6th October 2012

LAST night, Klarke sat looking up at the dull reddish moon, fresh after the full moon a couple of days back. A thought suspended in his conscience, like a copy of him, kept on talking without a pause. As he saw the gradient at the corners of the moon – sudden but smooth - reddish white light dimming into darkness of the night, he felt a deep connection with this gradient. Men were, he thought, like this gradient, sailing in the dark sky of our life.

We take birth as a bright white moon, glowing with a heavenly smile. Time passes on, and we rise – moving up the ladder. The glimmer seems to dull gradually, and spots of impact appear on our contour as we experience 'life' as it is. But the fight remains, and the light struggles to keep the darkness away. Teenage, adulthood, old age – they come and go gradually - a sharp contrast to the actual speed of our life where each moment seems so important, that we forget that all it is, is to rise one day, and set another.

And then this man reaches his peak. He stands conquering the darkness below him. His elegance is unmatched and unquestionable. But then he looks at himself – at his own dark spots. He wants to hide them, forget about them. But his life is an open book, inaugurated by none other than he himself, a book he would hate to read. 'Hate' was somehow inadequate – hate and dread, maybe.

But time is merciful, and all this passes away, like an obvious joke on all what was felt. The progress now, is towards the end. The man knows his inescapable destiny. Some wish to face it with a smile, others accept comfort in shooing the thought away.

Time would, meanwhile, sit on its couch, eating pop-corns, watching the second half of the movie – aware that soon it will have to get up and switch his movie off. It watches man, with his billion emotions, each given worth too exaggerated.

Klarke stopped the thought for a second, looked up again, and smiled. This was our success, he thought, the most successful failure. To be embedded immortal in stone, or to die in a gutter, seemed synonymous to him now. But his reflection was not to conclude here. Suddenly, he spotted a shooting star. The star seemed to smile at him, a humble calming smile. And Klarke was overtaken by a gust of joy – that there was, indeed, one exception!

The exception was love. An abstraction, and a reality. Suddenly, his conscience was filled with a billion thoughts – yet he felt he knew nothing about it – that there was so much more to learn – so much more to experience. The love when a mother watches her new born child. The love when a father ties your shoe laces on your first day of school. The love when a child sees his first toy. The love when a child watches his elder brother fight for him. The love in the eyes of the grandparents, as you touch their feet.

There was so much love around him, he felt delighted. Love, as he deeply felt, had the divine power to warp time. A long walk with a loved one passed away in a matter of microseconds, while a hug seemed to last a lifetime. He realized he had found a small scratch on the smiling ego of time, and this thought was highly elating.

He looked at his hands, felt love in abstraction, when for instance, he touched the dew on a morning rose, washed his bike, plowed the garden when he was a kid, made his first sketch, stood looking at the sunrise on the Ganges, took a deep breath of fresh morning air, and...embraced Christine's hands.

The thought brought back the pain lying dormant somewhere in his heart. He tried to recall if ever he was in love with a girl. He was together with a girl a year back, but that was more of a 'growing up' than love – at the same time, his recognition of the impurity that humans are prone to induce in the purest of gifts given by God. She was a passing phase, long gone, without leaving its mark on the sands of time, forgotten as quickly as the thought had come.

But Christine was an impossibility he would be in love with forever. Each time the name came in his mind, the brightness in her eyes filled his dark sky. She was like a shooting star – and he was the moon. For a couple of moments, she would come and his night sky would glisten with brilliance. He would lock his fingers among hers and get flooded with a divine warmth – a bidirectional connection of two souls. It was worth living life this way – howsoever temporary it might be. Klarke wondered - how easily this four letter word – love - stood powerfully facing two more four letter words – time and life. How easily the thought of Christine changed his conclusion that life was going to be a tragedy no one could avoid.

He wondered what Christine might be thinking at that moment. If she could feel his heartbeat increase more and more every time he thought about her. If she knew that Klarke could feel her scent enter his system and intoxicate him with her beauty.

Something inside him said - “Yes she does” and he wanted to think no further, say no further.

K