The Spaceman

Gagan was starting to feel an itch on his right arm, that spot inside the elbow but there was no way he could reach there, he would have to make do with a kind of scratching through his space suit.

He tried, but it was wholly unsatisfying, the slight friction through the thick material. He tried to distract himself by going over the details of the task ahead of him, but his mind kept slipping, a badly behaved child. 

Time stretched ahead of him, as did space, Gagan a little speck in a space suit, a little heartbroken speck in a space suit, while confronted by his own littleness and mortality could only think of her, of how he wished he was picking a stray strand of her hair off his arm (exactly from that spot where it was itching) in mock irritation, of how she would laugh and say, “What to do, Gagan, I’m going bald. Soon I won't have any hair left!"  

Every morning (Whose morning? Or was it night?) in the uncomfortable zero gravity cabin which he was still getting used to, right before he opened his eyes, he’d spend a few minutes awake, pressing into the warmth of her memory. 

Now Gagan remembered a cabin in a little hill town that his family had driven up to a holiday, when he was around ten years old. They stayed at a cabin, which was owned by a tall man with a beard. He had mystical bright eyes, and said that he was in contact with the Superenergy. He had a lot of crystals around his cabin. He said that helped him reach the Superenergy better. He had long hair and wore flared pants. There was something otherworldly about him. When he spoke about Superenergy, each of them felt a tug in their heart for not having been in touch with it themselves. They all wanted to be on whatever frequency this man was on, just because he was so charismatic, drawing them all in with his words. That was back when Gagan’s aunt Raksha was still around. This was the last family trip they did with her. She died a year later, taking with her a light, her laugh, and an uncanny knack for guessing the winning numbers in the Sunday lottery.  

When he was older he and a few friends drove to that same town for a weekend trip. He remembered revelling in the attention of Sandhya, a loud Malayali girl with a mole on her eyelid. As they passed the town, flashes came back to him in fragments, and something felt was drawing him in. He broke off from the group and went searching for the cabin. 

When he finally arrived there, he noticed that it had a very different look after all those years. It looked like a faded photograph. There was an elderly man sitting outside, staring at nothing. When Gagan tried to talk to him, he didn’t say respond, but a younger boy came out from the back to see what was going on. Over a cup of chai, he told him of how the owner had bought an old dilapidated fort up in the mountains, and retired there. He lived there alone, according to this boy, surrounded by crystals of all shapes and sizes. He came down once a month for supplies, but apart from that he lived a life of solitude.

In his space suit he wondered if that tall man with bright eyes ever felt as lonely as he did at this moment. Perhaps not, if he had the Superenergies for company.  

Back at home, today was the day of Zulfia’s wedding. She would cry a little as she signed the contract. She herself wouldn’t know if she was crying for herself, for her lost love who was now orbiting the world at 7.6 kilometres per second, or for her father who would now truly be alone.

What Bollywood films had taught Gagan as a young boy was that when a person dies, they become a star. Gagan looked around him, at the debris flying around him. If people became stars that watched over the world for the rest of eternity, what were these debris made of? The loves that didn’t work out? And then what about the other celestial bodies? Was every meteor perhaps a missed connection?

Gagan felt a rush of satisfaction thinking of Zulfia's father’s pain of separation from his only daughter. “Good, may he have this and more”, thought Gagan passionately. That was not the worst he could wish upon the man who had caused the most painful severance of his life. It had been even more extreme than than losing his Aunt Raksha, which was the first death he experienced. It took him a many years to realise that he was in love with her, as much in love with someone that a ten year old can be. Her death had caused a large void in him, which now that he thought about it, felt similar to the sensation of flying over the earth.

The operation that was supposed to take a month had extended because of technical glitches, and then extended some more, and then kept extending, and now Gagan had lost track of how much time had passed, there was too much time, it felt too vast, and space which stretched on, and somewhere below him the love of his life was getting married.

“Gagan Gagan Gagan Gagan”, he chanted out loud, as he found himself doing quite often, just as a reminder and an anchor. He was roughly over Africa when she was officially declared married. He looked out at the planet the whole time the spacecraft was passing over the beautiful Nile, far up from thousands of kilometres away. How simple life seems when viewed at this scale, but his heartbreak didn’t seem small, his yearning for her hadn’t faced a similar reduction in scale. 

Floating through debris and meteors and space junk, he held on ever tighter to an image of Zulfia in his head - her expression in the morning after their first time. Shy, but excited, she tentatively reached a hand out and placed it on his chest. They lay silently beside each other for what felt like hours. 

He would experience fifteen times the number of dawns than she would, feeling the pain of this particular dawn fifteen times over, as he flew over the home he could not return to. 

Maybe thoughts of Zulfia would eventually fade, and the pain, like the grief of Raksha's death, would dull over time. But in a way, he held on to it, almost cherished it, in these lonely skies. But as much of a loop thoughts about her felt like, maybe this was the only way to identify himself amongst all these other particles around him, hurling to unknown destinations. They had nowhere to go, no promises to keep, no stations to fix. "Maybe that's what life is - ", thought Gagan to himself " - finding things to hold on to till we all become stars ourselves. "