Measuring Love

“I love you all the way to that tree,” my imaginative not-yet-4-year-old told me.

This was our game. We measured love.

“I love you all the way to the topmost branch of that tree,” I retorted.

“I love you all the way to topmost leaf,” she echoed me, with an impish smile.

“I love you all the way to the fluffy white cloud that you see much above the tree,” I wouldn’t give up.

“I love you all the way to that cloud,” she pointed to the red horizon. She has learned this game well.

“I love you all the way to the moon,” I made a mock face at her.

“I love you all the way to the sun,” she made one back.

“I love you all the way to Saturn,” I wouldn’t leave the planets alone.

“I love you all the way to Pluto,” Pluto is her favorite planet. I haven’t had the heart to tell her or myself that Pluto is not a planet after all in the more organized scheme of things. Obscurity is a scary thing.

“I love you all the way to Sirius,” I made a mental note to hone my astronomy knowledge before I play this game again.

“What is Sirius, amma?”

“It is the brightest star in the night sky,” was I becoming pedantic?

“I love you all the way to the shooting star,” she jumped up and down. This was her find.

“Shooting star is nearer to us than Sirius, darling,” I tried explaining.

“What?” She frowned, she didn’t understand.

“Just a bothersome little fact. That is okay.” I consoled her.

“You tell,” she coaxed.

“I love you all the way to – to the end of the Milky Way.” I didn’t think I could keep it up much longer.

She didn’t listen anyway. Perhaps because her little brain could comprehend only so much.

“I love you all the way to the end of the world,” she stated in a well-rehearsed manner. She was ending our little game.

“I love you to eternity,” I concluded with a smile.

“How much is that?” she questioned. She almost started giggling. She knew what was coming.

“This much,” I said as I opened my arms wide, and she rushed in to give me her tightest hug. I tickled her neck with my nose and she chortled and commented on her goose bumps. Amid her kisses, her curls, and her milky breath, funnily enough, I did get a glimpse of eternity.

Love and Life

He was young – not that young to be impressionable, but still exceedingly susceptible to matters of the heart. She was older definitely, but the number of years did not matter, it never matters in these cases. She had a laughter that would tickle your funny bone and your heart equally. She was sweet, kind, and had a dazzling vitality that made her ageless. Was he smitten? There sure were signs of it. Did she reciprocate? Not at first, but all that attention must have surely rubbed off at least some of the prudery that she must have felt.

They worked together. They sat side by side. Although the work was demanding enough to keep them busy through the day, there must have been a silent tension, a closeted anticipation that built up an aura between them, around them. Those who were intuitive enough could feel the vaguest of a tingle on their skin. But there were not many intuitive ones out there. Working in shifts, with an eye on the clock and frantic fingers on the keyboard, we just barely existed. For most of us, life just was, it had no potency to become.

Time moved on. Some of us quit. Some of us stayed. Some of us got married, became pregnant, got divorced. Some of us relocated. The pregnant ones delivered. There were maternity leaves, baby showers, wedding receptions, wedding anniversaries, coffee evenings, hackneyed stories, more work. Did their love bloom? Had there ever been a spark? We were busy honeymooning and changing diapers to notice.

There was a marriage proposal for her. She told us in a whisper when we had all gathered together. “Good for you.” We, the smug married, were proud of her. She was becoming one of us, she was conforming to undefined rules of correctness. But, she did not want to marry the man, she stated quite vehemently. He was too old, too mature. He was not interesting. We were grossly offended. Those were all part of the game called life. We tried to make her understand. But there was a dreaminess to her stubbornness that made us suspicious. Was there somebody else?

Yes, of course there was.

That was okay. We were all broadminded enough to accept that. Was he somebody we knew? Yes. With cold deliberateness, we wheedled out his name from her and then gasped at the apparent outrageousness of it. He was too young, we argued. She was too old, we claimed. We didn’t care whether we hurt her sensibility. It should never happen. She would be unhappy the rest of her life. We poked, we prodded. We raved, we ranted. We wove ethics. We wore morals. We planted a seed of confusion in her mind, a tiny kernel of self-doubt, of drab responsibility. We just could not let love be.

Later, we spun our web of practicality around him too. Labeled him callow, innocent, idealistic. We convinced him to grow up, to give up. Or so we thought.

Time moved on yet again. All of us changed jobs, had more children, became older and triter. We heard they parted. We heaved private sighs of relief. Things were as they should be.

Or were they? A new rumor has it that they never did part. In some secret world of their own, they still love each other. Love works in mysterious ways.

Or maybe they did part. Perhaps, they did not love enough. When will love be enough? When it escapes practicality and jealously-guarded narrow-mindedness?

We smugly turn our heads and finally mind our own businesses.

