Liberating Love

It is with a heavy heart that I deleted the number from the contact list.  My Samsung phone cautioned me: Do you want to delete the number or remove it from the favourites?  And it gave me three options: Cancel / Remove / Delete.  When you have chosen a path after enough deliberation, there should be no hesitation.  I hit the delete option.

Last Christmas my phone showed a number of missed calls from a particular number.  Both Maggie and I were outside home and we didn’t hear the call.  I am usually reluctant to answer calls from unrecognised numbers and I never make a return call to such numbers.  Finally Maggie answered the call from that particular number when I was still outside. 

It was a call from a person whose number I had deleted from my contact list as well as memory some 15 years ago.  He said he wanted to shed a burden from his heart this Christmas day.  He said he had wanted to do it during many other previous Christmases but had no courage.  He also asked Maggie not to tell me that he was the one who called lest I block the number.

Maggie told me, however.  I didn’t block the number.  I was not interested in a call from that person, nevertheless.  I thought he wouldn’t call.  A day or two later, while I was sitting in a hospital where Maggie had an appointment with a doctor my phone rang.  I thought a phone conversation would be a good entertainment while I sat on the dreary bench in the hospital’s musty corridor.

It was that man who wanted to make his Christmas meaningful.  As soon as I answered he laughed uproariously which prompted me to move out of the hospital.  I feared his laughter would disturb the solemn and sad silence in the hospital.  I moved out on to the road.  I suddenly remembered that I had another work to complete in the town.  Let me do it, I decided.

“Do you recognise me?” The caller asked after the bout of laughter which strangely reminded me of Ashwattama after he had made his nocturnal and vicious assault on the Pandava camp when the Kurukshetra war was drawing to a close. 

How could I forget that laughter?  I told him I had no ill feelings towards him.  I have made it a policy not to harbour any ill feelings toward anyone because such feelings are harmful to ourselves.  He said he wanted to visit me personally and I said it was Christmas vacation and I would be available at home during the vacation.  But he didn’t come.  I didn’t save his number anyway. 

This morning I had to delete a contact for an entirely different reason: to stop hurting someone I love a lot and who loves me too equally.  Sometimes love hurts and it becomes necessary to keep a distance.  It was precisely that lack of distance that had created the uncomfortable situation between the Christmas caller and me.  He had taken it on himself to reform me.  There were a lot of people who joined him in the reformation process.  I found the whole process so hellish that I left the place altogether and moved to Delhi.  I didn’t want to be him to another person though I had never thought of such a possibility.  But love can be a burden sometimes.  Such love is counterproductive.  Love should liberate.