THE BOY WITH KOHL RIMMED EYES

    I didn’t know if I was his friend or just somebody he talked to over the phone when he did not have anything better to do with his time. Whatever the case might be, I had gotten a good and patient listener to my rantings and whining in him. Most adults will agree to the pricelessness of such an acquisition in life. Also, he never seemed to judge me, mostly on account of the fact that he simply didn’t care. His aloofness was comforting to me for some reason. In his words, he lived in a bubble of his own making through which he did see the world, but chose to observe only what he felt was worth his while. It’s been ten years since that message I sent him on a particularly depressing day, during the first year of my bachelors. Now, years later, I was beginning to read Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s when his descriptions jogged my memory, and that day when we met for the first time as acquaintances after spending eight years in the same school as perfect strangers began surfacing with a sweet pang that is quite often associated with the throb of nostalgia. Bear with me oh! Reader, for I am going to share my memory of that day with you, when he came to visit me in the city.

    It is a beautiful city where the old buildings stood leaning on new strategically placed pillars like old men and their shining walking sticks. If you stood long enough beside them, you could see the toothless grin on their sagging walls widening with every passing year and shamelessly showing the secrets inside to the observant passers-by. The gleaming modish edifices towering beside them were as conspicuous as attention-seeking millennials, lacking the world weary appearance of these relics of antiquity. The pulse of this city thus throbbed between the young and the old and extended from the architecture to the milling crowd that coursed through its meandering streets like a life sustaining requisite. 

    College was a solitary experience for most part. My expectations of college life were mostly based on a bunch of Malayalam movies from the seventies and eighties, that I had binge watched after a traumatic and taxing pre degree course. Even more interesting were the stories that my mother regaled me with from her own campus life. But the romantic in me was for a brutal shock from the realities of the twenty-first century college life. I failed to find depth in my interactions and experiences. Toeing the line and sticking to the books offered a comforting routine to cope with the excruciatingly stodgy existence. The only other respite was the new and burgeoning intimacy I was cultivating with this city that was not even mine to begin with. It could satisfy the cravings of a millennial while also giving me the much required escape into the pockets of the past. I would usually get down at the heart of the city and then walk all the way to the relatively secluded part of the town that housed the town hall and the buildings of Sahitya Academy. It was like a forward walk into the past. 

    The broken and uneven footpath which became narrower with time, as the shops extended their presence eagerly to accost the harried pedestrians, was for me easier to navigate than the hazy course of my future. It was a scene of paradoxes in rows around the giant temple that stood towering the passing lives. I knew which shops gave you lemonades in summer that were sweet enough to give you a sugar rush and which ones served you cheap lemon flavoured drinks that would leave a lingering synthetic taste of lemon on the tongue for a long time. My presence, most of the time, was met with disapproval by the servers in their grimy attires, for they would be awakened from their siestas only for the cheapest drink in the menu. I would sit on the dirt covered cushions futilely hoping for them to switch on the ceiling fan while waiting for the glass of lemonade, even though I was perfectly aware that lemonades didn’t qualify you for the comfort of a fan.

    I knew almost nothing about him, yet, there was a familiarity that I rarely felt with people in general in his presence. We were meeting for the first time in a long time and I did not quite know what to do. It was kind of like meeting a stranger. I wouldn’t be having the comfort of the distance and the cosiness of being by oneself through telephonic conversations this time around. Like the city, we were a contrast in the sense that he represented a hip world I was only familiar through movies and books while I occupied a liminal expanse straddling the past and the present. I didn’t have anything planned for that day. The leg of my spectacles had come loose and the better part of the morning was spent fixing it with a blunt kitchen knife, and before I knew it, it was time to leave for the rendezvous. 

    It was pretty hot that day. We had decided to meet in front of the very first shopping mall the city saw during its heydays. It symbolised the city’s transition to the new age of cold steel and see-through glass. I always felt like there was a vibe about that place into which I could tune in easily. I would spend hours sitting on that pew right in the middle of the building, people watching. I could be in the vortex of all the hustle and bustle and even then be invisible. That is where I waited for him with mounting anxiety. I was early. A part of me was trying to make peace with the fact that there was a very fair possibility of him standing me up. The last time we met during a function at our school, he had left me waiting on the school steps and walked past me with his friends without so much as a second glance at me. Though I knew he did not owe me any company, I remember texting him about how humiliated I felt having been ignored like that, while walking to the bus stop. He managed to catch up with me before I reached the bus stop and apologised for paying no heed to me presence before. Since I hadn’t actually asked him to wait for me, and also because he was not obligated to entertain me, I felt it was only fair that I do not make a big issue of it and decided to spend the time in friendly one-to-one. 

