PRELUDE
I firmly believed in love.
I was a fool.
Nina and I stumbled over each other at the gates of a bookstore. She was hurrying out while I was trudging in. We were crinkled embarrassingly into each others arms the next minute.
This is how we met.
Literature and film are strewn with such chance meetings. In my case it became a reality and I thought, Lady Luck finally smiled upon me.
We exchanged glances without deciphering the significance of such mutual compassionate looks. I was then preparing for a trip to Bangkok. A tedious regularity my office had forced upon me.
SCENE 1
The temperate coup de grace with Nina changed it all. Mutual exchanging of the glances went beyond imagination; we exchanged addresses, cell numbers, even the book that we bought from the bookstore. A single moment of exchanging looks turned into endless days of maddening euphoria.
The following weeks were brilliant. I flattered my colleagues telling them of false commitments in the family. They wondered what have come of me who otherwise treated family affairs with utter apathy. However, I was happy to get out of that graveyard, a less sophisticated media agency offering little to go on with my lavish life-style. My expenses were looked after by my grandfather’s lawyer, who meticulously arranged the demands of ours, the good for nothing grandchildren of Barrister Azizul Huq, now deceased.
SCENE 2
Sex never made us quiver.
Of course, I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy the buxom beauties popping up every now and then on those Indian channels. A self-proclaimed feminist, a friend of mine in the college often used to assault me with her proverbial diatribe “imprudent chauvinist”. The ladies from the virtual world twisted and turned with me every night in bed and I used to wake up in the middle of the night just to tame the firm virility disturbing my slumber.
I was an artful voyeur at best before I met Nina.
As for girls, it is repeatedly told; pretend to spend their entire life dodging the man they love. Sex, for most of them, is a way to beget children. Babies are born and perhaps the urge to revel dies out. I thought Nina might very well fit into that stereotypical bourgeoisie category.
Mythology often threatens to disrupt the bourgeoisie sexual aesthetics. As is the case with Hera and Zeus, failing to decide who derives the most pleasure from mating, summons Teiresias. He alleges if measured on the scale of pleasure, in the act of sex man has one measure to woman's nine. At this Hera becomes incensed and curses the hoary prophet with perpetual blindness. Man and women, it seems, is locked up in a mortal combat as to who wins the battle of the sexes. But the battle also extends as far as to who derives the most pleasure in love making.
I had never come closer to a girl before Nina. Closer with regard to the laws of attraction Nina was the first one who gave me a finicky feeling of being closer to something indestructibly attractive. I felt the wonders of conquering the unattainable other.
I hardly cared for her body. It was more of a Platonic passion. I never told Nina that we should smooch or if more outrageously put, sleep together. I was literally an apostle to St.Augustine in life and love. I gave up on my addiction for the cyber girls. She turned into my reticent obsession. I loved the times past midnight when she rang up and we talked till the silly prayers from the nearby mosque urging the faithful to bend their back signaled our parting for the day. We hung up the phone to go to bed and I started to dream about her soon. I wonder if she had done the same.
Each and everyday the phone conversations followed a linear momentum, assumed the structures of a parallelogram, confirmed to the hyperbolic regulations.
“Darling, you looked a goddess today”,
“I know…my looks are all for you”
“I think I found the love of my life”
I often heard her sniveling smiles at the other end when we delved ourselves completely into the passionate grammar and syntax of love.
She disappeared one day without any hint. Failing to locate her I was devastated and felt doomed. I had already earned a bad reputation in the office and now it seemed as if the whole sky came crashing down upon me. I hounded for her like a madman.
SCENE 3 as Interlude
“A trip to Thailand will help”, Hafiz argued the day when I disclosed her disappearance to him. Many of my male colleagues agreed to that. Perhaps they understood my situation best. When the one you love is gone it is very easy to let your oddities go loose. Ogle, ooze (getting an erection) and ovulate (wank) as vulgar Shams in the finance department put it while uttering his experiences spontaneously.
Love fades while you are away from your lover, he declared with a tepid certainty. But I just couldn’t fathom it at all. Mere physicality all the time, this is what they really prized. I just cannot be like those guys unaffected by the seamy sides of love. I felt our bumpy office was turning them into heartless beasts.
I repeatedly told myself that it was the worst of times and as I lost my life/love (the way I thought back then) desperate measures were the order of the day.
Either I had to sip one of those deadly pills to put an end to this psychic torment or I had to ward off her memory in style (by following Hafiz’s flashy prescription).
SCENE 4
I was decided. I had to go to those modern pleasure gardens to ward off her memory. In ancient India they had sumptuous pleasure gardens with cavorting courtesans. A few adept in Ars Erotica taught the rules of love while the courtesans willingly submitted themselves to put the lessons learned into practice. The modern version of the pleasure garden is overtly materialistic and regulated as per market economy. Boldly put, pleasure gardens declare the might of lust (just like harems did centuries ago).
I reached Bangkok after some hustling days in the office at Dhaka. I checked myself into a hotel and soon headed off to find ‘pleasure’ as hyenas scavenge for flesh. Soon I landed into an escort agency. I was sensing Nina memories will soon disappear for good.
And there I met Francoise, a lanky Frenchman Nina once introduced to me as her colleague.
“Bonjour”, his words seemed wry to me.
“Ça va”, I chuckled back in uneasy French.
He said he was surprised to see me in Thailand. Drawing out a visiting card he disappeared and I stood there grasping the importance of his petty gift. It was perhaps that of his funky business Nina told me about. I wondered how this visiting card will draw my lots.
I decided to pay the Frenchman a visit.
Françoise welcomed me heartily inside his mansion. It was a large villa, well-decorated inside with a pool at the rooftop. He showed me around.
“Today we are in here for a surprise”, he said all of a sudden. I was taken aback as he spoke in wily voice.
He offered me a drink. Today I was uneasy with him from the beginning and pretended religious conviction forbade me to drink. In no time, he was at his Dionysian best and began snorting as a pig.
“I’ll show you something you clean ass”, now words came fumbling out of him, “Lets go see the babes, them all crazi, luvelee, eeu’ll wuunt them.”
Like a lover in heat forcing her mate to bed he rushed through the staircases to a room from where tangy music was hollering outside. Françoise flung the door open and we thrusted ourselves into the room. And there I stood amidst the craziest of acts possible. In the most bizarre fashion few lady boys were entertaining a bunch of tourists, men and women included.
Bored I came outside the hotel putting paid to the frolics Francoise seemed to have reveled in. A while later he also came out. Seeing my melancholy mood he put his hands on mine. Though taken aback I guessed he will be uttering something about Nina. And he did.
“There is something I need to tell you boy”, he seemed procrastinating “I know I should have told you earlier but I just couldn’t. “
SCENE 5 as the End
I sensed melodrama might now anchor the shores of mine which up until now distanced away from me.
What Françoise uttered came out as revelations, “Nina is fighting for life for some weeks now in a hospital in Bangkok. She was send here by our employers’ trust as soon as the disease was diagnosed. There is no chance of survival. A genetic disease has swallowed her as the doctor said.”
I lost words for an instant but then with a frantic, lullaby-like voice told Francoise to take me to her. And the next couple of hours I waited with a pounding heart in the car while the burlesque Frenchman drove.
Soon I discovered myself in front of her hospital room where I was going to see her after months. With a tepid knock I entered her room. She saw me the moment I saw her.
But then what I did was something even more melodramatic. I scurried out the place with tears gushing forth. I bussed myself to a nearby town within hours and boarded a hotel overlooking the sea. I wandered the beach aimlessly with a death wish.
Somewhere in my heart, voices told, it’ll take me closer to Nina soon.
