In Good Company

To think of you is to think of a very faraway time, which you do not remember. 

To think of you is to be happy in your achievements and reside in my ordinariness.

To think of you is to accept that neither differences can, nor blood, ever unite.

Even if you were not my cousin, we would never happen, and this is, perhaps, the saddest thought of all, when I think of you.

Vaani, on a rare morning of heavy clouds, in the peak of summer, thought of Siddharth, with the same longing she had for him, some fifteen years back, when she returned to her hometown after her winter holidays. She forced herself to believe that such an irrational infatuation would certainly subside by the time school re-opened. It did not. Nor did it as she went to college and then to University. It stayed on -- stable when her marriage stumbled, consistent when her career crumbled. It stays on now, when her profession pays well and her heart gives away faster than she would like it.

Everything was prosaic about the day, yet thoughts of him overhauled her senses in a manner with which everything else went off focus. The idleness of hours, the endlessness of boredom, the uselessness of existence loomed large, like a chaotic palette, untamed splashes. It was always like this, unannounced, that Siddharth consumed her soul, with a bang no one else ever had, and as Vaani believed, ever could. She often smiles these days at those childhood tears she spent on silent terraces, breaking down, when he would make a brilliant entry and walk past her towards hoards of other cousins. They were connected closer, she would console herself.

Siddharth went on to become big in life, the type of older brother the rest of the lot are taught to look up to. But what Vaani liked about him was his voice -- gruffy and husky, his smell -- woody and citrussy, his shirts -- holding his arms and abdomen in a sexy embrace, his watches -- always correct for each occasion, his presence -- towering, commanding, and his eyes -- elsewhere. Right now, he was perhaps in one of the glamour capitals of the world, making work out of his passion and hardly having a memory of Vaani, yet here she was, pining for a life with him. The impossible.

For all that her name meant she was decidedly reticent, especially about this one dark circle of her life, and she had come to live with it. With an amazing grace she exhibits to herself, she shifts back her attention to the road, and moves on about life. She is happy to think of him, invisibly. He lives with her, and cannot go away till she wishes. He dwells in her and is what he is not, in her dreams. 

He is.