The Way You Look Tonight

 The bright orange blob of fire and gas rose over the placid, watery expanse of the Sheela as it did every day, blessing the world with vibrance and color, and I put my head on your shoulder, letting out a big yawn. I was tired, sleepy, and had recently undergone an extremely reluctant hike over the hill which now sat behind us just so that you could ‘feast your eyes upon the Sheelan sunrise’, as you liked to call it. I never could really see the appeal, to be honest. It was just a lake, the Sheela, and for the sun, well, it rose every day, did it not? 

 You were humming, I remember. Some western tune you’d heard the day before. Some-day...when I’m awfully low. That’s how it started. I remember because you were able to recall all of three lines from the lyrics. I didn’t like it much, but then I don’t like love songs in general. And to my twelve-year-old brain that song sounded especially stupid, you singing about the way I looked tonight when we were literally watching the sun rise before us. 

 We stayed there for a couple of hours, simply breathing in harmony. Silence never quite bothered us. That’s why we unnerved most of the other children we knew, I think. That, and their juvenile minds could not wrap their head around the fact that a boy and a girl could be friends with each other without the whole thing being ‘icky’. 

 It hurt me that it was going to be our last summer, together. When you know each other as long as we both have, the very prospect of not being within hollering distance of one another is vastly incomprehensible for a while. It took me a lot of time to digest that. But digest I had to. Well, I did feel happy for you, too, and that made things easier. You were finally going to go live in a big city. No more small-town stuff. You promised to write every week. I promised to reply.

 Sometimes I wonder how our relationship remained so platonic all those years growing up. You liked boys well enough, and I girls. I suppose it was a byproduct of being so young, and of having seen each other do such incredibly stupid things. The friendship was simply too strong, too old and too deep for it to blossom into something else. 

 We went to the lake every morning after that, for the entire summer. By the end, I didn’t need to ask Ma to wake me up, the alarm clock inside my body had long set itself to five in the morning. It’s funny, how years of school never managed to do something you achieved in a couple of months. It got annoying after you left, though. What on earth was I supposed to do at five o’clock?       

 Closing my eyes again was pointless, I knew sleep wouldn’t welcome me back. So, I started running along that trail going up the hill again, by myself. The looming trees that formed a canopy above the path and the short bushes that lined it, the smell of fresh earth in the morning mingling with the occasional scent of wildflowers. What once seemed repulsive was now inviting. That’s how I discovered that I loved it, really. I suppose I’ve got you to thank for the fact that I never missed a run since, for so many years, regardless of location or circumstance.

 You wrote extensively, describing your new, exciting life full of wild journeys and exhilarating adventures in the city of dreams, the one you’d longed to go to since we were little. You grew up, intricately and deliberately weaving a future for yourself that you would be content with and enjoy thoroughly. I grew up too, trying my best to vicariously live those rapturous moments alongside you while still being in our hometown, which remained a sleepy smudge in the history of time, at present as it was in the past, and will be in the future. Perennial and unchanging. 

 I wrote back, but my letters were pretty short compared to yours, and didn’t differ a great deal from each other. I think you felt sorry for me, I could leech out a sickly sense of pity from in between some of your lines. I wrote frequently of being happy and fulfilled, but I always knew that you thought I was lying. How could one be happy in such a small place in the middle of nowhere? You seemed to think my ambitions were captive; bound by a short, thick leash to an unyielding, iron pole. Truth is, I never harbored many. Maybe you did know that. Maybe that scared you.

 Whatever the reason, the frequency of your letters gradually slowed down. We had decided on one per week, on the shore of that lake all those years ago. Initially, you couldn’t stop yourself from writing, and I used to get not one but two, sometimes three letters a week. Old Jeet at the post office was familiar with the Sunday letters by now and would rise from his rickety chair and hobble over to hand them to me as soon as I walked in. After a year, that dropped to twice a month. After five, it was once in six. Old Jeet hobbled over less and less and shook his head more and more.

