My way and the highway

I’m on the way to our noisy tinsel town today. I’m leaving behind the quaint Pune, the dusty villages, road side special chais, murky ponds, dirty toilets, and the surreal calm of watching sun set over the lush green fields.

The Pune –Bombay highway is surely ‘something’. It has an extra-ordinary capacity to make tiring journeys meaningful; I begin to believe that the long seemingly unending roads have some cosmic power to indulge one in nostalgia. My past like a puppet dances in front of my eyes. Memories, so much like those voyeuristic waves of the ocean that pay frequent visits to watch the many couples sitting hand in hand by Bandstand, visit me.

Romance. Tease. Mush. Couples. Couples that seem a little wary of the onlookers , but very comfortable in their world of innocent loves. Like two birds perched on a treetop nestling upto each other, as if they live in a fantasy land where only they and their love for each other exists. How beautiful to be lost in the idea of forever loves.

I too spent few such years here; growing up in a city that presented to me a world of possibilities. The world of glitter that awes small town girls didn’t spare me, it implored me to break free from the claustrophobic small town ideals. Life surely comes a full circle. To be here again today after all these years, but craving to go back to the small world I have created for myself, quite funny.

Cities take on human forms, it seems. Strangely enough,evoking different sentiments at different times. A city that meant ‘returning to teens’ for many years, means only one thing to me now. The city that ‘he’ lives in. The city that he breathes in. The city he is fighting to survive in. The city that must surely be teaching him many interesting lessons, different from my own lessons yet similar.

I begin to wonder if he has walked by this road I now travel by, and if I’m stepping on the pavements that he has left his marks on. I wonder if he has stood by the road, hands in the pocket, wandering aimlessly, pondering over a million things, like I do now. He must have.

Did he leen against this wall and sip a ‘maaza’ to quench his thirst on a humid afternoon? Did he look up angrily at the sun and wipe the sweet off his forehead with his long fingers, standing right here. Or may be he was here on a sleepless night and stared into the oblivion.

Did he think about me, while walking past this bakery that reads my name? And if and when he did, what was I doing there in Bangalore? Did we think of each other fondly at exactly the same point in time and if we did, were we connected in some form?

Did he walk by my college and stare at the t-shirt clad girls who study there now? Did he wonder how I looked like back then? Did you even realize it is this college that I went to.

Did he decide to taste the first rains during last season and walk out to get drenched, just like I did at 18? Did the rain drops kiss his lips the way I had, did he go on to fantasize kissing me on the road the way we had in other cities? Did I exist in some form in his mind, in the empty places around him? Did we ever belong together in his mind, or in any space in this city, the way ‘we’ do in mine?

He calls me on the mobile when I’m lost in such thoughts, he speaks to me for a minute and he talks business. He speaks to me like we are strangers. As if there was never an intimate relationship between us ever. Like he doesn't know how I look first thing in the morning, like I don’t know how he moans when I bite his ears. Like we never dreamt of this world in which he, me and our children live a fairy tale life.

He talks like I’m ‘me’. He is "he". And ‘we’ don’t exist. And we never existed.May it doesn’t. Infact, I’m sure it does not. Not for him.

I wonder if “we” can exist only in my mind, in my space, in my world. May be it can. Maybe I’m happy with this. May be it hurts. I reach my guest house.

I move on. From the Pune-Mumbai highway.