Reflections

It has been raining intermittently for the last ten hours, which has impelled me to stay cocooned inside my room, depriving me of any form of pleasure that I derive from jogging. Such monotonous evenings always give me a pretext to think of you, to write something to you, which I know I will never be able to do because I am afraid you will misinterpret facts as fiction and fiction as facts. Despite this I want to write something in order to preserve the precious memory of mine, especially the way I thought of you,dreamt of you, tried to understand you and ended in failure, as this particular piece of writing is a work of personal history, not of incidents but of memory.

For the first time when I saw you I felt you were like an angel, inaccessible, utterly different from others but ultimately I realised that you were also a part of the crowd, cold, distant - women have formed a union. Please don’t think I’m a misogynist or a male chauvinist. I think it was Robert de Niro who said something similar in the film Taxi Driver, and I know that de Niro has millions of female fans all over the world. What I like most about this movie is his self-confidence and wit that he exhibits in the conversations he strikes with the woman he likes, who works as a campaigner in the presidential elections, apart from his extremely alienated existence that precedes and follows his frustrated love life. There is nothing except this sense of persistent failure that we have in common.

I can recall all our conversations - where a sense of compulsiveness to speak more in order to hide my nervousness and to counter the overwhelming effect you had over me - pervaded my reason, and with hindsight I realised that because of this act of mine these talks became like two parallel lines, never meeting. I became like that inefficient professor who, having nothing substantial to offer to his students, comes to the class with five or six books, speaks ceaselessly, throws some jargons, talks about theory superficially, and brings an element of theatricality into his voice. There was one more person, in fact, one of my teachers, who used to exercise such overarching influence on me. I remember thinking how he used to enquire about the exams and results and how I used to reply about my health and weather. Oh, it was not pederastia, dear! I’m straight. But, totally unconnected, like parallel lines...

To move from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, I planned to wreak revenge on you, and I decided I would never, ever think of you, would not talk about you – no, not even to myself. But things turned out to be different: I often dreamt of our classroom, where all the familiar faces were present except yours. I tried calling you but couldn’t reach you; thus in all of my dreams you became an absent presence, and a persistent fear of losing you forever (though I really never had you in the first place) transformed these dreams into nightmares. In one such dream I saw that we were married but even after five or six days of marriage I was unable to see you. I had understood Freud’s concepts of neurosis, displacement and condensation instantly (as if the dreams were the moments of epiphany), which would have taken ages, had I read all the dry volumes of psychoanalytic criticism.
Having understood that you had become an inextricable part of my unconscious I started looking for you in the library, market place, restaurants, book shops and all other places where human beings could register their presence. And, when I found you absent from all these places, for a while I felt like a character from Anjum Hasan’s novel Lunatic in My Head, and accused the whole city, including you of conspiring against me, thwarting my plans of seeing you. On one such afternoon, I came to my room and slept for almost two hours, and when I woke up I was down with fever, crushed under the weight of loneliness. Suddenly I was overpowered by a desire to talk to you, and I called you without deciding the topic of the conversation, which made my condition utterly ridiculous, as I ended up asking you to do something I could have done myself or many of my close friends, who are techno-savvy, could have easily done within seconds.
To add one more insignia to this list of emotional crap, I can recall a line from the Italian film Malena: True love is always unrequited. Though this line is uttered by a thirteen-year old boy in the movie, love being an irrational discourse, pushes one’s thoughts and reason to their limits, and blurs the boundary between the young and the old. In a true sense love is a classical example of sublime, as it cannot be represented in words. I’m, then, trying to represent something which is unrepresentable. You see why am I a failure?