Strawberry fields forever





1

Duke led a normal mundane existence. He studied history and film at university, loved a girl, broke up, moped for a bit, and eventually passed out of university. Meanwhile, she got married to the man of her dreams. Things were good, things were bad. It all depended on perspective, on point of view. He remembered a creative writing workshop he had once done in his third semester of college. Everyone else in the workshop would talk of nothing else but love. An endless, never ending stream of intertwined he's and she's, heartaches, heartbreaks. The joys and intensely felt difficulties of passionate fiery adolescent 'love'.

Everyday, Duke would sit silent in his usual place in the last bench and listen to the lovers talk. There was happiness all around, there was humour, there was peace. There was pain as well, but every time someone talked of disillusionment, despair or death, the lovers would be awkward and silent.

This was not what they wanted to hear. Duke would sit silent and feel the insects crawl minute and invisible under his skin. He would try to empathise with the happiness, to smile with the lovers, to understand and feel their memories of shared happiness.

But his mind would often long to go travelling somewhere in faraway airless outer space. He felt he could not, and in retrospect, did not really need to breathe. The insects crawled on endless and silent under his skin. He was determined not to have a he and she in his story. If he was honest to himself, he would only end up talking of the misery, loneliness and vague angst of what was, what would be, and, most disappointingly, of what could have been. He knew the lovers would disapprove. He wished he could escape his ego. He had begun to dislike his melancholy penchant for the tragic and the disturbed. All the happiness only seemed to reinforce the emptiness of his mundane, everyday existence.

He decided he couldn't take it anymore. He decided to leave. The people in the workshop smirked at his weakness. He was a loser. No doubt about it.

Like all losers caught in similar silken webs of imagined, internalised despair, Duke started doing drugs. Started with the usual soft drug, marijuana. But it only seemed to intensify his accursed memory. He would end up thinking of the exact things that he did not want to think about. He tried listening to music, but every song he heard reminded him of some forgotten little speck of memory, which he thought he had successfully buried deep inside his mind. He tried drinking, and was successful to some extent. The alcohol made him more comfortable with his despair. So what if he was unhappy, the world went on around him, the taxis cruised down Park Street, the street lamps still came on all over the city with the falling dusk. The buses ran, people fucked, people ate, watched football on television, fell asleep. Everything was all right really, he was just being self-indulgent. Having thus reinforced his defences against the cruel everyday onslaught of loneliness and that dreaded word, despair, Duke made his way down the street. He suddenly felt light headed and happy. The emptiness inside him now felt like freedom.






2

Pinky was happy. She could write poetry, speak fluent Spanish, had an impeccable taste in saris, and her sex life was beautiful. What else could one ask for? She always thought the principal reason for her being so successful in life was the fact that she existed squarely in the present, in the here and now. The demons of memory did not haunt her dreams at night. Her memories were warm and cosy things she cherished. She tended, more often than not, to be able to exercise choice, and remember what she wanted to, and forget the forgettable like so much gold dust in her palm, blown away with the autumn wind. She knew that she could not always get what she wanted, but it was fine, she had seen that she could get exactly what she wanted nine times out of ten. One only had to apply oneself.

She believed she hadn't really found herself until she found Rahul. Everything until then had involved too much effort, too much mental exertion. Rahul kept her in a perpetual state of complacent happiness. She remembered how they had gone to BlueSky café yesterday after a particularly brilliant session of lovemaking. Good sex was definitely an experience. She could almost sense the post coital glow around herself. She felt really nice, and was sure she looked it too. The cabbie pretended not to look when she kissed Rahul in the cab. She wondered what he must have been thinking. Did he morally disapprove of what they were doing? Or maybe he just did not want to look. She did not spend too much time thinking of this. Her mind soon wandered off to thoughts of Rahul. She wondered if she should call him. He should have been back home from office by now. But he might be busy. The very domesticity, which she had disdained through out her university existence, was now her source of never ending calm and blissful happiness.

She decided not to call, and thought she would read a book instead. She found her old faithful copy of The Sonnets to Orpheus, and desultorily read from it.

Only when flight shall soar
not for its own sake only
up into heaven's lonely
silence, and be no more

merely the lightly profiling,
proudly successful tool,
playmate of winds, beguiling
time there, careless and cool:

only when'¦

The bell rang. The thought stream broke into a million fragments of soon forgotten dust and silence. There were more important things to think about. Rahul was home at last.

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