ILLICIT LOVE

Winnie died.
No one cried.
No one but me


Love and loss and death
My themes have darkened
But for every truth I disclose, I hold back so much


For the world she was an enigma
A walking mystery
They didn’t know her but I did.
I knew Winnie


I met her for the first time
When I was working on my second novel
At the forest guest house near McLeodganj
Where, from the rainy window,
One could see the multicolored mynahs
The mothers teaching the young ones how to fly
I wrote some great lines that July…..


Taking a break from work,
I’d thought: “I’ll do what my heart seeks”
And I had been writing off and on till then
For a couple of weeks


I loved going off for a month every year
By myself, into the wilderness
Places invisible on a Railway time table
Places traveled less
Places my colleagues had never heard of
Places that usually depressed


But I loved discovering the simple secrets
Of these pristine places- their bus stops, their eating outlets


Each of these places has its stories
Some of them are sad, some are funny.
Some are stories of madness, of violence. Some, ordinary
Yet they all have about them a sense of mystery.
The mystery of life, sometimes the mystery of death


For example, I discovered that-
There was a shop called Dada- Boudi in Panagarh
That sold delicious Jal-sandesh
That at Chittaranjan’s haat, the street vendor violets
Were always garden fresh
That there was a two hundred and twenty year old tree
In Chamoli- a hybrid of Ashoka, Gulmohar and Neem


This one time, I had also gone to forget someone
To erase my mind of her tormenting memories
(As if it attainment of happiness were that easy)


Singularly incapable of making eye contact,
Those were days of great introspection:
“Why do I fall in love with every girl I meet?”
“Why can’t they love me for who I am?
Like I love them, every single one of them?”


Then one night, partly out of heartbreak
And partly, sheer monotony
I created Winnie


Ingredients- two tablespoons imagination and love to taste
She could be appreciated either as a Lewis Carroll fantasy
Or understood as a Patricia Highsmith country house mystery
Or interpreted as a double bluff in the spirit of Borges and Pynchon
Or felt to be as distinctive and palpable as Salinger’s characters


She was like an optical Illusion I liked to show
Where I’d severe my thumb or shorten my elbow


She was....
Four parts Ingrid Bergman and three parts Virginia Woolf
(Minus the suicidal tendencies, obviously)
And one part each of the three women I ever loved


I never beat her in chess
I often took refuge in her mechanical chit chat
She would speak to me
On bloomless Sunday afternoons
In her automaton ballad voice
She used to say:
“If our love lasts a lifetime
Let the lifetime be a millions years”


And after that, I wrote at finger-blistering speed
And a first draft of the story emerged
I remember the rest of it in a haze, even now
It became a bestseller and my reputation surged


But she became more famous that me
I began getting envious as can be
The world called her unreal, out of this world
They were ready to do anything for this girl


And why wouldn’t they?
She did have the-


Joan of Arc eyes
Helen of Troy hair
Venus De Milo nose
Cleopatra lips
Mata Hari hips
Holly Golightly legs
Anne Frank’s innocence
And that Monalisa smile


Did she love me?
Even for an instant?


Then I remembered,
She used to say:
“If our love lasts a lifetime
Let the lifetime be a millions years”
Of course, she only spoke
What I wrote!


And now my lovely bitch
Had transcended the world which
I had created for her!


And so in my next book
It was her life that I took
In furious anger and blind rage
I strangled her on the last page


And the next morning, I got a million fan- letters
All accusing: “You brute! You murderer! ”


There was anger.
But no one cried
No one shed a tear.
No one was surprised


And then they said,
“She never really existed”
That she was me
Was that the reality?


I made her.
But she made me too
But I made her first

Her body went back to the earth.
I have a memory of her.
The memory is all that I have left of her

And the world could break apart with sadness in the meantime.....