Quivering and Strong!!!

As if time had undone itself, they started it all over again. It’s good to be in love but its bliss to keep those unknown feelings under leash, and then love in all purity without saying as much.

Zi rolled his eyes and took J’s hand. His hands tightly clasped around hers, with the pulses of their wrists beating together and his fingers feeling up her nails and knuckles. It gave her a feeling of nervous clutters in the best way. For a moment J froze. In the next she took his hands and interlaced her fingers through his. Zi looked at J, his lips parted in surprise, but then he smiled innocently and gave her hand a tighter hold and a godly comfort! 

A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were the two, who had never considered each other beyond friends till date, between whom no word or even look of lust and infatuation had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of dissonance and boredom that settled around them there, their hands instinctively sought for each other. J has marveled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that he would reach out to her so, and, as she has often told him, there is in her also the instinct to turn to him for comfort and protection. So they sat there hand in hand like two children, with Zi's fingers writing words on J’s hand, and peace settled around them like a blanket while they played the game-of-words. 

Well, it seems to me that the best relationships - the ones that last - are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship. You know, one day you look at the person and you see something more than you did the night before. Like a switch has been clicked somewhere. And the person who was just a friend is... suddenly the only person you can ever imagine yourself with. You rise above mediocre lovers. You mutate to soul mates.

Zi and J found the perfect companion in each other. J would complete sentences that Zi left mid-way in a conversation, like she was there in his mind playing the telepath. Zi talked to her about everything under the sun. In lighter conversations they even discussed adult stuff, and marveled at their compatibility with each other. (Sounds fun!)

And there were other things that gave them greater fun and kick. That what made things happen to them in their head! Like when Zi almost thawed when J, sat pillion in that spacecraft, and wrote long secret sentences on his back all the way they flew. And J blushed away from pink to red when Zi took a back seat only to plant a thousand pecks on her cheeks, and neck and shoulders and arms while she maneuvered the "Blackbird". He would be lost in the scent of her body, her hair. He would peck her on her eyes and her forehead. He would bite her on her ears, at times on her neck as well. He would grab her tight, tightest; with all his strength.

And it happened that magical evening that Zi began, and J waited, heart throbbing in her throat. 

“What?” she asked, just as his head swooped in and his lips touched hers. She tried to speak, but one of Zi’s hands held the back of her head, and he kept his lips pressed against hers, kissing her softly but with a Zi-like determination.

Zi tilted his head to kiss her more deeply, and she felt totally lightheaded and numb, both at the same time. Then she remembered to breathe through her nose, and the numbness cleared a tiny bit. Somehow they were pressed together, Zi’s arms around J now, sliding on her rib cage, his hands flat against her back. J stretched on her toes and held Zi with all her might. Like, the two stood there as one body, one soul. 

It was incredible. They loved it. She loved him. He loved her.

Pure bliss it is to be there, and not to be there!!! Ah, what happiness it is to be with someone who keeps you happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes, to kiss with all purity, to hug like divine…

“My family left me to die,

BUT I’VE FOUND MY HAPPINESS”

"My wrinkled countenance reflects my misery,
my dirt-lined nails exude my toil.
I'm.
A mother. A daughter.
A chaste. A sinner.
A women. An Indian."

The other day when I was out to capture poverty dwelling in slums for a photography contest, I met Anwari.

Anwari, 50, huddles around the dark, dirty sludge-laden meandering lanes of the Naza market, in Lucknow, day and night, playing a waste-picker.  In between gathering all dirt and sludge, the frail wrinkled woman smiles, and agrees to pose for me when Jahan, her best friend joins her. United by a common fate, the two women engross themselves in work and chatter, cherishing a friendship that goes beyond age, work hours and gossip.

Anwari’s parents abandoned her when she was in her metric. Being a girl and the only child to her parents proved fatal for her. Too young to shoulder the burdens of an unsupporting family and teenage trauma, she smiled through it all 40 years of life, with Jahan, as a waste gatherer!

It’s been five-years-and-a-half since Anwari was diagnosed with the cancer of the nasopharynx (nasal part of the throat). Back then, as a school girl in a village, she’d dismissed the headaches and fever as common flu. To avoid taunts from her alcoholic father, she suffered in silence. It was only when Jahan saw traces of blood running down Anwari’s nose, she realized something was horribly wrong with her best friend and she took her to a doctor. “I was going mad with pain. I’d scream for hours,” Anwari shudders. Tired of her outburst, Jahan decided to take her to her village, where her parents lived.

Jahan’s friendship brought Anwari a temporary relief, but her parents abandoned her for life this time.

“They don’t want me to live with them,” says Anwari. “Though I have explained that cancer isn’t contagious, they think they’ll get it from me.” Unable to bear the humiliation she faced every day, Anwari tried to commit suicide, and once again was consoled by Jahan.

A convulsion of pain ran across the length and breadth of my body and I sat there frozen. To begin a lighter conversation with Anwari, I spent an hour with her chatting about everything from her health to her favorites. Soon the old woman transformed to a bubbly teenager. Slowly the conversation drifted to Azam, a man in his late fifties, Anwari’s co-worker and also a cancer patient.

The old man is thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. Anwari considers him the perfect man for her. They are together all day. Oblivious to others, they find solace in each other. Anwari is wary of talking about him, but the shy smile at the mention of his name is testimony to the surreal bond they share at the second innings of their age. The duo is unaffected by the glares of the society. “He understands my pain better than anyone ever can, barring Jahan,” says Anwari. Azam has given her hope for a future she did not believe in. “I asked him, jokingly, if he’d marry me, and he said he would if he had his own house,” she blushes.

P.S. – Anwari and Azam are currently undergoing treatment at a local hospital, courtesy Jahan.