Editor’s note: As your read on, you will realize that Aditi Mehta has put soul to paper in this piece of writing. Seldom do people possess the quality of moving someone to an extent such as this. We assure you that you will love reading it.
Anurag,
The death of a dream is in many ways like the death of a child. The mourning of unbound potential. Is that how you felt when your dream of us died?
You and I are beings of silence. We don’t owe each other any explanations. Words were always inconsequential, a shy smattering of fairy dust, but there are some things that I will not leave unsaid.
You must must know that I left to escape. I reached my place from yours in a daze, packed my shoes, money, and toothbrush, and boarded the first train to Puducherry, where I lived with a group of teenage Italian backpackers. I smoked pot, made love, celebrated the moonlight and read Austen and poetry with men and women I will never see again, and I felt alive with the joy of reuniting with a not so forgotten past, wrapped in novelty and a sense of denial. I hugged my solitude, my aloneness, as we walked through the city (me fuelling their teenage radicalism) and I hugged them tighter in the night to feel an all pervasive sense of a thoroughly confused but independent self. I was honoured and thrilled at the prospect of spending a married life with you Anurag, I truly was, but I equally dreaded losing the self I had spent building in the twenty five years before I knew you.
You always understood and respected my sense of self and space, but regarded my zealous guarding of the same as immature and selfish. You were worried it would make me love and share less over time. Why? Walls and distance do not matter to these emotions. You know that.
You had left for Mumbai when I returned to Poona, and just as our silences whisper to each other, I knew you didn’t want to be found. I fail to understand why there is something about a woman’s comfort with aloneness is such a threat to the male ego. Why did it yours?
There are perhaps some questions that should remain unanswered, and there are some that just do. We came together because we questioned, and a part of me believes that we drifted apart because neither was man enough to face the answers, hovering above us like purple fairy dust.
When I read about you in the newspaper yesterday, after five long years, I was (quite characteristically) ridiculously annoyed to find you only to lose you again. I do hope you find your answers (perhaps this time hovering closer to the heart?) where you are going. I found mine in Puducherry.
Farewell, my Wentworth.
I watched her fold the letter, slip it into a violet envelope, and gently place it in the palm of his dead hand. His wife tried to keep the questions and suspicions away from her eyes as the pundit began chanting the final mantras until all there was left was violet perfume in a swirl of musk and fairy dust.
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Illustration by Priyadarshini Sivakumar
