Guinea Pig

As we walk’ in down the lane, I heard my heart saying, “Shall I follow you to eternity?” As we got closer and closer to her home my steps start fumbling till it stops at last.

“Bye, meet again some day” she smiled with a quite unsure way.

“yea, sure” I responded as I feel a bit ocular humidity.

She turned around, as I closed my eyes just to realize that when I’ll open them she will not be there. I was feeling alone like never before.

It was a usual Sunday evening; sitting on the couch with my evening mug of coffee I started surfing from one channel to another. A habit that prohibits my family to sit and watch anything with me. “Hey, there it is!” I screamed out of ecstasy. It was the world TV premier of Saharukh’s latest flick, Om Santi Om, a movie I was privileged enough not to have watch, keeping in mind my craziness for the superstar. It took sometime to get the euphoria to sink in.

It was a cinematic masterpiece, like a paintbrush striking shades of emotions on celluloid. The story relates to the very chord of Indian man’s psyche. He, who can look up to the sky and dare to say, “the moon is a dream” and he has the guts to follow his dreams.

After four hours of commercials clad movie with loads of melodrama, it was heavy on my head. So I was all set to jump on to my bed and get lost in its horizon. I loiter around putting off every single source of light available. “Blink - Blink”, it was the service light of my cell phone that shining on my bed. I picked it up and it reads “1 missed call”. The next button pressed and it was “Priya”. It took a moment to realize that out of my greatest despair came the greatest gift. Blank as never before I began tracing the secret back through history to find nothing else than the mystical words in the movie, “itni siddat se mene tumhe pane ki koshish ki hai; ke har jarre ne hame tumse milane ki sajish ki hai.” (When you want something from your heart, the entire universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.).

It was 12.35 a.m. I called back. A romantic number as her caller tune hits my ear, the latest “Dil kho gaya…teri ore…teri ore”

“Hello!”
“Hi, Priya”, I gasped.

If anything I hear after that was pure sound. Everything was too unreal and pleasant to be perceived as meaningful till she stopped.

“Good night”;
“I have to stop now. I have a morning office tomorrow.”
“Ok” I sighed as I felt helpless.
“Bye”
“Bye, take care.” and then she hung up.

But the rendezvous was set. She agreed to meet the next day after her office. For the first time I felt an intimation of eternity. There was no word that precisely denotes the antonym of a nightmare. “Reverie” will be understated because I feel it in almost every sensual fantasy featuring her.

“Buddy, Tomorrow is a long time but Thank God, it is not an illusion like most of the things in my life.” I murmured while closing the flap of my cell.

It was 6.40 pm in the evening the next day I called her and the venue was fixed to the nearest downtown. As I sprinted to the venue, the ever paranoid alter ego of mine was wondering “what’s going on her mind? Does she regard our long pending reunion merely as my last desperate attempt to get her into my life? Or does she long to see me again as I long to see her? Is it an all new everything?” but the mind is not an organ and unfortunately you can’t stop it.

At last after a couple of calls interchanged, I saw her from a distance. She was looking fragile as ever, with a western formal shirt and jeans. “ Oh, God! From bottom to top she was pure heart."

“Hi” she smiled.

And I felt as if everything else felt silent. The loudest sound I was hearing is that of my heart, so loud that I fear I could have missed some of her words.

‘Hi”, I smiled back as I felt like oxygen debt.

“What do we do now?” I asked almost clueless in that heavy traffic around.

As she came closer a sharp focus from a distant vehicle fell on her face. They are the same eyes beyond which there is no human rationality exists. Could be the reason why I fell in love with her again and again.

“You tell” she rolled her eyes at me.

“Can we go for a cafeteria?”

“yea, sure” she acquiesced.

Then spontaneously starts moving towards the subway. As I followed I promised “this is it, and I would equate every single missed opportunity and chances lost. As we left the subway to enter the downtown, it was 7.50 pm and the evening crowd quite ready to leave for their home.

We enter the cafe, it was crowed enough to make me uncomfortable.

“Can we go for some other place?” I waited for a favorable response.

She took a deep breath “its OK, I’m too tired for that.”

I get up to order some beverage. Standing at the counter I couldn’t resist myself to have a distant look of her. Everything else in the vicinity turned blur as I saw her. Hair falling down the shoulder, an unusual knot on her necklace, those deceiving brown eyes, her luscious lips ready for some words and lots more to cherish for. I remember asking my grandma as a kid "whether fairies are real?" if believed this would be the moment when the answer could be a loud "Yes".


“70 bucks, Sir” I heard the restaurateur as I zoomed out of my reverie.


She spoke about her company, job profile, her non cooperative HR and some over cooperative male colleagues.

“What happened to black nail polish?” I asked touching her nails unconsciously.

“They are finished” she smiled.


Not that what we talk are all soul searching but what I could infer was that “she is a human too, and not an emotionless chicken what I had presumed ever since I met her. It is just that, she instinctively knew how to live in first person singular.

It was almost a year and half since I met her for the first time, at a road side food stall. Her sister introduced me to her and may be from the very first sight I felt like "I want to marry her". Through out the conversation I consciously choose to be in the listening mode as everything happening around was too pleasant to be real.

“What’s the time?” she was looking at me with querying eyes.

I jumped back to reality as I checked my watch and it was 8.27pm.

“8.15” I said unconsciously. And for the first time in my life I felt like staying in a place for ever. It was felt like never before.

She thought for a while “OK, we’ll leave at 8.30.”

“yup” I said, obsessively aware of every particle of sand slipping through the hourglass.

It would be the last 15 minutes. I consciously made some desperate efforts to keep aside the “lets-face-the-truth, I’ll-never-be-with-you” mindset. But every time I agreed to peep into her eyes, she would smile at me and by that, destroying all my reflexive expressions of really falling in love with her.

She stood up “um, shall we leave now?”

I followed. Thinking of when’ll the situation arrive when my brain will choose to stay in the cranium at last and my heart out of my mouth.

“Bye” she said as she turned to her home.

Back home, I realized that she was the one who laughed, spoke, cheered, and giggled. And for me a question remains “Do I exist at all?” My steps turns back as I learned that the better part of my life is spent saying “it’s too early” and then “it’s too late”. But the echo was still there “What I’ll do without…..”

As I was all set to call it a day. It was Bob Dylan’s playing on the background.



“Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,
Where I've got me a date with Botticelli's niece.
She promised that she'd be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece.

I left Rome and landed in Brussels,
Everyone was there to greet me when I stepped inside.
Someday, everything is gonna be diff'rent
When I paint my masterpiece”