‘I’ve never seen you low or down nor ever on high! Do I take you as someone who have been emotion-free all through?

This man, who seldom opened his mouth and when and if he did barely a word or two escaped his lips, made the last response minutes before he was gone. He spoke to me at some length in the hospital lying on his death-bed. No family, no friends, him and me and a nurse to behold his dying moments. He went exactly the way he lived when he was around. No trace of worry on face. I have no knowledge of how he looked and behaved as a kid. He went at an age that nobody would want a person to go. None of us know what age is the right age to go, though.  He died of no cause. He had no history of disease. He was not on drugs. They blamed hemorrhage.

The only remains of him with me are the anthology of his verses kicking around in my bookrack.

This man popped into my memory in his moss-green tweed jacket and creamy corduroy trouser a moment ago out of nowhere and sent me around the computer to put down a few words about him. I see no reason why anyone would be interested in his story. But that cannot be a reason to deter me from enjoying the moments of painting his picture with color of words.

We were friends, about the same age. Anything that bound us together was ‘friendship’ for I can’t think of any other ‘word’ that can explain the way we were connected. Having said so, my relation with him was only too large and complex or beyond comprehension to fit into the narrow definition of ‘friendship’ given by English dictionary. So, I say it was friendship plus other things, don’t know how to put it.

We were not born in one and the same place. We didn’t go to the same school. We didn’t grow up together. We were not related even distantly. We didn’t share hobby. We had no common interests. We didn’t live together. We didn’t dine together. I never went to his house. He came over to mine twice to discuss his poetry. We were not in the same profession though at one point of time my dabbling in journalism made me jump on his bandwagon. We hardly ever saw each other, talked over phone most of the time.

I remember the time when he had called to see me. It was about his poetry that he wanted me to do in English. We sat before the computer. His couplets were not always rhyming and were made of weird symbols pregnant with similes and metaphors, taxing heavily on mind. His style paralleled Rumi, not that deep though. I figured out that his work was a blend of orthodoxy and ultra-modernism. They were rather anarchic, no planning and organization in  it. He had put down anything that ran through his mind. The task really annoyed the hell out of me. He’d elucidate his point but his elucidation was not any the less difficult than his poetry. I did the job anyway and Royal Academy published them.

We’d seldom if ever put our thoughts into words and throw at each other for we never felt the necessity for talking them out. I would be absorbed in my moment and he would be in his and yet we were together and connected, sitting by or strolling by. Maybe it was one big moment that swallowed us without him or me being aware of it.  Maybe the noise of silence was so loud that it drowned our voices. Maybe we knew each other down to the core, nothing left to be plumbed of each other’s psyche. Whatever way it was we didn’t speak most of the part and did so only when couldn’t do without it.

On one or two occasions, we strolled together for hours on closed lips beaming smile at each other. It was sheer joy doing it.

I recall one occasion when he rang me in the evening asking me to assist him in buying a birthday gift to his daughter. We walked to a nearby mall where we managed to pick up a pink Japanese hat. The tricky part of it was that he had never ever bought a gift nor had I. The onus was on him to decide what gift to buy. He shifted his responsibility on me. I protested. ‘How do I possibly know your daughter’s taste!’, I exclaimed. ‘It is up to you to decide it’, I put the screw on him. He gave a cryptic smile. ‘I don’t know either. Let’s go back and wait until anything comes to our head’, he suggested. We exited the mall and walked down the pedestrian way, quiet, in leisurely pace, unperturbed by our inability to take a decision about a petty little thing. Half-an-hour of walk down the footpath and there came a Japanese lady frantic with worry, appeared to have strayed out of her group, holding a city map in hand, bumped into me. In deference to the great Japanese custom she bowed low twice in rapid succession to us before running her trembling finger down the map at her hotel and begging us to show her way to it. I could see it that her language was making trouble for her. I called out to a cab, bargained with the cabby for it, and sent the beautiful Japanese lady to her hotel.

‘The idea came to my head. Let’s go and get a pink hat like the one on her head’, he said. We walked back to the mall, picked up a pink hat for gift.

Two years later, he was lying on his death-bed in the hospital. He had collapsed in the street, spewed up blood, and rushed to the hospital by one passer-by. Someone had rung me to inform me of his serious condition.

Something in me whispered to me that he had only minutes and not hours to live while I was awkwardly sitting on the stool by his side. My eyes roamed around the intravenous blood being given to him. I knew it that he too know what I knew.

He opened his eyes, his pale lips expanded into a smile. I beamed a smile back at him.

‘How are you feeling?’, I asked.

‘I am in a moment. I can’ take you in there. It is my sanctum. Life and death are merged into one here.  No haste. Time has stopped.’ he muttered.

‘Pleasant feeling, yeah!’, I said.

‘Heaven in the moment. I am in the moment. The barrier between me and heaven is fallen. Nothing so heavenly anywhere than this moment. I don’t want to go anywhere from this moment. No luxury of a kingdom or glory of a king is as pleasant as this moment’, he said and closed his eyes.

He didn’t have his family or daughter on mind. I could see that he was all alone in that pure, sacred moment. I waited in hope that something more would come from him. It was not to be. He was gone. The words he spoke are to live in my memory forever along his anthology of verses.