Silver streams…

The water danced around her feet, in streams that meandered effortlessly… and it reminded me of wind chimes, hundreds of them, all dancing to the errant wind that threatened to rage on till its thirst subsided somewhere out in the sea, oblivious to elements, and hidden from human eyes.

Her soft laugh hung around us, perhaps separating us from the rest of human habitation. To me it seemed like a spell that would ensure something infinite… it would hold time back in crystal vials and pause this moment…

She drew figures on the sand with her toe, and the water would come time and again, erasing her initials, her footprints, throwing up shells that she would gather in the fold of her skirt to string them into chains… chains that would lie unused, gathering dust in some corner of her room… but she collected them merrily, singing a tune that I had never heard before…

At night I found her at the small desk in our room. She seemed to write something with passion, her pen seldom stopped for an occasional pause. The words appeared to flow and countless thoughts filled those crisp white pages of her diary.

She would never let me read what she wrote in that red diary of hers… yet at the darkest hour of night she seated herself at the desk, a little flickering candle by her side. She would pen down something and then look outside and sigh. The trees seemed to reply with a hushed whisper, and that soothed her. She would blow out the candle and tread her way back to her bed, dreaming perhaps of the silver streaked ripples that danced when she stepped into the sea…

She assured me that she never craved for wings. That her world was wine-coloured and she felt music all around… and at times she caught herself in those rhythms and let herself be swayed…

That was all I knew when she took her life, leaving behind a red diary for me. Allowing me to glimpse the world encased in that book, a world she had guarded jealously…
I leafed through those neatly filled pages she had never let me see.

Perhaps she wrote of summer dreams or sparkling wine that passed those lips… perhaps she wrote of the salty sprays of the sea… she might have mentioned the troubadour’s song we heard last year… of halogen lights seen on city trips and the fisherman’s boat she loved…

With all these lingering thoughts I opened her diary. And she wrote:

‘The salt here hangs like a shroud over me… I wash myself again and again, yet the white salt bonds with my skin, blocking my pores, my soul… if only I could peel off my skin… I need a breath of spring, a breath of green… I need the hills!’

‘I smell death here. The prophet said it too last year and in words of crimson fire he sang of the rain of blood to follow. All is decaying. He whispered the truth… he told me:

‘‘And you will suffer for what never belonged to you. They’ll hang you on twigs of dead trees in the market… and they’ll wrench your soul and see it smolder like molten lead… they will cut out your tongue too, making sure there are no more dissenters… yet cries emitted from hollow hearts and echoed in the dead air… they chop off dead tongues…”

I must set you free…’

I turned over the pages in a trance; almost afraid to believe what I witnessed…
Was this brilliance or insanity?
It seemed impossible that she had harboured such thoughts in that little frame of hers, that she had carried words streaked with fire… I thought she was contented.
And I kept reading:

‘They are burning the flower shop, their crimson swords slash at your throat and a blood-laden whisper drops to the ground from your lips like those dewy petals do… the swords slash still…mercilessly, and blood pours in torrential streams… the shop at the corner now destroyed… my flowers too…’

‘Stabbed. Twenty-one times. And they blistered my soul with their fevered hands… he spelled out dreams for me to lend comfort… and gave me fresh roses. White, fresh, pretty roses. He tied them with a golden ribbon.
I tore the petals, one by one, and pressed them in my diary.’

‘But take me to the dark side of the moon, my house drenched in twilight caught unawares… and I’ll bring back silver showers… freezing brandishing swords and hanged men shall come back to life…’

She was my wife. A woman I thought I knew. I looked into the silver framed picture beside me and she smiled back. Yet I noticed the wedding band, too tight for her fingers, cutting into her delicate skin, I noticed the smile that seemed watery to my eyes now. Her locket was shaped like a maple leaf… ‘The hills’…I heard her cry now. And her eyes heavy with inherent sadness, a melancholy I had never seen… never tried to see…

Hesitantly I looked at the last entry on that page.

‘You remain blissfully ignorant another while,
And I crave for a little respite,
A little bliss myself...
You might never know-
Of the muffled sobs at night
As you lie asleep in a drunken torpor.
Tears stain letters written in ink…
So shall mine be rendered indecipherable?
Perhaps. Perhaps eyes unknown shall
Shall read over these and conjure up
Visions…

Silver streams of water… silver nooses around my neck… strung together with shells, and he too collects them for me… the choirs mourn… a last swan song for me.’