Pritam's Blog
Chains
She sent me this picture while she was on a trip with her boyfriend and apparently, the view of the setting sun, she said, somehow reminded her of me.
“I feel honored,” I replied, in English. Her English has improved remarkably. I remembered the times when we used to take the help of Google Translate to chat.
“But what has the setting sun anything to do with me?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Did you ever notice that sunsets are more beautiful than sunrise?”
“I get up at 10 in the morning. I do not remember when was the last time I saw a sunrise…”
“What I mean to say is that sometimes good things happen only at the end… like we met just a couple of hours before I left India.”
She had come to India some years back for a project. We had met at the Bangalore International Airport from where she had to catch a flight to Delhi and from there to Paris. I was making a sketch and that’s how we started talking.
Over the course of our conversation, she had shared her experiences in India, good and bad experiences (I had written about that in another post) and I had apologized for the bad experiences she had had. That’s all I did. I apologized.
She was sitting with her legs resting on the trolley and I noticed her bare feet. I couldn’t help but tell her that her feet were beautiful and anklets would suit them…
“You think so? Then I will buy a few when I reach Delhi…”
She had sent me pictures of her feet with anklets when she reached Paris. And after all these years, she still had them.
“You still wear anklets…” I said.
“Yes…”
“You know anklets also represent chains, chains that bind women?”
“I know. But don’t we all forge some chains for ourselves and choose to wear them despite the hurt that it brings to the mind? And yet it seems beautiful…like the setting sun…”
She was right. But I decided not to reply to her message. Chains of any kind, be it an imposition, habitual, or emotional is too heavy for me to bear…