“There are fewer empty papers in our world right now,” she wrote, “but the winds still blow where they please.” That was it. No “hello, how have you been?” Or perhaps the flattering, “I am hiding where we last met, where are you now?” But no. It was just this one sentence sent to my inbox at five in the morning. Outside my room’s only small window, blue birds in geometric flocks were fleeing across the vast golden sky. Pundits and old pilgrims were making their way towards the temple. Squirrels were sprinting across the banyan tree and the front lawn. I thought I could faintly hear these footsteps.
She had used a pseudonym account. But I knew it was her by the way her sentence dangled on my screen. And I remembered then, who knows why, that night in our lives when she was my lady midnight and our city was in a riot. Delhi, a few months before the lockdown, back when I was still learning to peel pomegranates. Students in universities, our juniors, were out on the streets taking beatings from the cops we were all so afraid of. A friend called me that night. The cops have entered the campus, and many are bleeding from the nose, he said.
She messaged me that evening.
“Come to me the night is cold,” she said. I was still struggling with the unpeeled pomegranate. I had become a grown man with desire in my embrace, but I was still a child with unpeeled fruits. Here I was, barely making it through life, and my juniors were all ready for war. Of course I was ashamed. I remember so many sirens wailing. I played my favorite Bill Evans recording, Peace Piece, and sat on the balcony with my dog, looking out onto the street that wasn’t yet burning.
She met me wearing a thin maroon nightgown and some of her usual sadness. She wanted to talk but I wanted to sleep. I never told her that her presence made me sleepy. Something about being beside her made me lose all sense of myself, like sleep does, no? The lamp that looks like fire, that sandalwood incense that now reminds me of her, this crisp vinyl crackle in the Bill Evans recording—all so sleepy, so well. She might have said how horrible it was that the riots were consuming the city we grew up in. I might have said something cynical about religion, how it breeds hate and bigotry, and how the end of us was so near we could almost touch the final act. Suicides were becoming common in our neighborhood. The city was breathing a slow, imminent death. There were moments when the both of us were lost in some deep thought that still hadn’t taken shape. In those moments, we were sharing the seeds of our separation.
She had left her father’s home, into the city that made her father. The city was hostile but she knew her way around. I was still in my mother’s home, peeling pomegranates, letting time turn to ruin. She’d inherited her father away from home, and like the mothers of our world, I inherited nothing. There were no fights between us. She wanted me to be there with her, like ancient lovers in embrace while the city collapses. We could have been Nero’s guests at our friends’ parties.
“No matter what happens, we remain,” she said. I heard her, and then I heard a distant call. It emerged from somewhere else, and there I was.
A young initiate in our ashram, a lanky fellow with a bushy beard, came to escort me to the meeting hall. Outside my room, the wind blew fiercely where it pleased, like she wrote. The bells were ringing loud and clear.
“It seems we will have snow soon,” the young initiate said in a soft voice.
“Possibly,” I said, avoiding small talk.
“The season of snow grows more and more erratic,” he continued. “Did you hear? The stay order for the hydropower plant was revoked.”
No, I did not know that, but it was something we were all expecting. Our ashram’s Master had arranged a peaceful protest with his disciples against the companies erecting insidious tunnels and powerplants in the heart of our mountains. The protests were somewhat successful, but now the company was fighting back. It seemed we would be considering our way forward in today’s meeting.
“I have been around in many ashrams,” the whispery young boy went on and on, “but here we do the real work, yeah? Our Guru is not some kind of a world-denying meditator.”
I saw that the boy was after cults, a permanent sense of belonging, and soon his illusions would shatter. But his need was understandable––dwelling in faraway caves alone with your own breath at long stretches makes you yearn for the world.
In the meeting hall, all I thought about was her. That night her body swerved against mine like a river caressing a mountain. My lady midnight was flooding everywhere. Tears in her eyes poured over my closed eyelashes.
“We are doomed,” she would often say to me. “We love and we love but we never meet. You are where you are, always elsewhere, and I cannot meet you there, because I am where I am and that’s a painful place to be, my love. Sometimes I want to give and give, and be full of the giving. But other times, I don’t know, it’s like I am not of this world. As if I’m inhabiting a life that’s never been mine, and I am standing on the seashore watching the full moon swallow the sea and the night, and as it swallows, the moon grows large and final, and I am there. I am the moon and the night it swallows. Yes, my love, I am that shore you are reaching for.”
She looked straight into my eyes. They might have been elsewhere, as usual.
“We must embrace the trees,” said our Master’s seniormost disciple, a bald, tender, old man.
“Yes,” I snapped, “it may be the right time for us to create echoes of the Chipko Andolan.”
Embracing trees for a revolution and sacrificing your life for it seemed like the only legitimate approach now.
