Life Is What You Make It A Story Of Love, Hope And How Determination Can Overcome Even Destiny (12 page)

Later that night, Chaya and I spread out a mattress in her drawing room. Her parents were already asleep in their cramped one bedroom apartment. Her brother and grandmother too were asleep in one corner of the drawing room. They were very used to sharing spaces.

“Hey Anks,” whispered Chaya as we lay down “Don't take such risks again. What if you had fallen over?” she asked.

I could not answer her. I had no idea myself what I had been doing. It was the first time in my life that I realised that I could not trust my own self anymore. It was a very terrifying thought. I blinked away tears of shame that had been welling up in my eyes and threatening to fall. Then I turned over to the other side and pretended to be asleep though it was a very long time, probably hours before I managed to fall asleep.

12

The descent

W
e had a test on Monday morning. Professor, R.S.V. Murthy who taught the course was not one of my favourites. I hated his sarcasm and his know-it-all attitude. Almost everybody disliked him and he was nicknamed MM, which our seniors proudly clarified, stood for
‘Moorkh
Murthy’ and not ‘marketing management’ which was the subject he taught. MM quoted extensively and almost verbatim from a management book by Philip Kotler. Most of the people in my class had perfected the art of sleeping with their eyes open, thanks to this Professor. His nasal drone set the right mood for a snooze and many a time I had to nudge Uday, as he would slump on his desk and doze off. There was nothing of value in whatever the professor said. He might as well have been playing a taped version of someone reading out passages from Kotler's book. I could almost predict what the questions for the test would be. I had borrowed Kotler from the Institute library. I had already gone through the book and made extensive notes, using the same colour coded technique that I had used earlier for preparing notes. When I closed the book, I visualised it and just as it had been earlier, I could recall every single word, like a photograph, inside my mind. I was very pleased. Then I decided to go one step further. I wrote out the question paper, anticipating the questions that MM would set. I went ahead and wrote out the answers without looking into the book. When I compared the text book to the answers I had written, I was even more pleased. They were almost exactly alike and nobody would have believed that they had not been copied, but written out from memory. To top it, I had written not only definitions and jargon from the book but had also added my own detailed analysis as well. When I read the paper, I knew it would be graded a straight A.

Suddenly I was overcome with an overwhelming urge to share this with everybody in my class. I decided to photocopy it and distribute it. I hurried towards the nearest photocopying centre. When I reached there, I told the guy who operated the machine that I wanted about seventy copies. He was a little surprised.

“Madam seventy or seventeen?” he asked.

I clarified it was indeed seventy. I felt that I could distribute it to various professors too as well as the Dean. I felt it was a wonderful idea as they would see that was happening in MM's course. I felt it would be an eye-opener. I wanted to share my ‘colour coded’ way of remembering things with everybody, so they too could benefit. I felt like I had stumbled upon a great secret and my discovery would be hailed. I pictured it being used in schools, colleges and everywhere else as a new memory technique. I wondered why nobody else had thought of such a simple but brilliant technique earlier. As I was waiting for him to finish making the photocopies, my eyes chanced upon small glittering stickers of cartoon characters like Tw eety bird, Fairies and Garfield and some Disney characters, which children use to decorate their books and other objects. I thought the stickers would make a nice finishing touch and I bought twenty sheets. I also came across some very beautiful printed stationery and could not resist buying about eight packets of writing sheets. They looked very beautiful and I decided I would surprise Suvi and Vaibhav with letters. I also looked around the shop and discovered some water colours. I had last painted with water colours only in school. On an impulse, I bought a set of water colours and a set of brushes as well. It was like an urgent impulse inside my head that was driving me to buy all this stuff. They seemed
absolutely
essential.

