The wave, turning inside itself, rolls over to the shore and splashes the playfulness on the million sand particles. Each drop of water looks for its one in a million sand particle which with its heat can evaporate it on a summer afternoon because the evaporation will not push it to oblivion but to vapors and to clouds so that it can splatter back on the mirror of the ocean and make its way back to its one in a million sand particle, only to evaporate, and fall back, and meet, and rise, and fall, and touch, and fly, and drop in a circle of infinity. In the process, the sand particle keeps waiting for the drop in perpetuity with a hope to meet, ignorant of the fact that while it is easy to be lost in a million fellow particles, it still has its own physical shape, even if broken further into a thousand parts, one can pick it up and say ‘here is one grain of sand’, but the drop of water gets mixed with the many other drops of water – no drops of water remain, yet all remain, each on their way to find their sand grain. So, the journey may look like a circle in the conscience of both, it is neither a circle, nor a spiral; it is a journey of perpetual despair which exists only because there is a hope of togetherness. He would call this the oxymoron school of existence. When he first proposed to me in a garden, a bunch of grass instead of flowers, a chocolate instead of a ring, he told me I was his one in a million, and I had joked about the existence of a million and first, and that I was jealous of her.
Marriage is an agreement of two minds but a conjunction of two souls. We were inseparable. The first television, the first bed, the first refrigerator (on which we debated on whether we really need a double door), the first car, the first foreign vacation. On an evening in Florence when we were crossing Ponte Vecchio, a man with a flute and his son with a guitar were playing a tune, one of the generic European street performances that is so endearing for someone who witnesses them for the first time. We stopped to listen, and unexpectedly, he took me in his arms, and we embraced like the petals of a rose curling inwards to protect the inner gentleness of its heart. I wanted him to say ‘I love you’ but soon the reality of the surrounding crawled slowly through our ears and into our minds, and we separated, the string connecting our souls stretching like elastic, still holding us together in the past. He said ‘Let’s leave’ but after walking a few steps, he stopped and turned back to stare at the spot where he had held me, and I was happy.
We created our own world like a tent with the fabric with which flowers are made, stitched together by the threads of love, disputes, laughter, cries, hope, and hopelessness. In the tent, one night, after we had seen our friends off after a late-night party, I saw him sitting in a corner, with a book in his hands. I looked around at the empty bottle of beer, plates with crumbles of food, a bowl of leftover watermelons, and an aftermath of an evening well spent with the people we loved. I stood next to him, but clearly, he did not want to be disturbed. He was reading a Virginia Woolf novel he had always intended to read and was smiling. Maybe he was imagining himself as one of the characters in the book, in one of the hilarious scenes of the story. He had always wanted to write a book, and own a bookstore, but the age of long-cherished dreams seemed to have been the culprit, and as he said, he had peaked early, and that he had no stories to tell anymore. I walked up to the window of the tent and peered outside at the night that covered the world. The silence was calming, reassuring. Suddenly, I turned back to look at him, and a fear grasped me. I sensed that this happiness, this feeling of completeness, every moment is continuously becoming past at a speed unfathomable to me. I realized there was nothing called Present; the moment you realize it, you have already walked into the Future, and you are peeking into the life that was. I opened my phone to scroll through one of the social media apps to divert my mind from the darkness, from the fear of failure that always piggybacks success, from the fear of despair that always accompanies hope, and in one of the many posts, there were rumors about a new strain of a flu virus that was spreading fast in China.
—
After struggling for five hours to get an oxygen cylinder and despite being at the costliest hospital of the city (because with money comes a perception of assurance), I couldn’t help him live the life he had planned with me. The breath, the rise and fall of his chest, the slow thumps of his heart that I had known so dearly – all of them stopped in a synchronous hit of a thousand hammers, and he died with his hands in mine. We had dreamt of living together for a hundred years but I failed him after just three years. All around, there were cries, people were begging, bribing, shouting, but nothing mattered anymore. In that moment of our last seconds together, neither he nor I could see each other’s face. He had bought me the mask with an ethnic design.
—
The house had large windows in each room, and through them the wind was habituated to pass and get blocked by two people, and often they were one. Now the wind stopped, and in its place, an unexpected array of air entered the house, and blew through the house uninterrupted. The frames flapped on the wall and woke her up from a deep sleep. With her eyes half open, she saw him lying next to her, in his usual posture of an infant, mildly snoring. Reminded of the dinner last night with friends, and the scary thoughts of present instantly transforming into past, she stretched her arms, her arms that were addicted to his shape, more to reassure herself. They went empty. Her eyes now fully open saw the vacant side of the bed and her lungs inhaled a deep breath. Two drops of tear formed in her eyes, one in each, but the grain of sand, with its heat evaporated them. Waiting perpetually.
—
- Which book are you reading?
- To the Lighthouse.
- Are you enjoying it?
- Very much. But I enjoy you more.
- Fuck off.
—
- What are you eating today?
- Let’s order something. Chinese?
- Since when have we started to order together? You order yours and I will order mine.
- Then I am not going to bring both of our foods from the gate.
- Ok fine. I’ll go.
—
- I think it’s time we should have a baby?
- Are you mad?
—
Unable to sleep in the wake of the morning, she opened her news app. Yesterday’s count of worldwide deaths due to the pandemic had finally crossed one million.
As of 24-Apr-2021, the Covid-19 pandemic has killed 3.09MM people. It has taken away 3.09MM people from the lives of those who loved them. Every death is a life lost, love lost, companionship lost, dreams lost, laughter lost, future lost. Life cannot be reduced to a statistical metric. That one more death will not even show any change in the value of 3.09MM, and as I write that has indeed happened somewhere in the world, and the counter didn’t move. Many will not even be reported, they will not even be considered worthy enough to be a part of the statistic. But someone somewhere in the past would have laughed because of their words, would have felt safe because of them, would have dreamt a future with them. This is what eventually matters.
One in a million.
Disclaimer: Few ideas have been taken from the words of Virginia Woolf.
Shishir Chaudhary 
Leave a comment