I wandered lonely as a cloud

Fiction

Something was amiss on top of the hill. I sensed it in my veins. My veins are the primary source of my awareness. As well as the little wisdom I’m gathering as I go on. I’m not wise. I’m just 30 years young. And I’m going to tell you a story about a woman who is just ten more years older than me. But she has grey hairs all over her head now.

Her name is Sujata. I learnt that when I was a ten-year-old boy who was driven by the kind of curiosity that killed the proverbial cat. I was living in the valley whose sunset was always blocked by the hill in the west. That entire hill belonged to one family. Aristocratic family, my mother told me. The history of their aristocracy went back to some Aryan invasion and all that stuff. History never enthused me. But heights did.

My history teacher told us about the Eiffel Tower that day in class. The tallest tower in the world. About its 1665 steps. About the grand vision it provided from its height. I imagined myself running up 1665 steps and looking at the earth. I thought I would be able to see the whole planet, the roundness of it. You see how stupid I was.

But Sujata chechi was the first one to tell me that I was a little genius. By the way, chechi in Malayalam means elder sister. I had just walked up the hill that belonged to Sujata chechi’s family the day my history teacher had spoken about the Eiffel Tower’s 1665 steps. What if I couldn’t climb up the Eiffel Tower? I have this aristocratic tower just behind my house. And I’m gonna climb that. That’s all what I thought. Of course, I didn’t know slangs like gonna and all in those days. Life teaches you that sort of rubbish as you get on.

Sujata chechi was amused to see me, a ten-year-old boy who seemed to have lost his way. When I told her about my history class and the Eiffel Tower and, of course, my desire to see the roundness of the earth, she laughed putting aside the writing pad she was holding. There was a tinge of sadness in her laughter, if I remember correctly. I don’t know if my memory is tincturing the colours of the past reality. Memory is terribly unreliable, I know though I’m only thirty. Thirty is dirty, I forget who said that. If I can’t even recall precisely what happened just about 20 years ago, how can my country recall its history of 5000 years ago? Well, that’s just one of the infinite questions that rage in my mind. My mind – which Sujata chechi called genius and I think is a junkyard.

She was writing a poem, she said, when I asked her what she was doing with the writing pad. I learnt that some of her poems were published in well-known periodicals like Mathrubhumi. My father was a fan of Mathrubhumi.

‘Do you like poems?’ She asked me.

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ I said in order to impress her. I was quoting the first line of the poem that was taught in class that day.

She laughed again. That laughter too carried the melancholy of history.

Pardon my memory.

Pardon history.

As I grew older, I learnt that Sujata chechi's father had died drinking when she was a child. Her mother was grappling with a perpetual depression. Sujata chechi's poetry carried all the beauty of Keats's saddest thoughts. 

Eventually Sujata chechi married another aristocrat and left the place. Her mother died and then the house on the hill remained abandoned looking like a haunted villa. 

Twenty years later... twenty years after my first visit...

I stood in front of an old woman. She was Sujata, I knew though her hairs were all grey. She wasn't half as old as her hairs looked. 

‘I’m selling the house and the land,’ the grey-haired young Sujata chechi said. She had faced too many cataclysms in her married life, I understood from her conversation. ‘Aristocracy,’ she said. Aristocracy is like history. Brutal. Butcher.

She had told her aristocratic husband to get lost. She wanted to live her life. Not being fucked around by a cock of history whose erection is now embracing everybody from Putin to Zelensky, Netanyahu to Trump – Trump whom he calls Doland affectionately apparently.

 Why is she telling me all this? I ask her. Do you know me?

I wandered lonely as a cloud, she said. And smiled. Sad smile.