FANATIC FANTASY

He was very attached to Madhavi… wherever he went, Madhavi would always be beside him… in his every happiness, Madhavi’s decision would be decisive…. Madhavi would be standing lively in his imagination… a friend of his joy, his intimacy and his ups and downs, he loved Madhavi dearly.

Madhavi was like a mother to him… no… like a friend… no… no… like a lover. Infact, he looked upon her in all these forms.

In solitudes, he used to run his fingers down her hair and embrace her… During illness, Madhavi used to sit beside him caressing his forehead with a gentle kiss… Whenever he stumbled upon failure, Madhavi used to raise his spirits urging him to rise from the washout and set his goal again with a greater deal of zeal and fortitude. Madhavi had transpired, in his melancholy and isolated life, a fresh vivacity.

Due to the infinite snags in life, Karun, however, must have been unilingual… he had turned into a soliloquy talking to himself more than the fate talking to his loneliness. He had stockpiled many experiences from the bitter sufferings of past.

Before Madhavi, Pallavi was in his life… Karun and Pallavi loved each other more than anything… they used to get lost in the flight of an affable life collecting the fancies of a beautiful future… in realising that reverie, they both seriously delved themselves in furthering their education and at the same time, devising ways to meet their financial needs too.

Like it was obvious, Pallavi’s parents, one day, came to know about their love scene… Her parents, the strict conformists, poured their rage over Pallavi’s behaviour… She was blessed with scarlet smudges on cheeks and a black-and-blue back… Pallavi couldn’t seek out for any other option than to shed brimming brook off her eyes… their departure was ultimately inevitable… Pallavi was banished away to one of her relatives’ home…

These timid lovers couldn’t afford to confront the social albatross or they hadn’t the courage either. Leaving rest in the hands of destiny, it should also have been the romanticism of their love that induced in them this decision of self-destruction.

Karun, however, appeared a lonesome person thence, studies became far beyond his reach… When he looked at words, letters started dancing for him and reacting with one another… as a result, examinations approached and departed but Karun’s education never raised its bars… he was least concerned of feeding himself… while at home, his quantity of meal intake, only because of his mother’s insistence, would be even less than that of a beggar’s measure… rest of the time, the thought of eating never bothered him… it was hard to distinguish whether his clothes were clean or dirty.. more the dirty, the fittest it looked… but he was satisfied in all that… it had been quite a time when clean clothes had started prickling him…

He saw no meaning in living life and no exception of death… but death also was very reluctant to him… the hardest of thing he found in the world was to die... hanging would invite fear of troubling the neck… burning down in fire would fear of scorching the body… devouring poison would fear of curdling the mouth… and even if he died, that would also fear of losing Pallavi forever… fear engrossed him from all sides and his disorientation proved to weaken him to some more extent.

How he peeped into his failure suddenly amid that fearful life was really strange! But he regarded his incomplete studies the base to his failure…. financial growth as the sign of success… swayed by a feeling that anyone would want their son-in-law to be well-educated and well-earning, he decided to change himself. He left his hometown and reached the capital city to broaden his horizon… accepting educational degree the qualification to marriage, he continued his studies seriously and financial income the guarantee-card of marriage, he devoted himself to work... when success came across, Pallavi was there on his mind… he still had a deep yearning of living a successful life with her… and the qualification and the guarantee-card were also under his arms now…

Suddenly on a fateful day, one of his friends spoke on phone, ‘Today is Pallavi’s wedding’…. his heart exploded at the top of his heartbeat… as if the world was ending the very next minute and that he was going to be buried under the debris… The reason, that he changed himself for, was drifting away along the waves of uncertainty… and he was sinking deep into the oblivion… putting all his achievements on stake, he started moving off at a tangent like a loser… he was like a machine-driven creature wandering around at the instructions of his own piece of code….

In course of this nomadic life, he, at one point, found a friend- Madhavi… Madhavi started directing him to the right course. The unsuccessful tint of Pallavi started fading out slowly and Madhavi’s propitious colour opened up brightly in his life.

All this started when he, one day, happened to get sight of a book put on sale at a footpath bookstall…. a Madan Mani Dikshit’s novel… he bought it against his interest but started reading it with concern… as an influencing upshot, he started regarding Vishwamitra his greatest enemy and began sharing love with the heroine of that novel… it was the same ‘Madhavi’, the novel’s heroine, the name of the novel itself and his newly found love.

Madhavi had come into his life with a wide gamut of possibilities, a zenith of new hope… she was putting him on the right spoor of life spreading coolness over his past tribulations…

‘I love Madhavi dearly… I have spent many nights crying with her… and many times have had intercourse with her… Madhavi is the only love of my life.’ One day, Madan Mani Dikshit was explaining Karun about his relationship with Madhavi this way. Thud! The dais of his love collapsed before a hope had bloomed. The portrait of his unconditional love had already been painted on someone else’s canvas. He envied Madan Mani Dikshit. ‘If I hadn’t been so obsessed to Madhavi, I couldn’t have written this novel.’ Madan Mani continued speaking, drenched from tip to toe in the love of his own Madhavi.

But Karun was walking at random like a lost wayfarer, breaking up his infatuation with Madhavi… in hope of finding another Madhavi of his fanatic fantasy….

(Note: This story is published in The Kathmandu Post, Fiction Park dated October 9, 2011 Sunday)