Apples

I get a call from an unknown number. Who the hell can it be to disturb my sleep.

‘Hi! This is Jaheen here. Your red apples rejuvenated me…’

For the past few months, I have felt an incurable hole at the centre of my heart, like Saleem Sinai had in Midnight’s Children, which has become an eternal part of my existence. After the failure of the cardiologists in providing me with a momentary relief, I want to attribute the cause of this hole to the lack of having some friends—female friends, not male ones. Some of you might find it ridiculous, if not a pathological manifestation of love, as most of my male friends find it (because for them this is a form of cognitive masturbation), and it is this lack of empathy on their part that alienates me from them on many occasions and drives me to find some friends of the opposite sex.

Many times I feel like David Lurie from Disgrace — do I need to castrate myself to resolve this conflict? But how to castrate my mind that is the progenitor of all these aspirations? I often contemplate this, lest the dehumanising mechanisms of science should invent some device to operate on and castrate my cognitive apparatus and all its frustrated aspirations, abortive desires and erotic impulses.

Immersed in these philosophical and biological thoughts, I couldn’t realise when my train arrived at Wayanad station. Malayali was always Greek to me therefore I had to struggle for half an hour before our local co-ordinator Thomas talked to the autowallah and directed him to drop me at the Apostolic Centre, a fort-like place, surrounded by hills from all the sides, six kilometers away from the bustling city of Wayanad.

The mere imagination of spending an entire month with twenty odd beautiful women, apart from the remaining men, 24/7, of course except the sleeping hours, filled me with unfathomable pleasure. I fell in love with the promiscuous, lush vegetation of the place and, more importantly, with all the twenty women. What! Twenty women! Yes, love is promiscuous.

I often fall in love twice a day with the same person.

One fine morning, when I was having my breakfast with Hannah Sweeney, the first person to arrive in the apostolic centre for the Theory-Praxis course we were enrolled in, trying to make her understand my half-baked understanding of Indian culture, Jaheen appeared, drenched, in a red t-shirt and blue jeans, May being the peak time of monsoon in Kerala. I was lost in the midst of her sensuous lips, red attire, dishevelled hair, the rain and thunder, my heart heaved and I stammered even while saying Hi.

‘So, are you from Bengal?’ She took my Bihari accent to be that of a Bengali.

‘No, I’m from Delhi.’

A couple of post-lunch and post-dinner perambulations exposed my vulnerability to her honey-melting voice that was at its prime when she sang some Assamese songs and her way of saying ‘yes’ and ‘yeah’ in her semi-American accent plunged me into an abyss of oblivion. Some shared frustrations about the existing educational system and our conviction regarding the gulf between the theory and the praxis brought us closer.

If someone tries to wake me up early in the morning, say, five o’clock, the first thought that comes to my mind is to smash his head and spend the rest of my life sleeping peacefully in a prison. So, when somebody knocked thrice on my door early in the morning, I flew into a rage and was about to say “fuck off”! But as soon as I heard ‘Hi! This is yoga time’ in a lyrical voice that was worth a billion dollars, my heart did a complete somersault and the abusive f word got transformed into ‘f-fantastic to see you so early!’ Within ten minutes I was downstairs and I exhibited such skills in yoga that our yoga teacher must have felt insecure about his job, let alone the fact that for the next ten days I suffered from cramps. ‘God has punished you because of your evil designs’ said one of my co-participants.

Who says love makes you a poet? I say love makes you an acrobat.

The journey from the yoga camp to the St. Joseph hospital was a difficult one, especially when I had to act as a surrogate father, not lover, in order to console her by taking two drops of her tears on my finger tips and flicking them away, while she lay in bed, listless. ‘You know, for the first time when I went to Delhi I had acute jaundice. Doctors had forbidden me to travel but I did it. Pneumonia is not incurable; I have brought some apples, have one you will feel better.’ Next day she flew to Guwahati via Delhi.

We had fifteen more days to go. The lush vegetation of the place with which I had fallen in love, love at first sight, suddenly appeared to me a part of the concentration camp, holocaust already having been done, burning my mind inch by inch and leaving some cinders to cherish her memory. The camp started showing its true colours. The telepathic communication that was established between me and other participants made them fall ill one after another, I being the second victim, puking eight times within one hour before I was admitted to the same hospital. After her sudden departure, I dreamt of her for seven consecutive nights—dreams which became nightmares, tinged with longing.

“Animesh, since then every time my phone rings, or I step out of my room, some distant hope of encountering her makes me excited but very soon this veneer of excitement begins to crack.” Once her songs and her honey-tongue melted me, later on her tears froze me, now her eternal absence eats at my insides like a termite.

The coffee Animesh was to have remained untouched, as he seemed on the verge of crying, after listening to my story. As soon as I saw he was getting emotional all my suppressed emotions burst out and took the form of uncontrollable tears. Before he left he tried to console me in various ways. As soon as he left I was struck by how I could be moved to cry at the lie I had concocted for myself in order to narrate him a tale and how gullible, finally, he turned out to be. To tell you the truth I never went to Wayanad, never met anybody called Jaheen, nor did I ever fall in love.