Never the twain

The great metropolis of Nalina was one of the richest cities in the world, simultaneously playing host to the poorest slums anywhere. It had every other shade of green in between. But what was truly unique to this city was this tangible manifestation of division, reminiscent of bygone monarchical eras: The Wall.

The Wall was a giant hulking construction of granite and stone, encircling what was known as the inner city, separating it from the outer city or port area; in effect separating the haves from the have-nots. It towered over the city, reminding everyone that of all the delusional notions ever nurtured by humanity, equality was the most pitiful.

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It had been especially bad that year. An unfortunate trio of youths from the port area had been caught trying to scale the Wall and had been beaten black & blue, much to the horror of folk their side. It had aroused great resentment in them, for in this act of brutality they saw their own humiliation, a punishment for even daring to think of crossing the great divide.  

Arrival of the monsoon helped calm down ruffled feathers or maybe it just gave people a new injustice to fight against ‘cause even the rain knew better than to fall equally.

While one side could enjoy the lush vibrancy it gave their wide roads and the soft patter of it against their expensive windshields as they rushed off to nearby hill-stations, the other side went about their daily business awash in the murkiness of water-clogged roads and overflowing drains, with the worst blow of all being jammed up local train lines which like blocked arteries arrested the circulation of life-blood to a mere trickle, giving the city or at least their side of it, a temporary coronary attack. 

Into these troubled times, there arrived a love: a great love, a brilliant but short-lived flame that died a painful death. They came from opposing sides of this man-drawn border and their love was like a little oasis of chaos struggling valiantly against the order of this arid class-defined world.

She was brought up on wealth, and entitlement. It wasn’t so much the absence of an unmet desire as it was an astronomical unawareness of the very concept. She had never known what it was to not have something, the littlest thing.

At the other end, it wasn’t as if he had been born in poverty. He had had a normal childhood, with more food on the table than he had wanted to eat, and the occasional indulgence as well. But he wanted more. From an early age he had looked around and noticed what others had and he didn’t; far from making him feel inadequate, such observations had kindled in him an intense desire to create a life for himself that would be successful not because of its riches but because of the fact that he would have created those riches from his own limited resources and unlimited resourcefulness. He nurtured these desires, planting them lovingly into the fertile soil of his mind, patiently working towards the day they would sprout fame and fortune for all the world to see.

So you see that their very DNA was different and yet they had met, and fallen in love.

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Always drawn towards trouble, he had spent months trying to uncover a route to cross the border that did not involve going past the Wall. It was a bit of a legend - this circuitous route, not many had heard about it and the ones who had, believed it to be mythical. He was convinced it existed. Since the time he had drawn his first breath seventeen years ago, he had only ever heard about the inner city and the very nature of it being forbidden, encircling what he imagined to be paradise on earth, had aroused in him his young life’s most engulfing passion, of finding a way across. And when he had heard of this other route, he had felt as if finding it was his raison d’etre. So the search had begun for this chimera-like route. He had pored over material in the library, like city maps, accounts & records from a time before the Wall, older stories set in Nalina. None of them had been much help. Until the day he had stumbled upon a slim tattered book titled, ‘Adventures of a taxi driver’. This book had been written around fifty years back in the pre-Wall days. On a whim he had decided to check if the author was still alive. Almost miraculously, he had found him. The guy was well into his seventies and almost all his senses were failing him, all except his memory.

From then on, the route had taken on a more palpable though still skeletal form and he had set off with renewed vigor to find it. His advance had been slow, he had made mistakes and taken detours, escaped being caught twice, but eventually the perseverance paid off as waking up one day from an uncomfortable and exhaustion imbued sleep, he saw the first rays of the unadulterated sun hit the fantastical shores of his coveted haven, not more than a hundred meters away. He felt his tiredness turn into battle-scars to be brandished about with pride, but not just yet.

He went back, practicing patience and waiting for the opportune moment to cross. And one moonless night, he decided to.

The journey passed by without incident and the moment he set foot onto the sacred soil, he felt relief mixed with fluttering anticipation. He was a keen believer in destiny and as he walked onwards, he felt an almost magnetic pull drawing him deeper inside the city.