Millipede and Magic Wand

My daughter opened the car window and put her head out. I started admonishing her, in a well-rehearsed motherly way, but she asked me to hear her story first. “Amma, I will open window and jump out, police will catch me in a net.” In a net!!! Some imagination, I thought. But she had more of the kind. “Police will put me in jail. Then I wave my magic wand and I become a millipede. There is a hole in jail and I will crawl out. I wave my magic wand again, I become Saanya. You open window and I will jump into the car.” She stated with her eyes glowing. She was proud of having thought it through. I was proud of her knowledge. She knew – well, something about arthropods at least, that they can crawl through holes, for whatever that knowledge is worth. And more importantly, she knew what police is all about.

There is something self-effacing about a millipede. I know nothing about them, except that they seem to have a whole lot of legs, which, paradoxically enough, don’t carry them far. Do they really have 1000 legs as the name claimed? I doubted without curiosity. They don’t bite, they don’t sting. They don’t make much noise. They (at least one species of them) curl into a ball at the least provocation. That is how they defend themselves apparently. In a fetal position with all their legs well tucked in, they wait for the predator to pass. What would I do if I turned into a millipede, I wondered aimlessly. I could roll into a ball, conceal myself in a little forgotten crevice, hide from genuine and imaginary threats. There is an escapist in me who craves for it.

“Amma,” a plaintive voice broke into my random fantasies. “But my magic wand is not working. There is no light.” “Yes, that is true.” I agreed.

“We need new batteries.” She surmised from the situation. “Can we buy it from Carrefour today? Please amma…”

Should I tell her that her magic wand is a worldly contraption which cannot really do magic? That any amount of “bippity boppity boos” will not change her to a millipede? That there will never be a big enough hole for her to crawl out?

I decided not to. I took the defunct wand from her hand and did a perfunctory wave. Nothing happened. I would not have minded a little magic in my life. A little incantation that can clear the muddle in my cupboards, kitchen, and mind…. a wand that would make my mirror say “you are the fairest of them all”……a magic brew that can make my little spelling struggler (who has problems spelling C-A-T and H-A-T) be a master of R-A-T-A-T-O-U-I-L-L-E and A-P-P-O-G-G-I-A-T-U-R-A. There are no limits to magic.

“Amma, we are home.” She woke me up from my reverie again. We bundled out of the car, me, her, bag, bottle, fairy costume, magic wand, unrealized magic, etc. I opened the door and a tiny glitter of stardust preceded us home. I looked around, a little awed. Perhaps we don’t need those new battery cells after all.

The one who stepped out of line

He was sitting alone by the window in the rickety old bus we were traveling, and I don’t know what prompted me, I hardly knew him, and he was just a trainee for God’s sake and I was a manager, but I went and sat near him. He smiled, a bit surprised, and pulled himself together so that even our clothes did not touch. We were already a couple of hours into the trip and the city limits had given way to luxuriant wayside foliage of impending mountains. “It is beautiful,” I remarked. An acceptable gambit with a near total stranger. He agreed in silence. “Look at the tree lines, almost a straight line,” I tried yet again, with a clear lack of imagination, pointing to the trees that lined the road. He looked at me closely. “Do you know what is really called a tree line?” I did not know, but I hated my ignorance. Ignorance is something that catches you unawares and leaves you looking like a beached whale. “It is also called timberline,” he said unaware of my discomfiture or blatantly disregarding it. “It is the very edge of an environment beyond which trees refuse to grow.” He was sincere, he was somehow different. He caught my interest. After that, the conversation was basically about trees and – you guessed it – tree lines. In the next hour that we spent jolting inside the bus, he explained to me everything I would ever need to know about alpine tree lines and arctic tree lines. We ploughed through how the altitude differed from place to place, whether the trees ever tried to grow beyond the line, whether there was a definite line per se, and the curious thing was I never had to stifle a yawn. It was all interesting, coming from him.

He took out a cigarette. “Smoking is injurious to health,” I predictably conveyed to him. “We are all cigarettes burning away,” he retorted mystically, “to a habituated end.” But he kept the cigarette back. I respected him for it.

The journey ended, we smiled at each other, got down and mingled with our own petty little groups. There were about 40 of us, a pleasure trip, and pettiness was our second skin.

Later, somewhere along that burning distance of our cigarettes, we parted ways.

I later heard from my friend that everybody considered me and him to be a pair. “But,” I remonstrated, “we hardly knew each other. We have hardly talked.” “There was that trip when you hardly had eyes for anybody else.” She reminded me. We only talked of tree lines, I reminisced.

I later heard that he was a college dropout, a no gooder, who couldn’t keep any jobs, or girls.

I later heard that he had a lover.

I later heard that she ditched him and he took it hard.

I later heard that he died in a biking accident somewhere in the foothills of Himalayas.

Did he go there for his tree lines? Will we ever learn from a tree not to step out of line? I wondered with a pang.