“Come and embrace me,” she sang that night, “who knows when this night will come again.”
The moon was full and so close to us, and I was tossing about in my unmade bed, yearning, yawning. I held the river by her neck and for an instant she stayed there still as a glacier. I joked that it was as if I was romancing death. She said she was cold-blooded, vicious, scheming, a horrible person. I told her I was worse, we were damaged, both of us, ruined by desire, hatefulness, rage for this forsaken world. Then my overbearing heat melted her and she flooded all over.
In the afternoon sky of our ashram, the spotted moon remained shy behind a leafless Semal branch. The spring sun was overwhelming and bright. A vulture flew to the Semal, perhaps lured by the red flowers that resembled raw flesh. It gazed around the periphery of our world, and I was sure that our eyes met. I heard peacocks calling from the forest and mistook it for a kitten wailing. I started to search for the kitten, fearing that the vulture would devour it.
Durga, an old sanyasin, tall and broad-shouldered, stopped as she was passing by.
“What are you looking for down there?” she asked.
“Oh, I am just collecting some fallen flowers.” I said, lying low on the ground.
She did not seem convinced, but stooped low and started picking up the Semal’s lost flowers.
“Vinayak tells me we are planning a fast-unto-death, is that right?”
I did not respond, but the peacock in the forest called again.
“Do you think there’s a kitten hiding around our ashram somewhere?” I asked her.
“There is a lot of innocence here, yes, and possibly some kittens too,” she said jokingly.
“Do they cry in the cold nights, these kittens?” I said and looked Durga in the eye.
“No,” was all she said.
“I might have to find some empty papers before the protest,” I said.
Durga held the rotting petals.
“What are you planning to write?” she asked. The vulture on the tree had flown away to a different world.
“Nothing at all,” I said.
The vulture might have reached my old city. Perhaps it was surveying the home that left me. There was a Semal tree outside my room’s window, and it made the wind visible every time spring blew cotton-fluffs around the unease of our living. The vulture might find the tree to its liking. It may even shed a tear for all that was being lost in my old city. But it must feast well around our garbage heaps and riversides, as all was coming to pass. I wonder if the vulture would spot my home, my little corner of the world behind me. I don’t remember much. Our home was like any other home, erased for an unprecedented new world. We were five then, in two small rooms and a balcony overlooking the Semal and the Peepal, with a park and its squirrels, children and people. First the eldest died, some say it was old age or the virus, but then suddenly the children died, they say it was lack of immunity—children weren’t used to garbage breath, then the roads grew incisively, the parks became smaller. The young were consumed by riots, the horrors that come with a job or the uncertainty of joblessness. There were fewer places for lovers to meet. Or was that my excuse to remain distant from her? She wanted to be there for me, but I did not want to be there. When I was displaced away from home, who remembers how now, she was home and planned to remain there. Did she see that I had my eyes set outside her windows?
I collected a handful of fallen Semal flowers and reams of empty papers and headed to my room. There was nowhere else for me to go, so here I was. One small bed in a corner, a low writing table, a woolen mat, an old Persian carpet, and a lot of empty space in between. The walls were bare and the paint was flaking off here and there. I closed my window and lit a small candle.
Outside my window, the bulldozers are ready to scavenge the ancient rocks in the night. During the days the roads are busy with tourists cruising back-and-forth, relishing in the passing scenes of pastoral quaintness. There’s little water left in our villages, but the retreat hotels offer a splendid shower system. Villagers tell me that the glaciers are receding, that “the Gods are escaping our world to elsewhere.” The flood is the river weeping in this long night of separation. Perhaps that is why I think of her so often. I was the masculine urge to control, demolish, and escape. She was the feminine surrender, faith and hope, nature longing for union. Or maybe I was the woman, sensitive to touch, protective of my barriers but reaching far beyond my means, and she was the man, holding on to the air, raising a fist against the flow of our times. Perhaps it was the age that did not want to have us together. The days were full of small troubles and practical transactions that funded our ruin. All that the lovers could steal was a night, a song, a few tears.
I looked at the empty papers. Shadows of the passing winds flickered on the white sheets. I should tell her I borrowed a few empty papers in her memory. Perhaps I should ask her about the Semal in our neighborhood. Have they uprooted it, or is the park somehow still thriving in our times? Should I now tell her that she makes me sleepy? Perhaps she should know how I have been, and where I am going now. Where is she arriving from? How long has it been since we last met? There is so much to say, always so much to talk about between old strangers, and then you wonder why there are fewer empty papers in our world right now.
The night was perfectly quiet. I thought I could hear her breathing next to me. Outside my window, snow was beginning to fall without a sound. Late in the season, but here it was. I was about to be submerged by sleep when I heard a knock on my door. I walked towards the door and let it open to me once and for all.
