Autumn

I had seen someone's interview once, who said that no creation is actually original...everything we create is a result of impressions we gather all our life...books we have read, stories we have heard, movies we have seen, real life...I know that what I have attempted is not original or great...just a flow of thoughts...some inspired and some imagined...
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People I know sometimes ask me, what is it with me and Autumn...if I felt a need to answer them, I would have told them that its about broken leaves, the crisp air, the sense of loss...and its about her...its the way she looked at me that autumn day, years ago...even then her hazel eyes had struck me the most...the memory of which would haunt me for the rest of my life...the seven year old eyes that could share their most intimate dreams at one moment and hide their deepest fears in another...the eyes that could see through me, even at that time...of course, I didn't realize this then...I was nine and intrigued...

She came to the ground every evening where we played football...she would sit and watch other kids play..it never struck me as odd that she never played with anyone...she didn't fit, she never would...her family had just shifted to the block next to ours...they were very rich, so everyone knew them...and disliked them...they had two big cars and three servants...they wore nice clothes and went to parties...watching them was like watching a family in movies...beautiful and unreal...my parents and other older people speculated why they had shifted to a colony like ours...there were rumours abound, but no one knew the truth...I almost came to know it a few years later, but I can't say...she never confirmed it...

I don't remember the first time we spoke to each other...it doesn't matter...words were just another means...we already had been communicating for the past few weeks...but her voice was lovely and I had an excuse to look into her eyes...I found out she went to the posh-est school in town...that she loved to read and was very good in studies...and the only other hobby she had was collecting bird feathers...when I was eleven and she was nine, she had 117 feathers of different colours and sizes...gray, black, green...her dream was to one day find the blue coloured feather of a Florida scrub-jay...

I was growing up to be a rebellious teen...everyone in my family hated everyone...maybe it was genetic...my parents didn't speak to each other, my elder brother left the house as soon as he got in college, I loved to hate...her situation was only marginally better...she was an only child and a loner...but she was never restless...she would tell me that she had her books and she had me and that was just fine...so, that’s the way it was...our world of dreams and stars and silence and feathers...as we would grow older, people we knew would talk about us...make jokes, tease us...it made me angry and it was another reason to hate the world...

Almost by chance, I drifted to an engineering college, where for the next few years trouble and I would be constant companions...initially I thought it was just bad luck, getting caught...looking back, I know I was asking for it...it gave me reasons to fuel the anger inside...the first year I came back home, she told me something which didn't make much sense to me then...she said - don't run away...I guess I just smiled...it wasn't often that she showed concern...

I fell in love, the next Autumn...Surabhi was my junior in college...she was pretty and smart and fun...the 2 years we were together, life was heady...we couldn't care less about what people said about us...there were all sorts of stories about us doing the rounds...well, most of them were true...but the one of her being pregnant went a little too far...it led to one of the worst brawls that I ever got into...but Surabhi's anger was what pissed me most...I came home, during the suspension...my parents didn't say anything, which suited me just fine...but now I know that had they scolded me then and reached out, things would have turned out to be very different...

Life during that period was just mindless hours of TV and cigarettes...I was hurting and I was lonely...and she wasn't there...she was studying economics in Stephens, Delhi and staying in the hostel...I thought of calling her sometimes, but I didn't know what to say and I didn't want to break the unsaid pact of not trivializing what we had by talking on the phone or writing letters...and like always, I knew she would have agreed with Surabhi...anyhow, I didn't even have money for long distance...so that pretty much settled it...

Three weeks after my return to campus, Surabhi and I broke up...in her own words, I was dead inside...in a way, Surabhi was my last link with anything beautiful...she would go on to do her MS from US and marry a nice rich guy...and I went on to swim in the depths of human depravity...cheating, lying, womanizing, hurting others, drinking, drugs...in a way, I sold my soul to the same world that I abhorred so much...me and three others I knew started an antiques export business after college...it was good money...from my first big deal, I got my mother a sari and my father a Cartier pen...for the first time in my life, I thought I saw some emotion in their old eyes...I am not sure...

I didn't buy her anything, of course...what she wanted couldn't have been bought with money...she was Mumbai now, working...doing well as usual...in a few months, my work took my there...we met in an old coffee shop in Colaba...she said - you are late...the eyes didn't say anything...we spoke about her work, my work, her life and mine...but mostly we were quiet, like always...and it was good...she wanted to spend the entire week with me...we went for movies and plays, I took her to restaurants, we sat by the sea, we walked everywhere...I walked her to her door, on the last night of my stay...I stayed there the entire night...it was inevitable...to this day, I can feel the first touch of her lips, the warmth of her body, the life that flowed from her to me...in the morning, I gave her the gift I had got...it was a blue coloured feather of a Florida scrub-jay...she said - thank you but her eyes said, thank you for setting me free...

The news of her death reached me at my parent’s house a few months later...the suicide of a young, beautiful girl was perfect gossip fodder in that old colony of my childhood...it would take another few years for many truths to unravel...truth about incest and abuse...about existential depression...and a legacy of silence...I got a box from her mother later, who felt that I deserved to keep it...the box contained her collection of feathers...1257 in all, plus a blue one...

When I look back now, I see a pattern...Surabhi was right...I was dead...the only time I felt alive was when I looked into those hazel eyes...the eyes that said so much...the eyes gave life...the eyes that never concealed...it was me who was blind...

I am fairly old now and very rich...but we still stay in my old colony, where everyone knows us...and dislikes us...I have a wife, two kids, two cars and three servants...we wear nice clothes and go to parties...sometimes, in Autumn, I go downstairs, where kids play...deep inside I am still looking for a pair of hazel eyes, I think...in a way, her death gave me life...it saved me...her words that night, at her house come back to me everyday...when she had said to me-


I am the kindness in your heart,
the smile in your moods...
I am the hope in your prayers,
the colour in your dreams...
and no matter how far you go,
I am the life in your blood stream...

Come back...