Streetlights in Winter

“Yes now, okay, bye, see you sir”, then she gently kept the phone, and went out of the room singing to herself. “Mom, I’m going out, back at night”. “ You, are?” said the alleged mother after a pause, and a big smile slowly stretching out on her face, “then do take your-”. The door slammed shut with a thud. In the brief period it was open, the continuous humming of rain could be heard from inside the house.

Dearest Akash, my love,
Last night I could not stop thinking, so I didn't sleep a wink. Some sad old things made me cry again, you know those. I took three of those pills Arpita gave me and finally slept at 5 in the morning. A sweet dream of our love filled me so deeply that I had to get up and write to you, though its just 8 o clock. Any-who its been raining since the last three days, and I couldn’t go out of the house. First day I was ‘down’ so didn’t really care, but you know, now I just can’t stop (I’m smiling!!) . Yesterday I read "The Inscrutable Americans" and you know I just loved it. Its about this Indian boy from a village, who never touched meat or had dreams about kissing a girl, going to America for a year and being transformed into a drunk sex maniac of some sort. It’s so sweetly written! Read it when you come back, it’s beautiful. Anyway sir called today to ask when I could join again, and I said, “today itself, I feel perfect.” You know sir said, “Okay-oh but its raining now, are you sure you’re alright?” after a really really long pause and kept the phone. Anyway did you hear Arpita’s going back to her ‘ex’. More on that later. I’m in the lab right now. I just miss you so much honey, I just pray this month is over soon and you can get a break and come here for a few weeks. Till then in dreams. Write back soon, Miss you, bye, with love
Your Sonia,
P.S. – I’m not angry anymore, and I’m taking my medicines at the right times, so don't worry at all.
After an indent of 2 lines the screen read
On 12th July 2003 Akash wrote:

She turned back, as if to see if any one else was reading her email, finding just the neon lights reflected from newly painted walls and yellow gray diffused sunlight of a rainy day entering the room, she turned back and quickly clicked ‘Send’, and closed her mail box. Apparently she was in a hurry. While entering the building, painted in a shade of light yellow, which she occasionally found to be the dullest shade of the spectrum, chosen specifically by a committee after two month long research aimed at making her work place a little more dull and boring, she had to run across a corridor connecting the two halves of an elliptical building, mumbling “Damn it, I should have brought my umbrella” and “got to mail him before sir comes in”, her files in her left hand diagonally held, some distance from her physiognomy, in an effort to deflect the rain as she ran. When she flew her way up two floors of stairs, too impatient for the elevator, she realized that her heroic, yet stylistically correct efforts were in vain anyway, and she was as wet as she could be. “Any-who”, she said to herself.

No one else was there in the laboratory. The gaze of a 27-year-old woman with sleep-craving soft eyes followed her mind in the direction of the two windows. Dewdrop rain had gathered on the glass, the shade protecting the window, the drops mainly came from leaves of a Neem tree, shaken off by winds, much like as if it were a big dog shaking itself dry, she mused. She went and sat closer to the window in another chair and took a deep breath. Thin gusts of cool breeze along with misty rain entered through the crevices of the window panes, and somehow that smell attracted her olfactory senses and she closed her eyes. A beautiful lake, a rainbow, a grassy green field. Outside it was raining hard in the semi-tropical city of New Delhi, the rain falling at various acute angles, as the winds fleeted direction like the choice of ice cream by a child. The colors truly visible today were gray, steel and dull yellow. Buildings stretched themselves across the street, till at the junction of two roads, where the rain formed a white halo around the traffic lights. The traffic was moving slowly, cars, autos, taxis, buses, their red back-lights on, red looking bright and fuzzy through sheets of rain, contrasting as blood on a white sheet. As her eyes drowsed, she thought on, a mellow glow reminiscent of the cloud covered sun filled all around. Suddenly she began feeling sick, she felt trapped, as if in a closed space, or in a bad dream from which you can’t awaken, and her breathing became labored and tears wet her face, much like the way the splattered rain drops caressed the glass.

“Hie Sonia”. The moment the door opened, the dull library silence of the room, was shattered by the murmur of outside rain, as from the corridors. For an instant she felt it all going black. Then the door closed, the dull omniscient silence returned in the room. She quickly turned away and then looked at the girl who had just entered. “Hi, Kavita,” she said with a smile, “How are you?” Kavita was her colleague, with whom she shared her laboratory. She got up to hug. The clock on the wall read eleven-thirty in the morning and a table calendar informed it was 2nd August 2003. She wore her gloves and started washing the test tubes, petri dishes, beakers and all sorts of oddly shaped glass apparatus. Kavita meanwhile kept her handbag and looked around. On one of the walls, were hung various framed certificates and awards, reading things written in an italic semicircular font like “Award of Excellence”, “Best Research Fellow of the year”, and “awarded to Miss Sonia Ray”, “awarded to Mrs. Sonia for.." Kavita once had decided on decorating her side of the room with a Pearl Jam poster but eventually decided against it, mainly owing to a look their Sir gave her, when he had once entered to check the proceedings. Maybe it would have wiser to choose "Hiroshima mon amour", she thought later.

