They knew each other for decades now… they wanted to be each other forever…. they had their own reasons to part ….. they left each other but still lingered in the past…..


He sat there watching TV in the drawing room cluttered with ancient photographs and letters, folders and files and all sort of gift items carefully preserved …. a bit yellow now with growing age…. He had seen these things a million times now and still there was something in that which gave a never enough feeling….. He would see them and carefully rearrange them back in the shoe boxes with all the content felt, a but of sadness, a little longing  and lots and lots of love……

Today however for some reason the things were different …. the treasure was scattered all over the place his eyes were in one place and the heart in another…… the TV in the drawing room was playing some loud regional soap where climax was at its peak and all the actions and blames were shooting across the screen at a tremendous speed, the constant noise getting emitted by fan was working as a white noise taking him away from the TV, the present clutter, the memories in heart and allowing him a moment of trance, of nothingness, of feeling nothing, no sadness, no remorse, no regret, no anger, no depression, no emptiness, a vegetative state of being was being created in his brain….



In all that clutter today he held a box in his hand which was new…. it wasn’t the usual one…. the letters that were never preserved by him earlier… he had read all of them now ….. they were the witnesses to the years gone by …. justifying her stand, letters written in ancient past but never posted, some were his letters accusing her of all the treason and betrayal, of being cruel and mean, of being selfish and cheap and what not…… and every single accusation replied to, in the letter stapled to his letter filled with blames intricately woven to make her feel guilty of her choice…..

The past had danced in front of his eyes with every single moment vividly visible, all the intricate details being displayed to the very minute details……..but there was one thing that didn’t fit in…..he somehow was not able to picturise her face, no matter how hard he tried he just couldn’t see her in front of his eyes, he could remember the earrings she wore, the colour of her dress, the mehendi design on her hands, the bangles she wore, the delicately crafted anklets, but for some reason he couldn’t remember her face, her ever so beautiful big black eyes, her nose with the tiny sparkling stud, her black short curls adorning her forehead, her beautiful sun kissed pale peach skin… he knew all of this but he was just not able to put it together….to form a complete picture.

He sat there, still in trance, with an envelope in his hand…. “US” was written on it in capital bold dark pink sketch pen and inside was a photograph… of them both…taken years back…..

All he had to do was remove it and see it…. all the incompetence of brain could have been overcome in an instance…..but somewhere he was scared that it meant that he wasn’t as true as he thought he was…..all he wanted to do was to remember her face once…. before he accepted his defeat before he used the clutches of photograph that came with the parcel……..