Time and circumstance separated us, and it was at the moment of our separation that I realised I had no control over my life. Life has its own way, its own flow and rhythm. We are nothing but instruments to time.Loneliness is eating away at me. We are meeting after a gap of two years.
Since then, I have always been vaguely aware that I must never try to alter the course of time; it will only cause misery and chaos. Life will be more peaceful otherwise. The separation from my wife also taught me what words like 'acceptance' and 'surrender' really mean.
“You look sad...and you seem to have lost weight. Is everything okay?” she asked me when we finally saw each other, after two years, in our living room.
“Loneliness is eating away at me," I said, in a stifled voice and gave her a warm hug."
“You needn't worry now that I'm here," she said encouragingly. She stroked my hair and patted my back.
I nodded my head, and without another word went outside to the veranda where I needed to spend time with myself.
She had realised I had little interest in her. I had shown no excitement upon her arrival. Her presence, in fact, had caused me a great deal of irritation.
Her sudden departure—for an 'official emergency'—had led me to marry solitude. After nine months, I had given birth to silence. I was content being husband to solitude and father to silence.
I had ben a struggling writer and without a source of regular income, I relied upon her: physically, emotionally as well as financially. In a way, I was the stay-at-home 'wife' and she the husband, who brought home the bacon. I would sit in front of empty pages and dream of my masterpiece, and I soon realised, upon her departure, that the writer in me only awoke when she left home, left me for a foreign trip with her boss, on an official emergency.
Our sudden separation had unleashed the writer in me and it has not yawned since, or once fallen asleep. Even when I am sleeping, my other self, the writer self, is fishing for ideas and sentences, his imagination always trawling for a big catch.
My father had always been conscious of the fact that I would never be able to earn my own living. This was the reason he arranged for me to get married to an independent, working woman. This was why he had forced me into marrying her. On the day of the marriage ceremony—at the particular moment when the bride and groom walk around the fire—we had seen each other first, already on our way to becoming man and wife.
I learned she was a busy woman. Right after we exchanged rings and I put the Mangalsutra around her neck, she got a call from her boss and left. She convinced my father that it was an emergency business call. Neither the busy woman nor my father bothered to ask for my consent.
Everything happened as if I wasn't even a part of it. All the while, I was feeling cold and helpless. It was at that particular moment that the lines:
The only difference between I and the stone is—I breathe and the stone doesn't.
came to my mind. These lines made my day. For the first time in many months, I had been able to think of something beautiful. And it had simply come to me. I hadn't been seeking anything, simply found everything. I guess the pathetic situation I was trapped in had triggered something in me.
That night, after declaring the marriage ceremony officially over, my father told me that I was to stay and sleep with that busy woman from then on. He informed me I was her husband from that day, and was happy; he had received a gold wrist watch and a big television set from her. The biggest thing, however, was that from the following day, that busy woman was going to financially support me as well as my family.
The next day, that busy woman came to fetch me in her red car. I had packed all my belongings—these included tattered old books and sheets of empty paper. I remember my father was quite emotional that day. I could see regret playing hide and seek on his face. But I couldn't figure out the reasons. I did not bother to.
She owned a beautiful bungalow, surrounded by blue mimosa, on the outskirts of the city. Her Tibetan Mastiff welcomed us at the door. As I walked inside, I saw a big patch of lawn on the right-hand side of the courtyard, which had shrubs flowering all over it. I also saw a white cat relentlessly trying to climb onto one of the blue mimosa trees. I saw no one besides the dog and the cat. All I could sense was the penetrating silence.
Inside the bungalow, she showed me the living room, the kitchen, the bedrooms and the restrooms. She showed me a place for me to sleep. The room was quite small, with space enough only for me.
“Don't worry,” she said jokingly. “We can sleep together sometimes, in my bedroom.”
I didn't pay attention to her joke. And she didn't bother to look if I had laughed or not. She was on her phone, talking to her boss.
That night, we slept together, on the same bed. She wouldn't allow me to touch her, though. There was always a gap between us and although I was vaguely aware I was sleeping on the same bed as her, I felt like I was sleeping alone. It was a rather dreamlike sleep that I slept that night, and it was a dreamlike experience; one that was real and unreal at the same time.
The next day, over lunch, she declared she was going to New York, for business purposes, with her boss the following day. She told me not to worry and said she'd return as soon as possible. She also gave me a list of things to do: these included gardening, feeding her Tibetan Mastiff and her white cat, and cleaning the rooms every week, among various other things. I couldn't understand what was happening.
A week after her, as I was cleaning her room, I happened to see a piece of folded paper on her coffee table. Out of curiosity, I unfolded it and began to read. I was shocked to realise that the paper was an agreement; signed by my father, it clearly mentioned I had been officially sold as slave and caretaker to that busy woman.
At that moment, the writer in me had been roused by madness. Time and circumstance had played me, and that created a sound. A beautiful sound that, when translated into words, became this:
Because I didn't know How to swim I dived into The ocean of Love. Ever since, I have been writing madly. Loneliness is eating away at me.
- Sangram Lama
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