck, a coincident in my mind. Though he called it fate. He believed a supreme power lays out the fabric of meetings and events in a person’s life and not a single one of them is futile or worthless. They all are for that person to gain a better knowledge of himself and the creator. It is to make the creation reach its maturity where he can establish a relation of deep devotion and love with its creator. Meeting people, understanding their nature, reading into the lapses left between complicated emotions and outward beauty and establishing a sense of appreciation was to make him realize how much cherish-able and loved he was by the creator who delighted in acknowledging him as his best creation. And so on. He would read out common things with such peculiarity that I became more and more enchanted by his words as I come to know him better.

“I mean it. You are too encircled in a world of your own spinning to see the world outside it. The shell you have created around yourself had complicated your life. You have just lost the way you wanted to head when you decided on this journey. Think about it. Earning money, feeding, entertaining oneself for a moment and then repeating this cycle again the next day and that too in a world that isn’t complete or even real…is it all you want from this life. You don’t believe on several rebirths do you?”

I didn’t. I didn’t even believe in that supreme power he so much gloated about. I didn’t have the seeing eyes he possessed. I didn’t had his belief in things that the world was now renouncing as ancient and a fragment of imagination with no logical basis.

I couldn’t make out what my life had become at that moment. I am successful businessman with a comfortable house a loving family and a friend circle that I loved to maintain by frequent parties and celebrations. I am a happy man.

Or… was a moment ago.

When I look back, I had never thought about where I am headed: like my life is being suspended on a rope, tossed in several directions without any aim. At beginning I had lived on principles and morals with a view to uplift the miserable people around me. It was a young man’s youthful dream to serve a noble cause. And at some point in my life I got meddled up in the usual ceremonies of life. My dream turned into something else. I had to establish a successful career, and then I had to get married and live the rest of the life peacefully in company of friends and comfort and so on… I just gave up on being a good cause as I thought others and much more effective people were doing the job I dreamed with a certain good results. I wondered why he lived in such solitude. And in such a suffocating house too.

I understood it now. It was all an attempt to maintain the reality he was talking about. To gain what he thought was much more important than getting entangled in this worldly life like me – a fantasy woven out of weak fabric that covered the body until life but wearied out in death leaving a naked body to be devoured by worms in grave.

As always I just nodded at him. The conversation turned to smaller and usual matters.

While In my mind I was waging a war with my demon. I was sure, this time I wouldn’t be able to walk on his path or change myself in his way. I feared the loneliness this noble pursuit brought with itself. And unlike him I would be shattered when I wouldn’t be able to feel love. But then he was doing all this to gain that very love wasn’t he? The eternal love which would last much longer than any other; much longer than my families and friends and well wishers love and affection would. He would be wrapped in that very fabric he wove with sacrifice in infinity surviving the unknown he was so sure of was to come after life.