I reached home armed with my large bag of purchases and unpacked them carefully and arranged them all on my desk. Then I sat down and decorated the corners of each set of notes with tiny stickers of cartoon characters. I used highlighter pens and highlighted each set of the notes in my colour coded way with green, purple and orange. There were seventy sets to finish and I was like a woman possessed. I stayed up the whole night doing just this. I was a reservoir of energy. I just couldn' t stop. Strangely I did not feel even a little tired. By the time I finished it was already 7.00.a.m and it was time to leave for college. I made myself a strong cup of black coffee and two scrambled eggs, and rushed out hurriedly. I did not even realise that I had not slept the whole night.

When I reached college, I began distributing the notes I had painstakingly photocopied and colour coded and also decorated with stickers. Everyone gathered around me like bees around a honeycomb, as I began giving out the notes. It caused a stir in the campus.

“Oh my God—look at this!” said one.

“Did you do all of them?” asked another

“But why?!” said a third shaking his head in amazement.

“Oh! Look at those stickers! So cute!” screeched a female voice.

I could see they were very pleased and very surprised too.

Joseph was amazed and astonished. But he caught hold of me by my elbow and took me aside. I still clutched a few copies of my notes in my hand which I intended giving to the Dean and MM.

“Ankita, Are you ok? You have that same look in your eyes which you had earlier.”

“What look Jo? I am fine! I wrote it all myself, that too without consulting the book,” I said proudly, a bit exasperated and annoyed that he did not appreciate my action instantly. “I am going to give a copy to the Dean and to MM too. Let them know how predictable a paper he sets. It is time someone opened their eyes,” I said.

He shook his head, clearly displeased. “And are you going to be their eye opener? Come on Anks. Have some sense.”

“What is wrong, Jo? I want the Dean to know what is going on.”

“No, I won't let you. This thing you have done, distributing notes like this, is crazy enough. Come now, let us go and give the test,” he said firmly, walking me away from the crowd and in the direction of the classrooms.

He had uncannily spoken the truth about my actions being crazy, but the implications of it, were yet to sink in then.

The test was predictable and I sailed through it. I wrote out the answers almost effortlessly. I could hear a buzz when the question paper was given out. I wondered why the others could not have predicted the questions the way I had. If only they followed my colour coded system, they too would sail through.

After the class, many of my classmates thanked me for the notes.

Chaya and Jigna asked me why I had done it.

“Honestly, it all came easily to me and I felt like sharing,” I said.

“Next time share only with us, your friends. Don't give the whole class. At least let us reap the rewards of our loyalty to you! We bow to you, Ankita the memory machine,” quipped Uday, as I smiled and hit him on the head with a book. The others laughed too.

When I reached home I felt very pleased with myself. Everything around me seemed to have taken a new meaning which I seemed not to have appreciated earlier. Suddenly the garden in the residential complex I lived in looked so vibrant and so green. Each plant looked vivid. Each fern, each blade of grass, each flower had suddenly assumed amazing clarity and depth of colour. I was filled with an urgent sense of wonderment and beauty. The whole complex had a nicely landscaped garden filled with cobbled curving paths, a wooden bridge, manicured tended lawns and the focal point was a waterfall which looked so natural that it was almost impossible to make out that it was man made and had not existed there for centuries. It was a quiet shady brook and I was suddenly drawn to it as I gazed at it from the balcony in my room. I had seen this many times before but I had been so busy with my studies that I had never really paid attention to it. The more I gazed at it, the more alluring it felt. I realised that I had been truly blind all this while and was filled with a deep sense of regret. Then I wanted to capture its beauty forever on paper. Armed with my newly bought Art supplies, paints and brushes, I made my way towards the waterfall.

My mother called out to me and asked me where I was going and I told her that I was just going for a walk. A strange sense of peace and calmness enveloped me as I sat in front of the water fall and painted it. It had been years since I had held a paint brush. A group of children were playing in the garden and when they saw me painting they gathered around me. I did not mind the intrusion.

