Weightless

 I am often writing poems and stories and random sentences which I find pretty and loquacious, but I mostly lose them to some unsaved drafts or old newspapers. So I have decided to bring wha I could salvage here. Here is the first among them. This was a short story I wrote some moths back.

As she stood at the precipice of time and the terrace, for the first time in a very long time, she was overcome by a calmness. All she needed to do was take a step and all will be well, There was of course the weightlessness. Suddenly, all the burdens were lifted magically - she would not have to worry anymore, she would not have to work herself to the bone, she would not have to listen to the constant barrage of others. There for a moment and several moments afterwards she flew, fluttered like a feather blown away by wind. That’s when she realised - she was the feather, going where the wind was taking her, with no agency of her own. All she needed to do was spread her wings. So she took a step back and almost hit the cross-crossing clothes lines, and went down the stairs where real life awaited her.

How do you go on when everything seems to have come to a standstill? Nobody said this will be simple, nobody said it will be easy. As she took each step through the dampened stairwell, she wondered how life brought her to this juncture. Starting over at fifty was difficult , and if that starting over was a matter of heart it was even more so. But love is love after all, it doesn’t know age. Madhura had loved when she was young. It was the love of youth, full of promises and whispers, but it was not to be. The young man who had charmed her off her feet with his witticism and poetry was an intellectual whose politics brought about his downfall. He was one of those many unnamed numbers who lost their lives in some bylane somewhere, gunned down probably. He just stopped coming to college one day and no one knew of his whereabouts. She knew what happened to him, everyone knew but were too scared to say it out aloud. They said he was missing, and from that day she lost her love. She made a silent vow to remain bethrothed to him for this lifetime and that was the road she took. In a family of seven siblings no one really bothered her to get married. The family was happy with her handling the finances. 

Only now, when suddenly life threw a fresh breath of air her way that her otherwise disinterested family suddenly woke up. Rahul was so far away from the young poet who had stolen her young heart. Maybe if he lived, he would be somewhere close to this man? Rahul held her hand and promised a life of comfort and dignity. No more of living in a room which was getting crowded and then over crowded by the hoard of increasing nephews and nieces. As the spinster aunt it was her job to be the babysitter, the caretaker of the parents and the owner of every other odd job that her married and hence otherwise occupied siblings could not take up. Somewhere between feeling sorry for her when grief first struck her and leading their own lives, everyone forgot about the girl and eventually the woman who was tending to a wound. Rahul was perhaps the first to understand and love her more for it. She was never considered a grown up who would have any opinions even though she would be financing things from painting the house to renovating the kitchen. It was only now, in the last couple of weeks, when Madhura told them that she was planning to get married that everyone suddenly woke up. 

‘Getting married! At this age?’

‘ what will people say?’

‘It’s your age to retire and you want to go for your honeymoon?’

‘Have you lost your mind?’

Taunts came thick and plenty from every quarter. Even the young children sniggered behind her back. As Madhura walked down, she thought to herself, all of them were so comfortable till I was paying the bills and behaving like a furniture. This real person with a heart and mind of her own had no place here. She stepped into her room where the nephews and nieces were scampering for space. They fell into a silence as she walked in. Madhura looked at the little faces, all rife with judgement and admonition. She got together a couple of things and started to leave when someone called her, ‘Are you going to that Rahul?’

Madhura looked back and smiled, ‘Maybe. For now I am going away from you.’

And just like that, she flew, not weightless, but soaring.