 You still wrote, the letters never stopped completely. I was so glad about your acceptance to that university in the States that I threw a small party at my house, in your name. A bunch of people came, we drank and reminisced for a bit. I drank perhaps a little too much, to soothe the ache of missing you, which by then had dulled considerably, but was still very much there.

 You graduated with honors, landed your dream job, working your way up the corporate ladder. I couldn’t help but notice the subtle differences in the ink you used, and the paper it was used on. Both grew richer, more elegant. I kept all of those letters in a big, dusty file, and placed it safe inside the bottom drawer of the old wooden cabinet by my bed. It’s still there, the file too. Some nights when I can’t sleep, I pull it out and leaf through the letters like one skims through a novel.

 My own life rambled on, slowly and pleasantly. I finished school, went to a much smaller university and got myself a degree in English, the only language I used to love then. Took a job at the local school, teaching disinterested teenagers tedious amounts of grammar and composition in a foreign tongue. I liked my job. It gave me loads of free time, most of which I spent either reading, writing, playing chess, or participating in a newfound hobby: catching fish. It seems the Sheela had always been teeming with them, I’d just never noticed it until old fisherman Kika forced me to join him one fine morning I’d gone there to run. It is a serene and contemplative practice. Some philosopher, I forget which, had remarked that each stroke of the razor you make while you shave is an act of meditation, if you want it to be. Fishing is somewhat like that. So is running. Both are strangely similar, in spite of being so widely different. 

 We got older, and the frequency of our correspondence trickled down to something like once a year. Most of the letter then contained brief summaries of what was going on in our lives, rather than us actually talking to each other about something. You told me much, and I inferred the rest. You kept getting promoted, and you couldn’t get enough. Then you told me you met someone. Again, I was so happy for you. Marriage followed shortly after and then later, you had two beautiful kids. I liked to imagine you living in one of those cozy suburbs with grand bungalows having wide front yards and wrap-around porches, the kind we used to look at in glossy-paged magazines when we were young.

 The letters also kept up their feelings of eternal curiosity and mild frustration too, I must say. Have I met someone? Am I applying for positions out of town, and more importantly, out of country? The questions changed, but their essence remained; they were slight variations on a single theme. To your credit, they never were tinged with any sort of disappointment. They were always meant to rouse me out of some slumber you thought I was in. There was none; I was totally awake. I think you did understand that later, but the questions, and the answers to them had now become a fond habit, a long-ingrained piece of formality.

 One irregularity took place sometime in between; old Jeet from the post office passed away. Wasn’t too surprising I suppose, he was an ever ancient being. Still, it shocked me to know that he was a hundred and five at the time. It was equally surprising to see how many people showed up at his funeral, too; it seems he touched the lives of nearly everyone in our town at some point or the other. There is so much we never know about people. 

 Anyway, that caused me to miss a couple of your letters, as Jeet used to come round the house with them whenever they arrived. Tia, the lady who replaced him, naturally wasn’t familiar with the arrangement, which was now almost forty years old itself. I got the letters after three-odd months, when I dropped by the post office to collect my copy of the annual chess magazine. Needless to say, the magazine got read later than it was intended to be. I needed to reply first.

 You were getting old, too, slowly and steadily. An ironic counterpoint to the pace of your life and your own temperament. But you were never one to grow despondent, you weren’t. You were largely free from family matters by then; your sons had grown up and moved out, and your husband took care of himself pretty well. So, you invested your time in starting a charitable organization funding international students, helping them with tuition fees that had made a cruel, exponential growth since the time you’d first paid them. A noble cause.

 By then, the decreasing pace of your life and of mine had brought the rate down to a letter every three to four years. Many people, over the course of decades, now had asked me whether I was in contact with you. I’d always reply with a big smile and a ‘yes of course’. Many asked me why you never came back, or why I never flew over to visit. I always kept the big smile intact, and gave a small shrug. They thought it was an awkward question, and never pushed it. But there was nothing awkward about it. We both knew what our lives were, and what we wanted from them. And what we meant to each other. We knew, inherently, that coming back was as hopeless an option for you as was catching a flight, for me. 

