Tree

Short story..

It was almost noon when I received the news. It was a news because the decision was not mine. The phone started ringing. Aunt from California, cousin from new York another from Dubai. News as they called.
Jubilant happy..
I don’t know if I am excited or sad. Or if I liked the news I received. I sat down on the patio looking at the birds, sipping the tea.
Some how I felt new. As if I had an old shell and I lost it.
It was like wearing a new pair of glasses, which every one recognizes and compliments. Or like a new dress. When you recognize that some thing is new but every thing else inside remains same. You remain the old person.
But every one else sees the change.
I was still in oblivion. Or in a strange state of euphoria. Ephemeral…
How is he?
My cousin asked..
And certainly I felt nausea. I don’t know.
He looks pretty smart.
“I don’t know that either”.
I felt that I was a stranger in this whole drama. And I had no idea what was going on with me. It was scary that the plot of the story was my own life. But then that is how it works.
After the news, the phone calls the tea sips .. I went out for a while.
Every thing seemed hollow incomplete ugly and unstable.
“Should I call him and tell the news”.
How do you announce personal tragedies. Failures?
It did not happen.
Not that afternoon.. or the day after that.
I had known him from last 10 years. A decade as we call. It was incidental like every thing else in my life. We had meet in a weird way. Fate…
And then it all started. As a building. The phone calls paved the way for a foundation. The rendezvouse became bricks. Then the meetings became the rooms. Until we both started living in the building of the relationship.
There was nothing common between us. Every thing was strange. He would laugh on my idiotic thoughts. I would smirk on his indifference. He was practicing,.. and I lived in a no gods world. At least before we meet.
The only thing that was common between us was the guilt. The guilty love. Sin.. desire lust..
And that is how it happened.
Before he became a tree inside me. Taking roots in the creeks and hollows and growing in places I had never know existed. Ritualistic love is so boring..
I would say again and again..
Imagine that I am married to you.. And I am with you every other morning.
The desire dies.
It does.
“It is not a demand or supply function”..
How can you live in one place.
“suffocating”.
Living together does not matter. Living inside matter. And that is what you are doing.
I laugh on those days. At times I imagine that we never existed and this whole mess is my own imagination.
The way I imagine him in my dreams
Last night I dreamed again.
I saw that he was lying beside me and then he enters this room with light. A lot of light. There is a man who is inflated like a balloon and then he start cutting him. The blood oozes from every where. I am still looking at the saw.
That is what he do.
Stitch.. sew.. bind.. cut people.
He use to tell tales. Like the old lady with broken elbow. And how social health is pathetic.
They don’t pay surgeons well.
Yet he was into fine things.
Forget that..
Lets talk again about the tree. The tree that lives inside me like him.
I wrote to him at last..
Meet me.
Eton?
He asked again.
I did not tell him. About the news. The new me. I looked at his face and left.
I am coward. I did not tell him.
I was scared that things would crumble. But the building has already fallen on me.
And then later in his city when I walk alone I think about him. I think about the tree. The stolen glances. The dream. Sometime I imagine that its him. Him that is the news. I am doing every thing for him. The shopping. The clothes. The jubilant happiness. The small growing child inside me.
I close my eyes.. And wonder. He was right. He is like a tree inside me.