Everything has been washed. Everything is pure, pure like the rains that came cascading on a cool Colombo afternoon. I sit on the settee enjoying the complete feeling of being cleansed, bare bodied in an old sarong.
I am extremely comfortable. The settee’s long enough for my body to drape above it and settle on to the old indents made on it by me, for years now. Years of long Colombo rain showers, sitting and watching the rain come down. Watching it in full flow and then enjoying the very comfort of a monsoon storm past.
The rain drops race each other on the telephone wire strung across outside our balcony. The front door is open welcoming the fresh relief of the storm. As soon as one batch of rain drops race and fall, my eyes catch another, and another.
The wires seen through my front door seem to imprison me to the settee. Itself adding to my comatose feeling of inaction of a full stomach and lying still on the settee. My eyes blink, I breathe comfortably, my chest falls up and down slowly, the only sign of life, and yes, I am home.
Yet the open door itself is a symbol of my prison. For I do not exit it. The couch is the handcuff that holds me. Beyond the wires I see a clear blue sky, the church spire and the rooftops of the houses in front of ours. I new day beckons. Yet I lie staring, trapped in my own world, of inaction.
I dream yet only of my first cigarette, coughing, then that satisfying head rush that comes only to those virgin to the joys of smoking.
My first love, the most wonderful feeling in the world. Kissing her for the first time, that unbelievable feeling of wonder and love.
My first car, the joy and heartache of owning and running a constantly breaking down proverbial red beetle.
7 shri 4743, my chariot, the god gifts to those who believe. I didn’t bother.
Travel and tribulations in foreign lands. Lands where dreams come true in the physical manifestation of buxom blondes and all too willing brunettes.
Finding my Queen, then another and another.
Endless nights, brushes with death, pleasure and pain.
Life, beyond the racing raindrops, the telephone wire, racing my way, running away from the third world.
Realising too late, how much the world itself has prisoned me.
Tell me; was the grass any greener, the wine and women more willing than my true love? 11 shri 417 or was it 517, yellow Colt GLX for sure I remember. Only a few will.
I still think of her, does she know that? Will I have the indecency to disrupt her world of house, husband and two sons? Never. Even if it’s to say hi.
Will Charon, as I pay him be able to give meaning to the nothingness in my world?
Never, never, never, never, never ever will she allow me to hurt her again. Not her.
Now.
If I was American, I would have sat on that settee, shooting those racing raindrops down, you know?
We use to walk back from ballet class, all the way down Duplication Road. Bumping into each other, our hands touching, secretly. Her driver would walk behind us the chaperon, and the gatekeeper.
“When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.”
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
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