 Your last letter was three years ago, and I’m sure things have changed for you since then. I know they have for me. I did reply to that letter of yours a couple of years ago, but I write this because you need to know. Some months ago, I started having the worst coughing fits of my life. I attributed it to nothing more than being nearly seventy years old; but after a week I went to the local doctor all the same. He sent me, giving no diagnosis of his own, to a fancy doctor in the big city you’d moved to all those years ago. That one sent me for scans, and then after they were done, sat me down and gave a small, sad smile. It was cancer, pretty advanced. He told me that I had a year.

 This was about eight months ago. There have been ups and downs since then, but mostly downs. I don’t think this needs to be said, but this very well might be my last letter to you. I did not know what to write, so I just recounted it all. I know you know me very well, and I know you’ll understand that this morbid thing does not affect me as much as it does others. I am fine. I am at peace. I still walk to the lake every day; my legs won’t let me run anymore. I have a pension that is sufficient, and I still read, write, play chess, and fish. As much as I can. And I will continue to do so, until I can’t. 

 The endings of my letters have always been abrupt, but I think this one takes the proverbial cookie. I hope I find you and your family well.

Cheers.

* * *

 I do not feel like crying, even though I know I should. All I feel is a tranquil calmness; one that is very absolute, very final. I set his letter down and sit back in my armchair. Somewhere, I feel something settle down within me. Something that hadn’t rested in six decades. I call my agent and tell her to book my tickets. I have to go. 

* * *

 My hands tremble as I brush away the overgrowth covering the path to our spot by the lake. The spot is nothing like I remember, of course. Even if nothing’s really changed in those sixty-odd years, this is not what is seared into my memory, for the simple reason that I’ve never seen the place like this; utterly dark, cold and bathed in the ever so faint, white moonlight. We always came here at the crack of dawn, at the moment where things have only just begun to brighten under a yet sunless sky.

  As I stare at it longer, and the picture gains focus in the lens of my eye, I slowly grasp the curious similarities. The place is the same, yet so different. The cool against the warm; the black, blue and white against the red, yellow and green. The silent chirping of invisible crickets and the dry croaks of hidden frogs against the sweet calls of the Indian koel and the incessant squeaking of tiny squirrels. The quiet buzz of the day’s anticipation against the absolute stillness marking its end. Yin against Yang. Heads versus tails. 

 I lie on the shore that now feels so familiar, and a tune I haven’t really listened to in sixty years rises to my lips. I take his ghostly hand and pull his ghostly arm around my shoulder. I can’t see him, but I know he’s here with me. I sing to him, again, as the lyrics bubble up from within, altering themselves without my knowledge. 

Lovely, you never, ever changed.

You kept that breathless charm.

 I am aware of the silent tears that run down my cheeks for the wind is gentle but firm, cooling my warm face. I can almost feel him rolling his eyes.

I’m sorry I never arranged it, but I loved you.

 I look by my side and I see in my inner eye his youthful face; carefree, content, and beautiful. 

Just the way you look,

Tonight.

* * *

The pale reflection of a glorious star hangs high in the night-time sky, shining its white light on the world below, and a tiny fraction of that otherworldly light is reflected back into oblivion, by the calm waters of a tiny lake nestled between tiny mountains bordering a tiny town in the middle of a vast country. 

A curious twosome sits on its shores, one material and the other heavenly, dearly wrapped in a close embrace. Waiting, longing for the night to end and the darkness to vanish. In the hope of light, and of warmth, and of another day. In the hope of love, and of redemption, of creating, and of exploring. And more importantly, in the hope of feasting. 

In the hope of feasting their old, sore eyes on yet another sublime, Sheelan sunrise.