An Answer

Sreekumar was glad that she could not see his face in the dark even though he had turned towards her. It must have been close to two when she woke him. He could feel her lying close, her hand lying still on his chest for a while before tracing memories, her cool naked body touching.

After waking him, she had said, ‘I fell in love with you on that day you caught me crying. You looked so uncomfortable. You had joked, ‘Stop crying…what if someone comes…they will think I am the cause…’ I had laughed, or at least tried to laugh. I guess I fell in love because you made me laugh then.’

For a moment, he did wonder if that was a sufficient cause or reason but he could not ponder long about that or about what he would have preferred.

He directed his attention towards his own answer. It is not that she had asked him a question, not even a rhetorical one. The simple statement could have been accepted with silence in return but that did not seem right to him. She would not have complained. He liked to think that she was not that type. He believed that she might not need a reply or an answer, even though he felt the need to give one.

Was it Italy that made him fall in love with her? She had helped with his shopping for the trip, enjoyable but tough with his meager savings. She was there to send him off. Then, in all those beautiful places in Italy, he had felt a vacuum within, needing her with him more than ever. It could have been because of the discomfort and awe he felt in the foreign land or the beauty or just the atmosphere built up around centuries of stories or the inability to fit in and act the right way. Those six weeks away from her, with a single brief phone-call, seemed to be the answer he was looking for. So, was it just loneliness and isolation that made him love her? He wondered if she would find that comforting.

Was it on that stormy day with an extended power outage? They had walked together in the dark, moving slowly to the outside along that secluded path lit up by flashes of lightning. He touched her for the first time then. They clenched each other’s hands, feigning fright and probably copying familiar movie scenes of such a dark stormy romantic night. They held each other tightly, awkwardly hugging. He had let his hands stray on her body. He remember thinking if she would protest. A calculated risk or an assured reward, he must have decided. She had responded with equal fervor. Was it then that he realized that he loved her? Was it a result of passion or a prolonged need? That did not seem suitable even though it could be the right answer.

He went through the days and scanned each encounter. He tried to sort and make sense of the jumbled and the scattered. He reached that day when she was lying unresponsive before him, still warm to the touch, but with death’s chilly fingers near. He had touched her for the last time then. Was it then?

She still wakes him often, most often under a different guise, hardly recognizable. She avoids the special days, she likes to surprise, like then. He can make out that it is her when he feels her touch or her hand in his. Each time, he faces her ready to give an answer but the answer escapes each time.