He came to a point where the road widened out, and as he crouched behind a tree, his eyes widened in wonder at the sight in front of him. The famed Mahama bay spread out in front of him, a beautiful creation of nature in sharp contrast to the concrete paradise that arose from its farthest shore. As for those architectural marvels that formed the beautiful Nalina skyline, it was as if the stars themselves had descended onto earth and taken seat in them, twinkling through their doors & windows like a million eyes. Tall buildings surrounded by taller ones, fading into the distance for as far as the eye could see, their silhouettes reaching high into the sky, waiting to pluck out any new star that deigned to appear.

His eyes had by now adjusted to the darkness and as he looked around, he noticed he was standing at the edge of what looked like private grounds, surrounding a mansion, which seemed to beckon at him invitingly through the thicket of trees.

He felt that now-familiar tug of destiny and his feet led him on to the mansion.

The sound grew louder as he approached; it seemed as if a party was on in full swing. He stood some twenty feet away from the huge double doors, trying to devise an entry strategy. But he soon figured that there was nobody guarding the entrance. A couple of high-spirited groups half-ran past him, without paying him a moment’s notice and entered without so much as a mild breeze blocking their way. He took a deep breath and set off himself, taking care to saunter, wrapping his awkwardness in a look of boredom & hauteur.

Once inside, he didn’t dare to stop & stare, but with a frozen smile walked casually to the furthest corner, plucking a drink from a tray enroute, and stood leaning against the wall; only then daring to breathe out. He spent the next few minutes marveling at the circumstance of his breath polluting this rarefied air, while looking around to see if anyone had noticed his foreign presence. But he soon realized that nobody was watching him, allowing him to let his vigil down. He spent the next hour wandering around, drinking in hungrily of the sights and snatches of conversation, trying to decode these strange set of people. It was all alien - the glitter and unselfconscious glamour, the noise and easy camaraderie among equals. He felt this society had at its very heart a notion of heredity, where the baton of old fame kept lighting torches for generations down-stream. It was a giant cobweb of people who all knew each other through intricate connections. They didn’t seem to want fresh blood, unless it came accompanied by wealth or a name to shame them out of their elitism. It seemed like a strange and antiquated value system, and he found himself feeling some pride at how things worked in his world - outsiders coming together, each bringing something different to the table due their varied experiences, and all accepted to the fold.

The next step on his itinerary was to speak with someone. He hadn’t come all this way to go back without making the slightest bit of impact. So he looked around for someone who seemed faintly approachable, and that is when he noticed her. Her, the cynosure of her group, reveling in her surety, smack-bang in the middle of her comfort zone.

As soon as he saw her, everything else around took on an air of blurriness. Something about her riveted him. Maybe it was the total sense of adequacy she projected, an emotion he had never been able to master, and probably never would. She was unapproachable, by all parameters on every check-list in all the worlds, she was unapproachable, for someone like him. Yet, yet, he found himself feeling from the core of his being, that she was inextricably linked to his existence.

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She noticed him too, but had no reason to be struck; maybe a little curious, especially when one of her friends whispered to her of his provenance – where he had come from. Although she had seen the occasional immigrant, trying to fit in and failing, she had never been at such close quarters with one before and that too, one that was making no obvious jarring effort to blend into her world. It seemed to say something about him. And then there was the way she had caught him looking at her, she had never been looked at like that.

He went back from this evening full of her, full of resolve to see her again. And he did. He went back to her mansion again the very next day, and stood uncertainly outside her house, hidden from view of the guards, but conscious that every second he spent, he ran the risk of exposing himself.

Thankfully she noticed him before that could happen, and in that moment of recognition, experienced a powerful physical reaction – a pleasure like none she had ever known before mingled with the fear that he would be discovered and sent back before she could speak with him.

As he stood helplessly outside her house, trying to muster up courage to do something, anything, she came out again in her neon yellow Bentley Mulsanne, herself at the wheel this time. In complete amazement he registered her window rolling down and she beckoning him to join her. As if in a dream, he found himself seated next to her, unable to do anything but stare, while she went round and round in circles for some time before taking him to a desolate spot in a back alley, parking next to a couple of overflowing garbage bins.

