Autumn Effect

The horizon was refuging the sun as he was losing his glory. The earth was going artificial as if draped with the sheet of hypocrisy. The dogs had started hooting as if moaning over some foreseen disaster and the sky was getting pale waiting silently for the storm. As I waited for my girlfriend in the same restaurant in which we first dated, from the window I could see a tree which at the time of our first date was very young and small and I remembered due to my financial incapability, I plucked some flowers from it for her, and those not so beautiful flowers despite of being devoid of any seductive fragrance, became the real adhesion for our relationship, filling our lives with the colours of love and affection. But today that tender plant had grown into a long strong tree standing alone egotistically against the fury of Autumn. Just when i was thinking about this tree, I felt the storm tremorizing my heart, mind and soul as I saw my girlfriend coming straight to me with a better pace, longer strides and firmer expressions than usual. I knew that she was in a hurry but now realized it to be an agitation rather than the eagerness. Today, for the first time I missed to greet her as a queen, may be because i was completely paralyzed by the tumult in her eyes, and surely nor did she desire, at this point of time, to be welcomed. She sat down quietly, as if in some ritual, hoping me to start the proceedings. But i was more engrossed in fixing her up in my eyes memorizing those beautiful days that we had spent together, the mesmerizing colourful monsoon evenings we danced with each other, and now this last date of ours in this autumn, storming our relationship forever. 

The rich girl was leaving the country tonight. Our love couldn't bound her since now she had started feeling like being chained and fettered. She felt differently. We had always been different from entirely different communities with exceedingly different social and financial status and totally different beliefs, she was explorative and tasteful, while I was conservative, I was a man of principle while she was the one with practical understanding and reasoning. But this was not the problem. After all, despite of all these differences, which we knew before hand, we had accepted each other. The real problem was the only thing we had in common amongst us, i.e., our towering ego. I had always given my work preference over her often even cancelling our committed dates without any regret or apology making her doubtful about my dedication towards the relationship. But I was not the only villain in spoiling our relationship, she was also very dominating, considering me to be her slave and never even made an attempt to understand my feelings and emotions. She had always been on the driver's seat in our relationship, though more often than not, at the most crucial drives and the most critical moments, I used to refuse to sit in the car. 

The sun along with its warmth had by now completely disappeared and the coldness of our hearts was grilling our relationship. I broke the deadly silence, though not getting the right words tried to be British and talked about the weather, watching that lonely tree shedding its leaves, twigs and branches in that thundering storm losing everything it had nurtured over all these months. But she appeared disinterested, probably in me, and while slowly sipping her coffee, she was silently gazing at the white band of skin on my wrist. It had been the place for the world's most beautiful watch which she had presented me on my birthday. But today there was a vacuum, though not bigger than the vacuum that was developing into our hearts, and this place was vacant since on this very ominous morning it slipped from my hand shattering into innumerable un-unifiable pieces, making me feel as if a protest by this poor timekeeper who refused to keep the time for a person who don't have a time even for his beloved. I felt embarrassed, but what could I do. In fact, many a times I was tempted to burst out and show my heart to her, but I still had the sophistication and self-esteem to control and console myself. I knew that she was also struggling and waited eagerly hoping her to show at least some sign of emotion, but evidently my girlfriend was stronger and more obstinate than me. 

The storm didn't seem to be in a mood of stopping, nor was the tree, which had now started getting uprooted, was ready to bow down and I started praying as it was the only thing I could do, hoping for some miracle to happen. But what even could God do when none of us was ready to patch up and save our love. Though I had full faith on our love, but today even our 'true love' was suffering in front of our unreasonably large mountain of ego. Finally she spoke, but not to me, but to the waiter asking him for the bill. She paid her bill. We both paid our bills and as she hurried back, I saw the tree completely uprooted by the storm and was dead forever.

A Successful Failure

It was a nice warm summer evening and I was sitting quietly in my house’s veranda. It had been a long day with little activity but now it was more than an hour that I had been sitting here and working on this old specimen still present in my house. Though my work was a bit engrossing but I couldn’t keep myself from seeing all sort of beautiful colours of spectrum presented by the nature. The sky had turned from blue to orange to pinkish red and was now slowly getting a purple tinge to its shade. The fiery sun was done with his wrath and was now running out of his fuel for the day, so the people had now started coming out of their homes. Otherwise it had been very quiet except for the sweet melodious chirruping of birds often harmonized by the cooing of pigeons and also the occasional, though now getting more frequent, cool breezes with leaves waving as if dancing after the whole day austere ascesis. When suddenly my mother came with a completely pale terrified face. Her eyes had a queer familiar fear, her expressions were frozen and her lips trembled as she screamed “murder! Another innocent cold bloodedly murdered”. Screw driver slipped from my hand as I drew off my eyes from the victim machine that I had opened. I have been in this habit right from my childhood when I used to sever my toys, if not by mechanical tools then by brute force, and many other small things like torch and clocks, and now that I had been in the engineering college, this hobby of mine was getting a mania with my recent few major victims being a calculator, an old tape-recorder, computer monitor and the kitchen grinder and this time it was a CD player. My mother calls it a ‘cold blooded murder’, of course it might be to her but it was definitely not innocent. First it had stopped working properly it was only then that I destroyed, err opened it up in order to treat it but often after my treatments it becomes almost impossible for even a mechanic to treat these gadgets. I tried to calm down and console my mother after all being in IIT for all these years had taught me how to properly say ‘just chill’. I also told her that now being a half engineer I could easily treat this CD player but she being aware and confident of my failure rate with these machines didn’t settle. In fact earlier she used to call me engineer though I was not and used to wreck these machines more severely but now despite of my being into a technical college, she had restrained herself from calling me even a mechanic and now calls me, as I have already told, a ‘murderer’ and that too cold blooded.

Well, when everything fails, it’s the knowledge that dominates. Knowing that it was difficult to calm her down, I started a vulgar show of my technical knowledge from engineering terminology to various physical laws that may not have even a remotest connection with this poor CD player. I told her Newton’s law of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution and even didn’t hesitate in stating Einstein’s E=mC² (God may know the connection). The sari clad simple serene lady who left her studies some twenty five years back and had a little knowledge about science and technology had to surrender in front of these complex abstruse jumble of words. But she was not disarmed. She had something that could change everything; she had a question that I couldn’t answer. She asked me about where was the lighter with which I was playing the last night. The kitchen lighter was out of tune for the last few days and the night before when everybody had slept I silently ransacked it from the kitchen and brought it to my room and just like today had planned to return it back to its position unnoticed. But God knows how did she sense it or was it just her guess. I didn’t know, nor did I have courage to confirm it. But anyway she knew it as she always knows but she never complained to my father, though we had little to spare. She loved me and I knew that.

This reality about the lighter was a shock to me and I knew that the lighter was not in a shape to be returned back but I still had the strength to maintain my sophistication. I shouted “Eureka! See that’s the problem in the CD player, but now I have corrected it” and to my surprise I succeeded at least in driving her attention away from that traitor lighter and finally she had some settlement on her face as she looked hopefully towards me as I repack the CD player. It reminded me of one of my tutorial professor who knowing that we can’t solve the problems and ultimately he himself would have to solve them, looked at us with hope as we drew some cartoons in our register. I wonder where does all this hope come from. Whatever be the source, I was satisfied that she still had at least some faith left in my caliber and that there may be a chance to convince her even the next time. When I was done, I inserted a CD into the player and pressed the play button as she silently waited for the music. But before the CD player could produce some music, I broke the silence and said “mummy, lets buy an iPod”.