When Rumi came alive - II

The first part of this post can be found here:
http://apurplebreeze.blogspot.com/2006/09/when-rumi-came-alive-i.html
Please come back and read the continuation!

That’s just what it is about the past. Your past, my past, a nation’s past- they say things like these repeat, and also that it is not going to go away till you sit down and deal with it.

I had another way looking at things. Another way of looking at Brian, even. I saw him the way nobody else did. We grew up together playing marbles, cricket, soap bubbles and all other assorted games. I would wear his clothes and paint his face with my make up even as a teenager, out of sheet boredom. Most of the time he let me do that. There were also the fights- about inconsequential things such as who should turn which lights off, to things on the heavier side of life such as should we be going to war.

He would send me cards during my birthday that read as if he sent them to a brother or a buddy, he knew all the infinite little ways to make me smile even when I was hopping mad. That is Brian, light of so many eyes.

Many summers ago when we were in elementary school, he got this new shirt that was stripped like the army camouflage uniform. He threw up quite a fit for that, which is not normally like the undemanding him. We were walking around the neighbourhood, with my red trolley in tow. We passed a construction site and soon enough we were building something out of the little stones in the rubble. I don’t really remember what it was- could have been a castle, a pit, or maybe just a little hillock of sorts. Then we decided that we needed something just like this in our backyard, by the little inflatable tub with the yellow ducks. So we began to throw out the contents of the trailer- that included my rag doll, a broken comb and the little plastic cap that comes with cough syrups bottles- the ones that have volume marks on it.

Just as we were ready to head back home, I could not find my rag doll and went into hysterics. It was the queerest doll of all- made from cloth that had this sunny print on it and a yellow scrunchie around its neck. Brian found it a few feet away, at the footsteps of the construction site. While sprinting to get it back, he tripped and landed on his face. The wound was not like anything I had seen before- it was across his cheek, and was bleeding profusely. I began bawling my head off, at the sight of all the blood. Maybe also at the thought of him being in so much pain. He just got up, dusted his muddy hands and the sand that was stuck to the scraped palms, took my hand and asked me to cart the trolley with the other. The trolley had my rag doll in it.

I still can’t help but smile with warmth that floods all over my being at the thought of that summer afternoon. The images are so clear, the red wagon, the rag doll, and Brian as he was sprinting to get it back. The wounds were cleaned soon enough, but the there was a little scar tissue that had formed and that almost became like a mark of identification.
Time rolls on, it has its own sweet course to follow, while we are left here in a future we don’t always want to see and a past that still lingers behind eyelids, like it has just happened, refusing to go away, refusing to let you go.

We grew up, sure enough, but into very different people. I loved the idea of non-violence- from the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, to Flower Power, and I must admit even vague, non-descript stuff like making beads an essential part of my wardrobe. I made my vision very clear, and made sure that I wore every bit of it.

Brian grew into something totally different- he was tall and muscular before I realised it, and loved sports. I always thought that it was one of the few times he came out from his solitary shell, and laughed, played and made strategies with other boys. He went on to enlist in the Army.

The paths we chose for ourselves were completely different. I sometimes even think that one of the two must have felt left out while thinking of the other. Like leaving the comfort of your oldest blanket behind, and turning up the heating so high that you will never need it.
However, in relationships where the bond is from the heart and the love so deep and pure, things like this do not really change how you feel. He would always ask about me even on those briefest of calls home during the war, and I would still make him silly smiley cards for no reason at all. That’s how it is, with people you love. Even if it has been years since you saw them, even if the television blares reports of the wonderful job the boys are doing on the front and all the ecstatic things this war means. My thoughts forever hovered around Brian. Around how this is the classic recipe for disaster.

Demons have this way of shocking you around corners when you least expect them. Maybe that’s why they are called demons, even. My demon- my entire family’s demon infact, also caught up with us. A telegram. Followed by the light of our eyes, my little brother Brian in a wooden box.

The next few months went by in a blur. Just the pain remains in my memory. Like how some film makers put a lady in a bright red dress in a black and white movie, so that no matter what and no matter where you think of the film, the image of the lady in the red dress surely flashes across your mind.

That’s what the pain was like. Always there. Sometimes rising from the pit of my stomach, sometimes lulling me to sleep when I could not take it anymore. It’s funny, now to think of it, that pain and memory almost seem as if they can be transposed.

I earnestly believe that life, or whoever heads the department of cosmic intervention in the sky, sends you messages. Messages that are vague, out of the blue, and yet in that moment hold the key to a flurry of events, unlocking things from memory that you carefully stored away, never to be reopened. The message in itself may not mean a thing to anybody else, but to you, it seems like a customised page cut out and sent to you from the destiny handbook.

Here I am after all these winters and summers that have slowly slipped by, here I am still wearing my beads, sitting in at a café in a foreign country in a green skirt. The boy in the University sweatshirt and the grey green eyes has stopped talking. He is just looking in my eyes. All of sudden, I just reach over and touch the scar on his cheek.