Life in 26 letters. Its strange how that can be done. To be truthful, it could not be. For Alia, life was much more. More than that could capture the delight of these 26 fellows or the shame on each one of them. If it could be, it would have been, at best, a second to second story. The stories which develop from one second to the other…. not to be anticipated, not seen through.. just to be lived from one moment to the other.
Independence brings a lot of responsibilities. At times Alia would shudder at the thought. It was increasingly getting difficult for her to keep all the strings of past, present and future woven together. She could see them melt away. She hoped otherwise.
Bidding him goodbye at the airport that evening, she felt a strange sense of blankness. She was full of emotions a second before, and in the next , she felt nothing….. Zilch, Nil, Nothing.As if the time they were together, was meant t0 be – in some distant land of destiny – it was just an execution of what was written. Or as if, life in 26 letters could not explain itself to her. The tapestry of the random events was so incoherent that she could barely put them together. But she wished so hard, that at the end of it all, there would be some meaning to it.
About a couple of years back, someone had told her, that sitting at the banks is not the way to explore the waters of life. She had dived deep and wide. She came out experienced, but not wiser. Wisdom she concluded was a tricky thing. You can only get more, once you make yourself believe, you don’t have enough. But the deeper seas also brought to her oysters of mystery – lovely, little, unassuming oysters – questioning each of her belief and thought. Why was she wandering in these deep waters? Far away from the shore… What was she looking for? Was she getting herself to the middle of nowhere – where the northern stream almost died and the sea stood still ? Could she carry the pearls back home? Could she leave the unassuming questions unanswered?
She is still waiting for her own answers. Hopefully, outside these restrictions, she gets them.
At times, independence is outrageous even to oneself.
