Following my recent English Writers' Collective award for best short story,  I decided to publish my short stories. Here's the first. 

Love Never Dies

 

He was always scraggy, this man, and age had not improved anything. Everything was the same -- the unkempt beard, unruly hair, the gruff voice, those piercing eyes with their ever present traces of melancholy, the stubby fingers with their dirty,  chewed fingernails, the clothes which looked slept in and the smell of alcohol whenever he opened his mouth. Few people liked him, and he seemed to like few in return. In fact, he hardly seemed to like anybody. But he liked me very much. It's hard to explain why, but with him it was all chemistry. You either liked someone, or you didn't. Actually, it was love and hate with him rather than likes and dislikes. That's how I understood the regard he had for me because, under normal circumstances,  he had every reason for disliking me.

There was a class difference. I was much better off than him, I spoke English which is again a matter of class snobbery, and he  didn't have a future whereas I had one  -- or it seemed so those days, anyway. When I look back at my own failed goals, disappointments and gradual impoverishment, there hardly seems to be any difference between him and me now. But there is. Despite my increasingly straightened circumstances, I try to keep up appearances. I get my clothes dry cleaned, I polish my old shoes. He doesn' t do anything of the sort. I don' t know if he ever owned a pair of shoes. Those worn imitation leather sandals were as much part of him as his mealancholic eyes, smell of alcohol and the sweat-stained shirt. Life wears everyone down, but he looked worn down even twenty years ago. A lot can happen to a man in twenty years. He looked as if a lot happened to him twenty years ago and he was now a relic of those happenings, indistinguishable from the debris.

 

I invited him for a cup of tea. He had always fascinated me because I saw in him an ideal, something which I'd have liked to possess. He was someone who would go to places I couldn't even dream of. It was a feeling I always had, and what he told me during that twenty minutes or so I spent in that fly-ridden cafe eating a fish bun and sipping a glass of scalding hot tea confirmed it beyond my wildest expectations. Don't get me wrong. It's not that I lack physical courage. Heaven knows it has failed me at crucial times. But I managed to find it and  hang on to it at other times, equally crucial, preventing myself from self-destruction and loss of face. But moral courage is a different matter altogether. It's hardly noticeable since it isn't a question of muscles or hard stares or a strident voice. It's a grey area since it is purely mental and the mind is an unseen thing, not comparable to anything else, not even love. That's because love has clear manifestations; it shows in the eyes, in the tone of voice, in the minutest gesture. But moral courage isn' t anything so obvious. You may not even know it is there until the need comes and you dredge it up from the depths. It has nothing to do with muscles, being tough or with being manly.

This man had courage of both kinds, moral as well as physical. I doubt if that occurred to anyone pasing him in the street -- or to people who knew him, for that matter. I doubt if anyone recognised that tender side to him, either. He wouldn't let anyone get that close. Or was it that people were afraid to come closer, repelled by his appearance? In Doestoevesky's novels, there are people like him haunting the streets of St. Petersburg. No one saw the nice guy in him because he looked like his own worst enemy. But, if you were sensitive enough to catch the moment, there were clues. Come to think of it, he had the voice of a singer who sang in his daily speech. There was a lilt to his voice when he talked. I can't remember him ever raising his voice. There were never any chuckles, none of that raucous laughter which comes out suddenly when two men are talking to each other. He smiled and frowned. There seemed to be few other expressions in between. When he smiled, his brows knit together. When he frowned, his brows squeezed together like dark clouds on a collision course. I didn't fancy being anywhere close if he  got angry. That would be a volcano. Even now, as he smiled with obvious pleasure at having met me after such a long time, he looked like a volcano at rest between historic eruptions.

 

He was telling me about his life now. It was an endless series of confrontations. I personally knew some of the people he mentioned. Some were public figures. Some, I'd only heard of. They were evil. Or they were monsters. Increasingly, as I sat there listening, I saw him as a man with black and white views. It was good vs. evil, and there was little good. It began to depress me. Didn't he see any redeeming factor in life?

 

Trying to change the subject, I asked him how his wife was. I remembered meeting them long ago, before they got married. I remembered a thin wisp of girl with short hair in a cheap frock. I remember wishing them luck and seeing her sad eyes light up with pleasure.

 

"Ruvini," he said wistfully, as if reading a name on something -- plaque, address card, or his own memory. I had forgotten the name -- if I knew it in the first place, that is, because I never met them together after that.

 

"How is she?" I asked him. I imagined the children to be grown up.

 

His brows got closer again, but this wasn't anger. This was something else.

 

"Ruvini died," he told me in that tone of endearment, bringing us even closer. I imagined that his woman could love him greatly -- if I felt drawn so much to him by that tone, I could imagine what it might do to a woman who loved him.

 

"Died?" I felt the sadness, like a permanent stain, weightless but stark -- his sadness was descending on me. I did not try to escape it. Whatever it might do to me -- contamination, infection, or permanent stain on my psyche -- I had to lean closer and accept it. I felt it becoming mine, and welcomed the feeling. He was that kind of man.

 

"She had a chronic heart problem," he said. "I knew that when we got married. I knew she could die, but I thought I could save her."

 

"Did you do an operation?"

 

He now looked at me as if I had asked a childish question.

 

"You don't understand. I thought love could cure her."

 

He smiled. It was a child's smile. I could imagine him in a school uniform, smiling when he saw her waiting for the school bus. I understood.

 

"Of course, she was operated on." He mentioned a reputed heart surgeon. "But he said there was nothing further anyone could do short of a heart transplant."

 

I didn't press for details. I thought of her heart as something else -- a reservoir of love. He was donor as well as recipient. But his love had evidently not saved her. I remembered him mentioning a daughter. So he still had something of her, after all.

 

"I married again," he said when I asked about the daughter. "My daughter's from the second marriage. Ruvini died three years after we married. We had no children."

 

We sat silently for a while. The faces in the cafe were familiar because of their routine expressions. Some were talking into their phones. A sales rep ate hurriedly, alone in his table. In the corner, a couple sat silently, their burdens clearly on their faces and  shoulders. I met his eyes again. So, she died without giving him a child. But she had given him a precious memory, a secret talisman. It was his privilege to display this hidden treasure when he desired. And now, he was showing it to me.

 

"I felt like a failure," he continued. But why? Because he couldn't heal her ailing heart with his love?

 

"Don't," I said. "I'm sure you did your best."

 

"Yes, but I had to see her again. All I had were photographs. What good is that? So I went back there to see her again."

 

I looked at him, uncomprehending. He smiled.

 

"I knew the cemetary keeper. I told him I wanted to see her again. That was three months after the funeral. He agreed. One night, he opened the grave for me. I removed the coffin lid and there she was, as fresh as ever. I can't explain that. Maybe it's the soil. But she looked blissful, like she was sleeping."

 

"Maybe it wasn't the soil," I said. "Maybe it was love."

 

He looked at me with gratitude, and smiled. That's what he had believed all along, though he didn't dare say it aloud. That's what I wanted to believe, too. We sat there for a few minutes more. But there was nothing more either of us could say. Then he walked out with his talisman, and I never saw him again.