Note: This was as a result of telephonic conversation between me and a voice. I don’t intend to reveal who exactly the voice is, neither the context for which this conversation happened. What I say is what came out of it.
“What did I do?” the voice asked as I wandered around the terrace. I was thinking hard, flashes of memories appearing in front of my eyes and my mind pondering over them to frame an answer for such a seemingly simple question. I knew the circumstances which led to that question, yet the answer? I don’t know. Why would people do such a thing? Pitiful and immoral, I thought, that people tend to do, just to put a sign of ‘innocence‘, ‘I am damn right, always‘ and ‘I am better (than you)‘ in front of them, although they are made of whatever.
“Neele neele ambar par chaand jab aaye” – the song was being played with the guitar at the music school and me trying to pick up the notes. My mind wasn’t fully onto the picking, as usual. Its wandering part kept going back and forth between the office, weekend and movie that I was supposed to go next day evening. The mobile began to ring, “will call back after 10 minutes”, I said. It was almost time for heading home. On the way home, with hundreds of thoughts vying for my mind’s attention and overwhelming it, little did I realize what lay ahead.
I called back, the same voice picking up the phone. I heard Hello in a casual tone as with any call, but I felt a deep grief in what came next, although it tried its best to conceal it. I could feel the throat at the other side going dry, the voice trying to explain what had happened today. It took me a couple of seconds to understand the deepness of the voice’s grief, as I tried to find words to make the grief less deep. “Forget it, its ok” I wanted to say, but each time I tried to say this in the past, I got back “I’m not a machine”. “What did I do? Why is this happening to me? Why are people so ostentatious?” it asked.
Its an awkward situation to be in, when people who have gone through hard times asks you for a solution, they just want to speak out to someone – they wont listen to you intently, their minds consumed by their pitiful fate questioning how in the world would you know what they have gone through, how in the world will you know what they feel, for you haven’t been there, being them. The way one reacts to those times depends on what values they are made of.
A crucial thing is not to blame someone for their emotions – people seldom understand themselves better, let alone their emotions. You need to step into their shoes, their perspective and their thoughts to somehow try to understand what they feel. Their minds cannot think straight, it’s overwhelmed by fear, anger and helplessness of the situation. “I’m all alone in this” their minds think, constantly going back in time with a futile attempt to try to undo the done. It becomes hard to conclude what’s right and what’s wrong with such narrow thoughts, which leads to grimmer situation, lonely and depressed.
“I had told you before clearly what to do, it’s simple”, I said. The word simple would have made the voice curse me – its no simple, you wouldn’t understand a damn thing, you are in your own cozy little perfect life! Nobody’s life is perfect, not me, neither cozy nor little, the voice wouldn’t know all me. “How can I avoid just like that?” it said, “I can’t”. No one can do it just like that. It’s a slow, emotional process of convincing your mind to try to not think about it, eventually making it minuscule in the realms of the present. “You were sort of right, I didn’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t avoided it”, it said, “Things could have gone ugly”.
“Importance”, I said still trying to make sense of the events of the recent past, “is what people seek. Never give importance to things where you aren’t important“. Although this seems greedy – I too don’t agree with this in all situations, this situation demanded that. “When you stand among all, you want to be identified. More wealth, more respect you get and more likely to be noticed for, that’s the reason for their flaunt behavior. They want your attention on them, the very reason why I told you to avoid. This will affect them more than what berating would have done them. They want to show you how innocent they are, how damned right they are, how far better they are, although, I wouldn’t say further. Ignorance is Bliss, Avoidance is heavenly“. The voice listened with a confused silence on its side only to reply back “you didn’t say all these to me before. I couldn’t convince myself completely to your words. Why didn’t you tell me?” I smelled distrust in the air – the voice wasn’t fully into what I had told in the past. How would I know? it would think. I never tried to answer that question, “you wouldn’t have understood then”, I said – it couldn’t I had thought.
Life is the best teacher. You will be perfect in lessons it has thought. No one can beat you down on that, that too when it has thought the hard way. The voice had a bitter, rather a hard experience. An experience would be a lesson in itself, although the lessons learnt depends on reflections on the experience – reflections which are subjective, still you would at least know the bitter truth – the truth behind such experience. And also there’s the fact that the voice believes it’s the only one who has had such a thing in life. The very same reason it can’t accept what others say about it – “How in the world would they know?”
“I always feel like bawling out at them, but I do hold back as you want me to. The way they talk tends me to do that each time. Yes, they want me to do that, but why?” the voice asked again, still with a lot of questions, still with anger and somehow not convinced with my words. The thought of smell-of-distrust came back to me, a bit aggravated. This time I had to make sure that my words didn’t go in vain. The voice replied “It’s not a question of trust, for that matter you are the only one who knows about this apart from me and those people. It’s just – How would you know all to make it so simple, it isn’t”. “I do know it’s not simple”, I said, “and I don’t expect everything to be sorted out overnight. But you are making it harder for yourself by not being simple. You are hurting yourself by your own delusions”.
I was feeling a bit tired. I kept mum for a while, hopelessly pondering over events again and again going nowhere whilst the voice made more revelations about the past. “Interesting”, I thought – somewhere deep inside my brain, a spark had generated. Things suddenly started to make sense. They are guilty of something, they don’t want to take it all alone and they want to put some blame on the voice. I did this and you did that, we both are equally guilty, they would say. The reason for these to come up is that sometime before, the voice had revealed about one particular event (of course the voice didn’t want to reveal me everything!). “How happy they were when I said I would do this”, the voice had told me, “as if they want me do it”. If that would truly have happened, it would have annihilated all the guilt in them, leaving them in no state to repent what they had done. “Indeed!” the voice replied, “No wonder they wanted me to”.
The deep grief that once loomed over the voice now had been made less deep. It was more confident, more precise when compared to all the mutterings it had done in the beginning (it just wanted to speak out), more listening and more logical. “I don’t know whether I can remain true to your words in all situations”, the voice had told before an hour long call ended. What would that mean? Is it a possibility of going back? Or is it that if it was faced with similar situation in a different context, the words won’t have any effect? I wouldn’t know for sure. After all it was its life and its decisions. Just a sense of hope, even in your delusions would make you cling to it. It could at-least sleep tonight in tranquility without any of these haunting it, I thought. They aren’t any worth to be kept in mind, to be thought about, the voice would be trying to say to itself, lying in bed, as the vision of the real world fades away and memories starts playing in front of its eyes.
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