Dear Akash, love
I feel so sick again,
There was no one in the room and Kavita was teaching her post-lunch chat class that had many junior research fellow mates, soon to graduate. It was one-thirty. The screen had a yahoo ‘write mail’ box opened, and one by one letters appeared on the screen, like pustules on a measles affected child’s face. On the top it said in blue, ‘You have 23 unread messages’. In the white space where letters were appearing out of nowhere, below it read:
On 12th July 2003 Akash wrote:
The letters told their story. Honey I’m really sorry, I again feel so sick, and nauseated. May be because I didn’t take my "Lithosun" properly. She closed her eyes. An amber colored bottle in her bag, in red black and blue the writing said Lithosun 400 and below “Lithium Carbonate equivalent to Lithium 400mg” and “Dose: As directed by the physician”
Sometimes I feel it’s all meaningless. All I see around is everybody going about their business. No one really cares for me, except you. I feel so insecure. When I looked outside into the rainy city-

After clicking send, the in-box screen showed a tail of unread messages, with subject lines like ‘Dear Sonia’, ‘Warning’, ‘Please take care’, ‘Please read' and IMPORTANT and senders names did include more often than not of ‘Akash’ and ‘Doctor Rina’ and dates up to ‘2nd August’. But Sonia hated the word ‘warning’ and feeling scared of being instructed by others rather pressingly by ‘Please Read’; her unilateral flow of emails like the one-way street overlooking the building was an unperturbed river of feelings, where waters flowed whenever flood gates had to be opened after rain. So over and over she clicked ‘reply’ to a mail, which she found to be particularly sweet or loving.

Sometimes I think what will happen after I die. The red lights in rain remind me of a scene of blood. I’m not afraid; I’m not a vegetarian. Then I try to forget it all, think of a rainbow, a glassy lake and meadows. After all it’s just a quarter-life crisis, is it not? I’m over the divorce, I have a fine career, we’ll marry soon and it seems more than a novel. Only those moments when I’m down, I feel then what, if we’ll all die anyway, then what’s a single life in a universe, where myriads of people just born and die away. Then I plan a grand finale for my life, may be off a cliff, a dazzling display, thrilling….I’m so sorry, I promise the next time I write I’ll write cheerfully and it’ll all be better. Quickly closing her mail, she went over to Kavita’s desk. Inside the drawer she found a copy of “Chicken soup for the teenage soul”, “Dr. Wean’s Miracle foods to beat stress” and with a sigh a dusty copy of “Who Moved My cheese”. A memory, and she laughed. She turned on an on-line radio station; that was playing retro Hindi songs. This one was one of her favorites, built on the concept of the ‘naughty singer’, the seductively sweet music of the organ, the lyrics translated into-
You and I standing on two sides of a river,
that has no bridge on it, and nobody to guide us through.
So my love I can’t find you,
and I search among the stars, and cold waterfalls in monsoon
for someone just like you.

After working continuously for 3 hours, she sat for a while, averting sight of the window. Sonia now typed something as a word document; printed it and collecting it and a few other papers went to meet sir, who sat in the adjacent small room. The interview was short, and the kind sir, praised her work and more intently inquired of her well-being. Suddenly she felt angry. An impulse told her to shout ‘Why sir?  Isn't my work good enough? Does bipolar disorder mean my life’s over? God damn it man! It's already ruined my marriage, isn't that good enough?’ Feeling happy being able to resist herself, she replied with a smile “Yes sir, the chromatographic data indicate the same results”.

As Kavita wasn't back after lunch, she locked the lab and went out. Outside, away from a persistent smell of phenol and benzene, the fresh rain-drenched air was the sweetest smell she’d ever sniffed. Like perfume, it brought about a wave of memories, and she took a deep deep breath to fill her lungs. Few people seated here and there thought she must have been smoking pot. Happiness, she thought, sequestered in a ball is suddenly released, filling up all space and time. Quietly walking below the trees, leaves looking golden caressed in the evening sunlight, they held on to the raindrops, just as a divine conspiracy she thought, to release them sporadically the moment she walked below them. She walked in the greenery of the campus for what was probably hours, thinking intensely and feeling inspired, sometimes smiling to herself. The rain had stopped, the traffic hastened and no halos were visible around orange streetlights. When night had seeped in like ink into a glass of water, and which stars appeared first following twilight? remained eternal mysteries to her. She entered the lab around nine at night, after dinner at the cafeteria. Kavita had left for the night, and she had no jitters to write long emails. The rain started again.

The following morning was very sunny, sunlight hitting like needles on  faces just out of bed. There was a crowd outside an elliptical extension of a building labeled ‘Polymer Laboratory’. Kavita arriving at ten that morning, pushing through the crowd took some time; there was an eerie silence and sun made every color look bright. Yellow, green and purple. “Didn't you hear before?”, a hush hush silence murmured, some sobs. To cut the long story short, she understood within an ensuing ten minutes, from disparate sources that the sweeper had screamed five in the morning, finding a body in a pool of blood below the window of a laboratory, two floors high. Other people working in different labs all night had rushed out, though everyone swore they had heard no scream, no moans or any morbid noise. Must have been the rain. Presently the stains were being washed off the stony gray ground, but they were irritatingly indelible. Kavita’s thoughts raced as to which of her self-help books would be of best advice in this situation.

Dearest Akash, my love
When you’ll be reading this, it’ll be too late. That’s something you don't write everyday! I just wanted to say I love you, and let you know how happy I am. And they’ll burn away my body and throw away the ashes, so that the atoms in my body can continue their eternal journey through time and space. I just want to know what will it feel like, what will I want to say, what if there’s no one around. I feel so scared. Then I think I’ll close my eyes slowly and thank God for every single moment of my life. But halos will form around my eyes, as I look at the streetlights for the last time. And they’ll form around yours, when you read this and look outside at the streetlights, tonight and maybe also this winter. Bye, take care. With love,
Your Sonia.
P.S. – I’m not angry with you.

On 12th July 2003 Akash wrote:

2333 words