The stars in the sky twinkled hazily—not much light in them. The night was raw and my mind a benumbed mass. The house behind me lay doused in peaceful sleep. I was insomniac. The fallen leaves under my restless palms pricked at my memory, but I was too lazy to remember. Your memories were for me another fight on life’s uneven path, and lest I forgot, I had hidden them away neatly, carefully categorized in corners of my mind.

The balmy sea breeze affected me magically. Your words drifted out of the depths of this still night, and made me smile.
What was that you used to say? That I would die an incurable romantic?
Here I was, trying to live.
You gave up when I wanted you to outlive my romance.
Were you scared of being left behind?
Didn’t you think of me, trying to manage life when I didn’t know what it meant?
My incurable romance died that night, on that mountain to which you abandoned me.

My mind reels. Your pink saree billowing, you stood by the window, waiting for me in anticipation. Your parents had come around to saying yes, but you were still scared. You called them your pre marital jitters, and I was romping about in my pre marital exuberance. And then, jitters and exuberance mingled, to create a rhapsody, a pink and white and blue and golden rhapsody that had no beginning and no end. It was only a vast ocean of happiness, wave upon wave of tremor, of ebbing and receding, of building and breaking troughs and crests.
Your face, a thousand sparkling stars on a moonless summer night.

You were right. I was a romantic. Romance filtered my views. You were rooted.
Is that why you thought every beginning hid its end?
Is that why, I would look back at you every time I stepped out of the house? The pillars on the verandah couldn’t hide your proud smile, neither my searching glance. But they were there: the pillars, taking away a little bit of us from each other. You had your housework to go back to, I my paintings and my writing. The clash of your vessels brought no color to my palette the way the jasmine buds in your hair did. Their fragrance filled my senses, wafting out of a smoke filled kitchen. Your senses were at your command.
Oh, how I longed in those desperate eons to be like you, master of my self, slave to you! Your smile seemed to mock me from behind the sheets.
Or was that only a loving reprimand?

And then, all around us, slowly, imperceptibly, life began to change. The city changed—its landscape, demands, and imposing spaces. I wanted to be out in the hills, smelling the crisp air; your mind was at peace in the ever changing life around us. The steel, glass, and chrome of our urban space seemed as natural to you as the rustle of pine on mountain tops. Each place has its beauty, you said. I searched, and my reflection stared back at me from those glass doors and towering panels. My images and words were bouncing off those facades, and I was reeling back, unable to clutch at the straws you offered. But where was the reflection of our leafy lanes? Where were the birds and their nests? What would I write about now? A new subject, a new angst, a new struggle seemed to emanate from all around me.
And when I looked back at you, your smile was intact—half of it behind the pillar.

My misgivings about the changing lifestyle drove me crazy, and you knew it. What patterns could I paint now? The reflected patterns of glass upon glass? Everything was a smooth flow of sophistication. Even the beggars who posed for me for a few rupees were elsewhere. Their images in the swinging doors and glass facades scared them, reminded them of the disheveled pieces of their present.

Everywhere I looked, the swell of hastening mankind rose to a tidal wave. The smiles looked jaded. And my mind was a whirlpool of anguish at a lost world, a lost ambience that had nurtured my thoughts and skills. I had to learn afresh how to express the newness. Each image I tried to create became a mundane monologue. Voices seemed to merge into a cacophonous whole; language lost its variety. How could I capture on paper the polished utterances of corporate discussion and the chatter of coffee bars? They all spoke the same language. I was speechless.

And then you left the house to work. Your work replaced you between the sheets. The house was bereft of its clattering vessels, the hiss of its pressure cookers, and the tinkling of your anklets. The silence was a new challenge, though I had craved for it so. Was this the silence I wanted? Where was the companionship in this? Or had I pushed my companion away, engrossed in my new search as I was?

My mental encore for the mountains would not cease, and you would not come along with me. The accented language of your office chores had no space for the hill dialects that stimulated my thoughts. Your city had found you, but I had lost it. And yet, I tried to take you along, for one last time, to savour the rejuvenating pleasure of a rustic mountain hamlet. To traipse once again in the bubbling brooks and listen to their sound. Was I looking for inspiration? The city was like a fast beating pulse, bursting with variety and subject. I knew the admonishment in your mind. But I had to look for inspiration elsewhere. This was not my quest.
Was that an angry twitch of your brow that day, or your usual loving reprimand? Was it your message to me of what was to come? You did not smile from behind the pillar the day I left for the hills you once called home. Your embrace was soft and cool. My arms tried to carry away the remembered warmth of long ago.

You left me to the hills, Shahana, to survive, without you. The very hills from which you flitted into my mind space once. The hills whose fragrance spoke a language all its own to you alone. And I? I learnt your shared language with a hunger that blinded me to all else.
Is that why Shahana? Is that why?
For my incurable romance to die without its inspiration. To be born again, practical and realistic, an inspiration for myself.
You were right, as always. What you forgot was I would lose myself. My name and fame are superimposed on the self that was me. And my inspiration roams the hillsides in the clouds that gather at my window and slowly melt away. In the flowers that blossom and droop and wilt under my intense gaze to blossom and droop and wilt again the next day. You are eons away, successful in every endeavor. I am successful in my own way.

Sitting here tonight, under these half twinkling stars, I think back again. Shahana, I am not what I want to be, but I owe it to you, this what-ever-ness I carry with me, like so much extra flesh hanging in loose folds. I try to sift life through these folds and come back with emptiness. From those hills to this seaside, the journey was long and painful but you wanted me to be strong. And I am.

But a part of me waits, to turn back, one more time, and see the fragmentary smile meant for me, from behind the pillar of our house.