**********************

And then there was no looking back. He made several such trips to meet her. They found a few places to spend time at, closer to the border to minimize the risk of discovery and more importantly to snatch more time to be together. Very soon they were spending all their free time together, swapping stories, ideas, dreams. Her fall was steeper than his. She had never met anybody with such a thirst. He represented questions that had never occurred to her but were now looming large and urgent, demanding immediate answers. She felt drawn into his world, she could construct through his words intricate details of a physical universe different from hers, through his past a history she had never known, through his dreams a future she had never imagined could exist. She knew she had been taken whole & soul by this love animal with no hope of return. He remained struck by her confidence – her whole world was at her beck and call. It didn’t seem odd to her that people materialized from thin air around her all the time. He felt a little drunk on her confidence and allowed himself to bask in it like a newly-created moon in the splendiferous light of the sun; but underneath it he knew better than to forget that it was all borrowed. In fact he lived in some sort of fear that this entire phase of his life was a bubble waiting to burst.

Well, it didn’t. Their intense attraction developed into what can only be called love. They knew their lives had changed and there was no question of existing without the other. For any normal couple the next step would be to come out in the open, introduce the other to friends and perhaps parents, but for them this wasn’t an option. He was optimistic about the reception she would get at his home, but regarding her parents - they were both completely certain that her family would not approve. And if they decided to report him, he would not be treated any better than the three youth communists (as she called them) who had almost been beaten to death for their class-crime.

There was only one solution. It was really very simple. They had perhaps known it all along, their love could not survive in this atmosphere of institutionalized division. And so they finally said to each other one day what had been building inside for long, that they needed to run away.

It was not an ideal solution, but it was the only one.

They knew their relationship couldn’t remain a secret for much longer, and so decided they had to act quickly. A few things had to be done – some money arranged for and secreted to a new account, logistics of the actual elopement chalked out, and most importantly a safe haven chosen – a place where they could stay without their folks finding them.

Days quickly flew by and finally everything was ready. She was to set out for home from her university as usual, then go over to one of their regular haunts and wait for him to come. Then they were both to drive up to a town around four hundred kilometers north of Nalina, and take a train from there to another part of the country.

It was a journey of many days, but the most difficult part of it was going to be the first step. They were both leaving behind everything they had known and loved so far in their lives.

The day came and he woke up happy and hopeful. No more stealing around after that day, no more staying apart. Everything was arranged, from the car they would drive up in, to the family photographs he wanted to take along. He spent the morning with his mother, helping her around the house. In his mind, he was saying his good-byes. But inside his heart, he was convinced that he would come back, with her, and would always find a home here.

Later that day when his mother was pottering around elsewhere in the house, he packed his few belongings into the car, and set-off. Driving carefully along the marsh-lands, which the rains had left more swampy & treacherous than ever, it was evening by the time he reached the border, and the birds had long returned to their nests by the time he reached Café Ideal – the restaurant she was waiting at. She was sitting on the porch, sipping coffee anxiously, with a lone suitcase by her side.

She started at the still-distant sound of the engine and was relieved to see him stuttering to a stop in that dilapidated vehicle he had borrowed. It had been getting very dark since the past one hour or so that she had been waiting, getting increasingly worried that he may have come to some harm.

They realized they had not accounted for the darkness to be so very..dark. Driving on alongside the swamp in this light was asking for trouble. So they decided to spend the night at the motel next door, even though it was dangerous to do so. They both would have been found missing by their families by this time and enquiries would be on in full force in another hour or so.

But they didn’t have a choice. So they rented one room, one and not two, telling themselves it was prudent to do so for financial reasons but knowing all the while that they were longing to spend some time alone, just by their twosome, as they had never been able to in their brief relationship. They entered the room somewhat awkwardly and tried to mask their trepidation-cum-joy at the sight of the only one narrow bed. She went to change her clothes in the attached bathroom, and after completing her toilette came out .. to a sight she continued to describe till her last breath as the most horrendous one she had ever seen.

He was standing there in his Dollar Club banyan and what she could in a hurried and horrific glance make out to be Dixcy underwear.

She – born and bred in South Nalina, he – born in Katihar, brought up in Kandivili. That was the exact moment she realized that never the ‘twain could meet.