Dear Meharunnisa,
I am sure you have forgotten me. Even if I show you my
photographs, you may not remember me. Time has passed, seasons have changed,
people have evolved, many are dead and many are born and in the meanwhile you
too have become old. I have been thinking of writing letters to you, still I
was not doing it. I can find hundred and one reasons for not writing mails to
people. It is like this; some mails deserve answers and some not and some mails
are to be written but never sent. However, I think it is very important to
write a letter to you now, may be a series of letters in the coming days.
You may ask me why I choose you, of all people, to write a
letter in these days of instant communications and instant forgetting. The
answer is that I do not know your address; postal or email. But one good thing
about letters written to someone but never sent or received is that at some point
in life somebody would find them, read them and interpret them. I do not have
such high hopes. However, I am sure that one day, while searching something
online you may chance upon these mails to you and how happy you would be or
sad! It would be absolutely a surreal experience; someone writing letters to
you from some part of the world and they reach you when you least expect it.
Don’t you remember those bottled messages thrown by the sailors from their ship
decks thinking that someone would find it one day? The feeling I have while
writing this mail to you is the same of those sailors. Now, suppose it never
reaches you, instead it reaches the hands of someone else, that person may ask,
what was the surety that the writer had while writing it regarding your chances
of having an internet connection or if at all you had one, the possibility of surfing
it with the possible search words that would finally have brought these letters
to you? Such scepticism has to be accepted and appreciated. But life is full of
chances. And some of them are really surreal chances or occurrences.
Hence, dear Meharunnisa, let me write about some surreal incidents
happened to my life recently. In fact our first meeting itself was a surreal
encounter, wasn’t it? You were a nurse in a private clinic. You were beautiful
with big sparkling eyes and curly hairs. You had a huge smile pasted always on
your lips. I was there at that clinic because my mother was admitted there for
the removal of her ailing uterus. I waited endlessly thinking about the
operation that was being conducted upon my mother. I distracted myself by
looking outside above the boundary wall. There was a huge mango tree and a lot
of squirrels and crows playing on it. Suddenly you came out with a plastic jar
covered with a sheet of newspaper. I looked at your face and you were still
smiling. “Take it to the Cosmopolitan Hospital lab for culturing,” you said
while pushing the jar to my hands. It felt hot. I was curious to see the
content in it. So I was about to unpeel the cover of that jar. “Don’t,” you
said, still smiling. “Why,” I asked. “It was your home,” you said. “My home?” I
opened the cover and saw several pieces of flesh jam packed in that small pet
plastic bottle. “Your mother’s uterus, where you had taken shape,” you said. My
mouth watered for no reason. It did not look like my ‘home’. It looked like ‘meat’
for cooking. You laughed while I walked out of the gate with the jar in my
hands. Meharunnissa, do you know something? After twenty five years, I happened
to be at that building again. My friend had rented out a huge house next to it
and I was looking for you there in that building.
Chances; sometimes they are not chances at all. There is a
secret pattern to everything around us. We fall in the right place and we say
that we have a good opportunity. May be we have been preparing to fall in the
right places after a series of bad moves. But that particular moment of being
in the right place might sound quite surreal, haven’t you felt so Meharunnisa?
But when you are not in the right place too you could feel this surreal state
of being. The other day I was going to a local market called Sarojini Nagar
Market in Delhi. It is one of the biggest floating fashion markets in Delhi. I
did not have any intention to shop as I hardly shop (when was the last time I
shopped for a shirt? Must be several years back.) I went to that place to meet
someone as I was supposed to give some money to that person. I got into a
battery auto rickshaw from the INA Metro station. Somehow there were only four
of us in that rickshaw; two Japanese women, one Indian woman, face covered with
scarf and myself. The rickshaw ran without making any sound. The heat was unbearable
and the Japanese girls were finding it really tough to fight the heat. Their
faces were turning red. I told them to cover their faces with scarves and I
pointed at the woman sitting next to me fully covered. Then she explained to
those girls how to do it. They bowed their head. Next moment, I saw myself
sitting alone in a running rickshaw. Those three women were not there in the
vehicle at all. Was it a dream?
Dazed by the incident and also by heat I walked up to an ATM
counter to take out some money. When I entered the cabin with two machines,
three girls got in along with me to withdraw money from the other machine. The
machines were playing pranks. I tried my best to insert my card but something
was going wrong. One of the girls from the group instructed me how to do it. I
did so and it worked. I turned around to say a thank you to her. But out of the
three girls I could see only two girls. The third one who instructed me was
missing. I rushed out to see whether she was gone or not. I could not find her
anywhere. She was not making a phone call standing outside, she was not walking
off or she was standing under a shade waiting for her friends to come out of
the cabin. She just vanished into the thin air.
Now I was supposed to find out an address where I was
supposed to meet a person and deliver the money. I saw two women standing at a
cross road, talking to each other animatedly. I could not find a single soul
other than these two women. I walked up to them and asked for the address. One
woman spoke to me in English and showed me directions. She showed towards right
and asked me to take a left. When I told her that she was confusing me, she
said sorry and corrected herself. Then the other woman pitched in to give me
another direction. She spoke to me in Hindi and said I should take two rights
and then a left. I calculated their directions in my mind and came to a
conclusion. Thanking them I walked off. But before walking further a few paces,
I just turned back and found three women standing and talking to each other. I
had seen only two women there. I walked away in half horror and in half
delight. I did not know why I was horrified and even why I was delighted.
While coming back I got into a battery rickshaw. There were
at least ten of them going parallel to my rickshaw, filled with people. And
till the metro station my rickshaw was empty except me as a passenger. I even
asked the driver why he did not get passengers like the other rickshaws. He
turned around and smiled at me. There was only a smile on his face, nothing
else.
Meharunnisa, why all these happening to me? What are you
doing these days? Have you got married and if so how many children you have? I
think you even might have become a grandmother. I am sure this mail will never
reach you. But I will write to you again.
Regards
JohnyML
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