Hide and Seek- the Last

Mmm, what you say?
Mm, that you only meant well? Well, of course you did.
Mmm, what you say?
Mm, that it's all for the best? Ah of course it is.

“Who was driving?”

The universe skipped a heartbeat. The skies spun in agony. The mountains lay heavy with grief.
For a moment, the players felt their souls contract…an involuntary twitch of the eye…a sudden desire to scream…an inexplicable clench of the fist…a wish to collapse. When one of the naturals leaves us, we all feel it. Even if we do not know.

And then... she was on her way.

She checked into a nearby inn first. Anything to postpone the moment when she would go and see him. Alone. And now she looked down at the pine needles and wondered whether she could even build those walls again… well, of course she could! A few days cannot change that much… can they? She did not owe them anything. She could leave enough money at the clinic to make sure they did all they could, and go back to Delhi, to her work, to her safe life. Even as she thought it, she knew she would never be able to leave without seeing him. And she knew she had lost…

A clinic.
A door.
A room.
A bed.
A broken man.

He lay there, unconscious, and she was defeated by her own love. She stayed there for hours, just sitting. She did not look at him. She did not cry. She simply stayed.

The caretaker had accompanied her. He was the one who made arrangements for the funeral. She told him that there was no one they needed to contact immediately. The older man had told her that his wife had walked out on them years ago and they had had no word from her ever since. The two of them had spoken proudly about how self-sufficient they were as a unit, with no family to speak of, in the country. She and the caretaker attended the funeral and she carried the ashes back to her room in an earthen pot that the cremation ground authorities had given her.

He woke up two days later. They did not have to tell him. He already knew. He held her hand and had the bland soup concocted by the clinic’s cook without a fuss. She asked him no questions, and he gave her no answers. The next morning brought her tears. She cried over her breakfast, and went for a walk. She did not want him to see her red-rimmed eyes. By the time she reached him it was early afternoon. That evening, he sent her back early, saying he was tired. He did not want her to see him cry. She went without a murmur. She had sensed tears all day, and thought they were her own. When he requested an early night, she realized they were his.

Neither of them seemed to be able to bring up the death that lay like a heavy fog over them in their waking hours. They would clasp their hands together and spend their time quietly. She rationalized the lack of conversation, reassuring herself that they were healing through silence, and through touch.

A few days and many walks later, the doctor had a few words with her, “You need to cheer him up a bit. He’s physically quite all right now but he’s still very depressed. Some music, some books maybe…”

The doctor had noticed something about his patient that she had not. He was not healing at all. He was wasting away in the silence.

He awoke to Fool’s Garden the next morning.

"I wonder how, I wonder why
Yesterday you told me about the blue, blue sky
And all that I can see is just a yellow lemon tree"

He groaned, “That’s the most meaningless song in the world. You’ve given me a headache early in the morning, thanks a ton.”

“What? I love this song! It’s such a classic.”

“Crap. What is it even supposed to mean? ‘All that I can see is just another lemon tree.’ How pointless.”

“That’s the point, silly. The absurdity of life and all of that.”

He laughed, “I’m sure that’s the last thing they were thinking about when they wrote the song. Germans should stick to beer. They were probably sloshed when they came up with these lyrics anyway.”

It was the first time he had laughed in the week that he had been conscious. She had not expected success so easily. Just goes to show, she thought wryly, how we complicate matters far more than we need to. She laughed at his grimaces, and let the song play till the end. Then she opened the newspaper. “We’ve been cocooned in here way too long, right?” And she read out articles that she thought would interest him. Politics, the latest movies, George Bush’s latest antics, a new study that ‘revealed’ that loud noises are distracting (“like you need a billion dollar grant to figure that out...these Americans are crazy!”), the Balkan situation, Indo-Chinese bilateral trade agreements… After lunch, they both rested a while. Come evening and she popped in an album of Punjabi remixes and imitated one of the singers right down to the last detail. He laughed till he was exhausted, and she went back to the guesthouse still humming the catchy tune.

She took the urn to him a few days later. He held it in his hands as he lay on the bed. He stared out of the window for a few minutes and then put the urn down next to the bed. They held each other and he wept as she stroked his hair, saying nothing. He cried for a long time and she felt him trembling with the loss.

Then they talked. They celebrated his life, and they grieved his passing. They were angry at the unfairness of it all, and they were reconciled to the unpredictability of events. They missed his presence, and they felt his presence. They cried at losing him, and they laughed with his memories. They asked destiny a thousand questions, and they made their peace with kismat.

She took him back to the guesthouse a few days later. They sat on the porch till late that night, drinking their wine and looking at the clear sky.

The taxi to Delhi arrived the next morning. The caretaker blessed them both and she was grateful. Gusts of wind whipped her short hair around as they loaded their suitcases into the boot. She looked around one last time, before getting into the car. As she saw the guesthouse and the old caretaker, and the densely vegetated landscape that surrounded them, she felt an ache so strong that it was almost physically palpable. She felt vulnerable once again, frail in the face of the mighty mountains and the fierce wind.

And she laughed. Because she knew she had won.

Mmm, what you say?
Mm, that you only meant well? Well, of course you did.
Mmm, what you say?
Mm, that it's all for the best? Ah of course it is.