She looked about her age. Forty-nine that would be. Time had stroked her hair with its grey fingers and the taut outlines of her placid face made apparent that she had asked for more testimonies of age than these. Her face bore the look of a woman-in-charge. A lady who knew what came next. Yet, there was a whiff of disenchantment in her elegant movements, in the settling of her sari, in the caressing of the errant tresses and in the manner in which she faced the worldly audience.

There was a sense of quiet assurance in her eyes.

Those eyes he could once die for.

He took a few steps back and from behind the refuge of a road-side stall his eyes followed her. The rickshaw passed him uneventfully, jingling its bells, raising no alarm in the lazy din of the approaching day.Only a whispering reminder to people to make way.

He took to the by-lanes now. Long, meandering and as lonely as him. He remembered how it was the August of 74 that had brought love in his life.

Their lives.
And how it all faded suddenly. For good.

Now, back to the city of his birth after almost two decades he was roaming the roads in search of his past. A past he then wished to bury in the endless murk which met his eyes every time he crossed the nullah. He aspired to reach for the skies then. To challenge the very limits. His meager livelihood combined with an ambience of constant need cemented his faith in 'money', the things it could buy, and the attendant relief that his restless heart so desperately sought those days.

Still, escaping the watchful eyes of his determination to prove his mettle , dodging and hiding from his near-Spartan resilience to rediscover himself love happened almost noiselessly, and he was more than glad it did.

Madhurima Sarkar, was vivacity incarnate.
A girl to whom good books and good food made for life in entirety an affair with a boy whose only claim to popular notice was a 'Grecian frown' was almost unbelievable. But, from the very day they met in their most private moments of childish premonitions they knew this could go far. Both of them.

And yes, it did. For four long years they shared their life. She was the inspiration behind his stories and she felt her heart aflutter while singing a particular stanza that made intimate identifications to her own life inevitable. Love swam in their eyes and they embraced its tides with both hands. Life with all its lyrical thrills unburdened itself on them.

The fights occurred often with a loving regularity bordering on trivial issues.

The reconciliations proved tedious yet rewarding.

And then the rifts surfaced. While her family sough out suitors with religious zeal he could do nothing but wander the streets in search of a solitary job- A face-saver, A 'something' with which he could bargain his life in return.

But fate had other conspiracies brewing. Amidst tears that were a continuous stream of suppressed grief and heart-rending sobs muted with the screaming conch life augured a 'new-beginning' as another story met its demise.

A neo-natal death of a love was well mid-wifed by society. Onlookers of this incident lamented ‘fate’ and enjoyed the sumptuous wedding-feast.

He walked the lanes in search of some momentary solace. And found none.

After weeks of desolation and unforgiving bitterness he came back to realize the void in his life. The void that now surrounded him till he could gather himself to do something about it. So he did. He finished his course, worked tirelessly in the day while the midnight oil grew weak from his nightlong endeavors at mastering borrowed books.

On the 23^rd of April 1981, from the stairs of a prattling train he bid goodbye to his past of misery and misfortunes.

…………….

Today, back as a near-affluent NRI to that very city, he could not help but look back in mournful retrospect. He turned back at the road he had traveled unmindfully, engrossed in his thoughts. And as he approached the nearby grocer for directions to the main-road, a white smoke billowed from an adjoining window which he hardly noticed amongst the gathering scene of daily chaos.

…..The window that had filled the eyes of a girl with myriad colours, all of which seemed dull and vacuous amidst the flourish of her sweet remembrances.

……The window that had muffled her soft sobs from homely disagreements with the inviting hum of the outside world and its activities.

….The window that had made the rain and the clouds, the sun and the spring a delight to watch within its restricting frame as she drank in all their aromas and ecstasies as a welcome recompense.

…..The window that for twenty-one years breathed life into the numbing nothingness amongst the din of worldly worries that accompanied everyday.

…..The window to the kitchen of Madhurima Sen Gupta, who once was a Sarkar and loved a boy who sported nothing but a Grecian frown on his face.