I stared at my work and stared at the waterfall. The more I looked at it the angrier I became, the earlier sense of peace that had surrounded me, quickly evaporating like water droplets on a sizzling hot griddle. I became angry that it was man made and not real. “At first they cut down trees to construct buildings and then they try and emulate nature,” I thought angrily.

Then I took out my paint brush and wrote at the bottom of my picture “SHAMMING—MOTHER NATURE”. I signed my name underneath and now was quite pleased with the end result. The more I looked at the picture, the more profoundness I could see in it. Again I was filled with a sense of loss, a terrible sadness and I began crying softly. I was a vortex of emotions. I felt Abhi would have understood perfectly what I had just realised and witnessed. It had been months since I had thought about Abhi, since that fateful day. Now I just could not stop. I yearned to talk to him. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to hold his hand. I wanted to see him smile and I wanted just once to press my lips against his. I remembered his words that day when I had last seen him, imploring me to keep in touch. I wished I had told him I would. I wished I had told him that Bombay wasn't far away and we could meet in the holidays and I could even do my summer project in Cochin. I wished I had assured him. But I had been too practical and too besotted with my own dreams back then.

The pain I was now feeling was almost physical. It felt like there was somebody inside my heart digging out little bits of it with a scalpel and throwing it away, a sense of emptiness quickly filling up the dugout bits. I was aching for Abhi. It was a longing which I had not allowed myself to feel. I did not know what to do, as I made my way home.

Then I felt that writing to Suvi would help. I took out the new stationary I had bought. I began writing. Wo rds poured out like a flood. I wrote about meeting Abhi that last day, I wrote about the time during the youth festival when Abhi and I had first kissed, I wrote about the waterfall that I had just painted. I wrote about every little detail that I could remember about Abhi. I searched my mind, going down the annals of memory, digging out every little thing he had said, every place we had gone to, the things he had done, the expressions he had used, the way he had said them, the plans we had made. It all seemed terribly important that I write it to Suvi. I wrote and wrote and poured out my twenty one year old heart into those pages. When I finished I was shocked to look at the clock and see that it was nearly 5.00 A.M. I had once again stayed up the whole night without even realising it. I was even more shocked to see the length of my letter. It ran to forty two pages. I read it twice. Then I put it in an envelope and carefully wrote out her address so that I could mail it on the way to college.

I had no idea when I sent it off to her that it would later find its way into the hands of doctors. The psychiatrists would read it, dissect it, take it apart bit by bit and perhaps be privately amused by its contents, later label it as ‘Incoherent and delusional ramblings caused due to mania or psychosis’ and then would look for clues of a thought disorder. I did not even imagine that my grief, my pain and my seriousness poured out into those pages would be stripped bare and examined harshly under the blinding, unbearable glare of medical terminology and jargon, which I had not even heard of. In the harshness of that examination, my carefully chosen words full of angst, longing and sincerity would wilt and wane. They would be killed and stamped out. Not a trace would be left.

It was the first step that I had taken into descent. The irony was that I had thought it would soothe me, when I wrote it. I had no idea it would snake around my neck and form a noose which would almost take my life.

And the descent had just begun.

13

A stop gap relationship

W
riting to Suvi, seemed to have awakened in me another kind of monster—that of writing. The amount of relief and satisfaction I felt after writing to her, had succeeded in giving me a feeling of re-assurance. It had helped me in keeping Abhi's memories alive. I could not write to Vaibhav about Abhi as I had never mentioned Abhi to him. I toyed with the idea of telling him everything starting from the beginning. Then when I thought about it, I felt he would never understand. So I wrote instead about my course, my college, my life in Bombay and my new found love for running. I also wrote about the colour coded way of remembering notes that I had discovered. I wrote in detail about the cultural festival but I left out the part where I had danced on the parapet. When I had finished, the letter ran to about 16 pages. I was satisfied and thought it would be a nice surprise for Vaibhav. I decorated the sides of the letters with hearts and tiny drawings. Then I added a few stickers too, left over from what I had used on the photocopies of the notes that I had distributed in college.