Where Parallels Meet

PROLOGUE

MANY YEARS INTO THE FUTURE

The printer coughed up vacuum, as the sheet refused to appear at the other end of it, and jammed inside. The whiff of the Sāmbhar stewing in the kitchen was borderline burnt. The phone chimed incessantly, and the early august showers soaked the clothes in the balcony, but yours sincerely sat paralyzed with my feet up the coffee table, hallucinating about a time that changed my life a great deal.

The harbinger of the memories was a decade old letter, a boatload of emotions, all compactly fitted on a frayed edged leaflet in a broad cursive penmanship, as ghosts of yesterday visited me for the vespers meal.

Silent tears, glowing in the fading light weighed in my eyes, while a smile blossomed all the same, as I felt the reverberation of every word deep within myself.

His final letter to me.

. . .

Dear Ananya,

This, unlike the majority of my letters is not about gratitude. By now I'm sure I have made it pretty clear to you, how grateful I am. Have I? Have I not?

I guess I'll try my hand at admitting something. Or is confess a better word?

I know I have not done justice to your person. Maybe, maybe, I was never the one for you. But that doesn't change the fact that I have been in love too. With you.

I have liked you, ever since I knew I didn't have to filter my thoughts around you, ever since I knew I could talk to you in my language, ever since you pulled me out of the eye of a hurricane, maybe that's what magic is.

You were fluid, like the tears which won't ever listen to me, but which were the only things at times to really understand me.

Not that you were perfect, no one is, but your imperfections were beautiful to me. You once wrote that we're all somebody's definition of beauty, and I think you were mine, still are.

I love you, and it shudders me to think if you have water in your eyes while you're reading this, or if your eyes are dry as the sand...Both the possibilities, to me, are equally terrifying.

And you know what's even more terrifying? The fact that I'll never know. I wish I had the courage to say it all to your face.

It might surprise you to know that I knew all along. I knew it from the way you hastily averted your gaze from me when I looked your way.

But no matter how much my universe makes sense around you, there is a major flaw with our fates. The great order of things has burnt a hole in our skies right where our lines were meant to meet.

It breaks me to write it, but I don't want this night to end. I don't want the sun to rise again with you nowhere around.

I wish I had you by my side to tell me how all of this was going to turn out perfectly.

We're the parallels which stay together till the end of the very universe without once meeting.

This is neither happy, nor the ending to our story.

But as you quoted years ago, "If you can't drive a story to its destination, you ought to find a beautiful turn, and drop it."

While I have not written this story, because if I had, it would never end: I think this is the turn that I'll drop it at. It might not be as beautiful as you'd like, but while it's hurtful, it does have a beauty to it.

Thank you, Ananya, for everything. Once again.

Forever

J.