They are lying in grass, on the hill that overlooks a lake. Evening sun on the far wall of trees, glowering. Woodfire. He points his index finger out, and traces an arc. She looks up from under the straw hat covering her face, and understands this line he wrote down for her in the air. What is speech but the breath of silence? This was not the case always. With other women he had to explain himself. As his finger pointed in a similar fashion at a shore bird flying above a cold ribbon of water, his tongue had to dredge up the sound. Gull.

The hero of a book of parables. That is what was she, the other self he couldn’t claim for himself, believed in. And to her, instead of promises, in his rough speech groping for words to say, he gave a tragic memoir, the compact tear of a woman weeping, as he left, knowing she would understand his sadness at his inability to take her with him because they were both humans, and not gulls.

She peers at him from under the hat, studying his silence. They had met few months ago in a philosophy class. She spoke French with the professor who was delivering the lecture that day on Montaigne. Quite voice. Black hair spreading over her tall, gangly frame. And they have become friends somehow after that. And in the channel separating them, desire kept spearing its many tongues. It was this that prevented gossip between them. That and his many abrupt turning aways from her into his chamber of silence, his pile of books, turning away from his weakness for her unyielding presence.

They could laugh, yes, but only at self-described, self-confessed foibles. He called her St. Theresa of the Suffering Sophomores, striking towards beauty and god, and who constantly denigrated herself by using the codeword ‘daffyduck’. And he was the impossible devil, full of wound up passion, a cranked up gun, a Granatwerfer mortar round let loose, screaming, chanting lines from reworked and eroticized Shakespearean sonnets, lines from Song of Songs, attempting to seduce her, succeeding almost, and failing nevertheless because in her clear gaze, he always saw something else looking back at him.

Muss es sein? Es muss sein..

Much as one struggles to forget the exact numb sting of a particular tear, it becomes bigger, larger, because at times it survives only in the memory of one or two. It is afterall a story, living in an ocean of noise. And it folds unto itself. And becomes larger than the self.

Dream sequences of what never happened. And yet what would or must have, to leave such an imprint behind.

You remain, the colloquial grandfather of a far away technical institute in desperate search of a pink card for a young girl. Daddy Hairy Legs. You.

Peace re. The only girl who really called you hazaar things in Hindi