Another One, Lost to the Hands of Society
A Short Fictional Story
I am a writer. I don’t really know what I write about best or who I really am. All I know when someone asks me who I think I am is to tell them that I’m a writer. I don’t know so far what that means to other people. It could mean picturing me sitting in a room filled with crumpled paper balls lying around on the floor with a typewriter on the wooden desk; or it could mean to picture me reading a huge number of books and sit in a café day after day with a coffee mug and my laptop, to get the one-story right.
I didn’t really care about what they imagined about me when I told them that I’m a writer. The important part is that they acknowledge my words and the stories that pour out from my heart every night. I once heard someone say that the world is in a dire need of more storytellers. That’s all that we are, really.”
For the first time in the four days that I had known her, I felt like I finally knew who she was. We met on June 17, on a trekking trip in the mountains. I knew it from the very beginning that she was travelling solo but I wasn’t, so I didn’t really do anything about it. We traveled throughout the night and checked straight into the hotel the next morning. She had caught my eye because of how clumsy she really was and how she couldn’t walk straight without tripping over something every ten minutes. I looked at her that first night and wondered how this girl was planning on surviving through a trek in the mountains.
Although she was solo, she wasn’t one of those loners who are difficult to talk to or always have headphones on their ears so that literally no one can speak to them. She was just another person who caught my eye. Every time something fell off during the entire bus ride, it was somehow hers. She managed to literally make everything go wrong. The strange thing though, was that by the time we took our first stop for dinner that night, she’d already made up with three people and had good company for dinner. Funnily enough, all three of them were my friends, my travel buddies, my companions for the trip.
I can’t say if I did or did not like her those first few days. What I do know, however, is that she was new. I don’t what that meant. I think it was somewhere between the wave of freshness as well as an outsider.
June 17 was probably the most amusing yet most intriguing days of my life so far. She had packed light and had all the right clothes and items to carry, which made it clear that this wasn’t the first time she was trekking. But, once we took off on the trail, we could see within a matter of minutes that she was definitely not used to it. She got tired too easily and liked taking stops every now and then.
At times, when she felt embarrassed, she made an excuse of stopping to take a picture of the place and the incredible view. She was amusing to me. She’d breathe so heavily, so soon that there’d be no choice but to stop.
We shared life stories and times with our friends and our families and within a day, it felt like it was all five of us who’d come to this place together.
We danced, laughed, smoked together, and drank alcohol out of teacups by the third day. We almost ran out of all our alcohol stock by day four. That night though, once we had all settled into camp comfortably, I couldn’t find her anywhere. We all made a ritual of hanging out before going to bed and playing games for as long as we could stay awake. She wasn’t there that day, though. A little later I did find her at the dinner table. I made sure to try and speak to her but couldn’t. Luckily, I saw her taking off again after dinner, so I followed her.
She had found this little wooden stair-piece near the camp, where a family lived up ahead with a farm of their own and goats too. She just sat there, looking at the stars.
I’d asked her if she was scared to be out there all alone. She told me that she usually was afraid of the dark but wasn’t that day. I asked her what exception the day carried and didn’t know how to respond to the rest of the night. She told me, so easily that she had taken this trip, all by herself, because her travel partner, her go-to person, her support and pillar of her life, her girlfriend had passed a year ago at the same time. She hadn’t taken a trip anywhere, ever since.
I didn’t really say anything after that. I just sat there, with one hand on Meera’s knee and the other holding her hand. We looked at the stars in silence.
“Dev, why didn’t you ask me anything about the fact that I used to have a girlfriend?”
That was the first thing she was concerned about in the four days that we had spent together so far. I couldn’t answer it at the time, so I didn’t. I just clenched her hand tighter. I like to think that all she had been looking for was someone whom she could talk to freely. I could understand that because of the plethora of personal opinions and her thoughts came out of her with a tiny simple question.
“So, who are you Meera?”
“I’m a writer. I don’t really know what I write about best or who I really am. All I know when someone asks me who I think I am is to tell them that I’m a writer. I don’t really know so far what that means to other people. It could mean picturing me sitting in a room filled with crumpled paper balls lying around on the floor with a typewriter on the wooden desk; or it could mean to picture me reading a huge number of books and sit in a café day after day with a coffee mug and my laptop, to get the one-story right.
“I didn’t really care about what they imagined about me when I told them that I’m a writer. The important part was that they acknowledged my words and the stories that pour out from my heart every night. I once heard someone say that the world is in a dire need of more storytellers. That’s all that we are, really.
“People have such notions and they put everyone in such tiny boxes that its exhausting to try and live up to those notions. Every night, I go to bed, thinking of a story idea about how a really beautiful girl with waist-long hair and really shiny eyes fell in love with a man who found out for her to be a damsel in distress in the disguise of unscathed strength; or thinking about how starting tomorrow, I would start waking up early and working out to lose the extra weight and look marvelous.
“We ourselves want to define our personalities in such great length and quantity for the world that we push ourselves to perfection, forgetting the beauty of the imperfect. We ignore the fact that we all have imperfections and messy parts but look at messy art and call it abstract beautiful. We are all at an exponential level of hypocrisy.
“The truth is that I too, am just a girl who identifies herself as a writer, goes to sleep every night, wondering about when she’ll find love again or what she really wants in her life, wants someone to look at her hair floating in the air and just put a strand of her hair behind her ear without permission, wants to eat all kinds of food and never worry about the fact that she’ll be judged for her fat skin or be outdoors as much as she’d like and not worry about the complexion that would change.
“I am just a girl who likes to write and wants to see the significance in the world, doesn’t just want to read about but really climb mountains that make her want to drop dead on the floor because of how much her feet hurt and look at the beautiful night skies with a stranger. But most of all, I’m just a girl who wants her mother to tell her that she loves her regardless of who she is.”
I loved listening to her say all those things that night. We went to sleep that night, with huge smiles on our faces. All five of us slept in the same tent that night and woke up really cramped up the next morning.
The next day was supposed to be our ride back to Delhi. We sang and played games throughout the day on the bus.
**
It has been two years since I had this strange conversation with a friend I had never expected to make. We’re all together still, at her first book launch. Just a few minutes ago, she sat up next to me and said that she was glad I was the one introducing her. I really hope that I don’t get killed for this introduction speech afterwards. But there’s something more that I want to share. Before we said goodbye to each other at the arrival spot, I asked her what had really happened to her girlfriend. She told me that when Vidya, the love of my sweet Meera’s life, trusted her parents enough to tell them she was in love with a girl and that’s who she was, they literally sucked the life out of her with unacceptability. Vidya couldn’t take it much longer and ended her own life out of embarrassment for something so natural and beautiful as pure love a week after that, to leave Meera behind in mourning.
The thing that never really leaves my mind and hurts me the most, is that two days after Vidya left her and the rest of the world behind, the article 377 was abolished. Meera said, that she slipped out of her hands like the last grains of sand that you didn’t even know we're still there, stuck to your palm. I hope, that today, we can see this writer through the pages she has bound together for the first time, for who she really is and make her smile at herself in the mirror every morning.
