Matheran- In Retrospect

Four years later I am traveling to Matheran. To scout locations for my short films. I woke up at 4 30 in the morning and got the 5 40 train to Churchgate. It was at around this time it suddenly flashed to me that I would be going to Matheran after a gap of four years. “She had cried then…over the phone!”- I remembered and found myself smiling.

Four years. And it seemed like a moment ago as is often the case with her memories. They never seem distant. There are times when I have to remind myself that I am living my life and not “her memory”.

She killed me. She resurrected me. She made me.

There are even times when I jokingly tell myself-“ Rajiv…you are nothing but a figment of her imagination!” As if one fine day, she would get amnesic and I would cease to exist. LOL!! But the human mind can play tricks as we all know by now.

The heart is the eternal prankster. Notches above rationality!

I catch the train from Dadar to Karjat[which incidentally starts with a S, I wonder why?] after buying a ticket to Nerul from Andheri which is where I had asked P to meet me and where I had a breakfast of “kheema pav” with hot tea in an Irani restaurant.

For that time being she did escape from my mind. A drunken friend of P was there too, at the restaurant and he was feeding his own ego.

Four years! In four years it seems nothing has changed. And yet everything has. I have finally grown up. Grown up …back into a child.

Somewhere in the pursuit of “success” I had lost the connectivity with myself. I was a mausoleum in the graveyard of ambition.

She had entered my life at its nadir. And then taught me to fly.

That hug, that kiss, those words of kindness had given me wings. And her final stroke of indifference had become the wind beneath those very wings.

“ If you open your heart you can touch the sky.”

At the station, we meet a man called Shinde who works as a cashier in a bank. He is, he tells us, traveling further than Nerul to a place called Khapoli.

“ Seven hours of my everyday is spend traveling to and fro between office and home. ”
He had been doing that for the past 10 years and had no plans to change the pattern as it would disturb his son’s academic career.

“ Ten more years…and then I retire.” He is in his fifties.

Sacrifice.

Sometimes I do wonder[ you must all be thinking that “wondering” is all that I do by now! LOL] whether she had sacrificed me for my own evolvement!

A woman is God.

The devil is a woman.

As the train stops at Nerul, I feel my cellphone in my pocket and wish it rings. Like it had four years ago. Then G had waited for me after we had hired a cab as I sat down on the platform bench to pacify my crying princess. He waited for twenty minutes.[Its another story what those twenty minutes did to his mind!]

“They” said she looked for me when she arrived at the editing studio.

“ How long does it take from Matheran to Mumbai?”- She had asked me when I did return. She was serious.

“ Two hours…two and a half hours…”

She had “hmmmmed”.

Four years later as I stand and walk on that platform, I can feel her tears in my smile.

Four years ago mobile signals were not that good in Matheran. I remember walking miles to tell her – “ you can now bake your cake!”

She wouldn’t get to eat it. The director had made sure of that. How an associate director could pull the rug from under the feet of a director is something I am still trying to analyze.

He blamed me for making it her film. He had asked me to be in charge of her and then how can I be punished for a job well done???

My professionalism was mistaken for my love.

She was my life. The film was “a work”.

As I click pictures of prospective location spots for my shoot, I sort of narrate the whole episode to P.

It had rained then. Now, there is a heavy downpour.

My work is my love.

She is there in all my work.

No mistakes there!

Four years later I am in Matheran.

It takes a longer time to reach than the two-two and a half hours I had told her.

Four years ago.

My phone has fallen silent. She has a new number.

The waterfall seems to be still. But the mountain across the valley is singing a song. And the clouds seem to be floating in the river. The rains smell of freshly roasted corns.

For the time being I am free from her memory. And I cease to exist.