Catharisis! (from the unpublished novel)

To be born again, to wake up and be purged of all memories associated with her, to alter the past so well as to make it free of all that went wrong, to the extent that any inking of lost love, unrequited feelings would become a foregone conclusion - he wished so. He wished it so much that he spent hours thinking about the possible methods of doing so. Only if our heads and hearts were a bunch of electrical circuitry in computers, where with a press of a button, every undesirable file or folder or history is easily erased. Or perhaps if there was a real method of acquiring amnesia, say by eating wild berries as he was told in his childhood or by smelling fumes of mercury. A more dramatic way was recently shown in the "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind", though the most melodramatic ones have been repeatedly shown in Bollywood flicks. Bollywood flicks, though, have some movies, where the person remembers a history of his previous life too. He shuddered at the very notion of having the miseries of past life coming to haunt him when he was already bogged down by his present state of affairs. A friend once suggested getting stoned could induce temporary relief, but he was too sane to exhange hallucinations with his hopelessness.


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Catharisis: ah! that is what he figured was needed. Harsh measures suggested themselves. He immersed himself into the detailed effort of making every chore an effort towards achieving perfection. The daily chores that were second nature to him, now were turned into noble acts towards acquiring perfection, clarity of thought, delightful purity of toil, acts of conscious efforts towards achieving a perfect state of being in harmony with the world, and in peace with himself! Soon he discovered how hard it was to pay continuous attention to trivialities, and went to the other extreme by starting to neglect everything. It was during this period of turmoil that Shashi walked into his life. She entered quietly, for he was too busy with nothing in particular to notice her or anyone. She came in noiselessly, dusted off the nooks of his heart that had become smelly and stuffy with the months of neglect, opened the windows of his mind that he had closed mourning for the loss of love and the loss of his old self, she opened the windows and let in fresh wind of her sparking laughter. Shashi woke him up from his months of abstraction, months in which he thought about Kavita as relentlessly as he wanted to avoid thinking about her. Shashi groomed him afresh, brought twinkle back to his eyes, charm into his words, and even before Kalpit knew it, he found himself glowing in the radiance of Shashi's attention.

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{I guess I can post conversations sometime. This novel will probably never get finished, for it is too melodramatic, too much Mills and Boons while the other two are both more energetic, have more comedy, and read better: maybe I will finish them in this lifetime, and maybe one of these days you would pick them off the shelf. Well, I am sure you can see why I call myself a dreamer!!}