    I don’t remember what we talked about on that walk at all. It was almost a decade ago. But I do remember walking in silence for most part. A few minutes later we were joined by another friend of ours. There was a breach in the flow and soon the two guys launched into a routine guy talk and I was left a mute listener. But it was fun. I was friends with this other guy too. But I tended to be a different person when I conversed with him. Thinking back to that day, I realise that the nature of our relationship with people depends to a great extend upon who we build it with. We are a different person with different people. These thoughts kept me preoccupied during the wait that was beginning to feel interminable owing to the heat and nervousness that was slowly getting to me. He was late. I slowly stood up and dusted away some invisible dirt from my dress and slowly dragged myself towards my haven, convinced that he was not going to show up. Part of me was relieved to have escaped from the meeting, while the other part was disappointed. 

    Just as I was about to leave the premises of our designated meeting place, my phone rang. I quickly looked into the screen, only to find his name flashing across. He was not audible. My hands were clammy from holding on to the phone tightly, and I tried to make sense of his broken words with all my concentration. A horn blared simultaneously from the phone and from the road in front of me. I looked towards the entrance, only to find him standing there facing the opposite direction. I battled indecision for a split second and then decided to walk towards him. I went near him and called out his name. He turned around and something faintly resembling smile waxed and waned across his face. We shook hands and I began to tread my routine path towards the Town Hall, and he followed me unquestioningly. With anyone else it would have been an awkward move. I had abruptly started walking even before we had exchanged the customary greetings. But with him it felt normal. Like something we had been doing all the time. 

    I was playing coxswain to a train of thoughts. It was getting louder and louder inside my head. I was uncomfortable because it all felt oddly familiar and natural. Having said that, starting a conversation in person with someone had never been this difficult for me. Especially not with someone I had spent hours taking over the phone over the years. We had been walking for some time now and had reached the relatively silent part of the city. It was my favourite place to wander during working days. I would leave the college early and walk around this place near the library where occasionally, if I was lucky enough, I would come across a motley crowd of film, theatre or literature lovers. I would never venture into their immediate vicinity, preferring to observe from a distance. Their animated conversations and lively gestures always interested me. It was like watching a motion picture unfolding live in front of your eyes without scripted conversations or background music. The plot was a work in progress without necessarily a beginning, middle or end. What really mattered was being in the moment and to make meanings out of the characters in sight. Where they led or where they came from didn’t matter. Sometimes the moment is all that is enough.

    In the scorching heat of summer, we entered the deserted gates of Town Hall. After handing over my tattered backpack to the librarian, we ascended the steps leading up to the first floor that housed the books in ratty old wooden shelves that were festooned with cobwebs. It was dusty. The assistant at the counter raised her head from a torn old Malayalam book and gave me a friendly smile and just as fast as she had raised her head, went back to the book that held several loose pages hanging in an order less stack. I led him into the inner room, towards a window that stood facing the entrance to the building. The street was empty and not even a leaf moved. It was almost as if the surroundings had gone still in anticipation of our impending conversation.

    Who is this person? I thought. In his faded black t-shirt, worn jeans and man bun, he was nothing like the guy I knew from our navy blue and white uniform days. He had changed. Or did he? Considering the fact that I barely knew him back in school, I was desperately looking for something familiar in his person. I looked up at his face which was becoming increasingly difficult to decipher. He looked at me, his gaze as focused and piercing as from years before. Then I realised that he was the same fourteen-year-old boy, whose striking dark eyes had me blurt out if he had his eyes smeared with kohl ages ago, while standing in our school veranda. With an emphatic “NO” and an expression that bordered on rage, he had walked away from me that day. I was intrigued by him and had hoped to be friends with him some day. The very same set of eyes were staring back at me now. They were reassuring despite their obscure expression. Those unreadable kohl rimmed eyes comforted me and we began to talk like it was the most natural thing in the world. Every time I felt a disconnect, I gazed into those eyes and they comforted me enough to ignore the unfamiliar person I was talking to.