Aiming the Impossible: An Artist's Memoir (Contd.)

IV

Painting: "Contemplation"By Kramskoy
Suggested by: Sarath Krishnan

I always disliked spiritual talk. Reading self-help books and philosophizing life were worst in my hate list. I hated writers like Paulo Coelho and all his sort of spiritual journeys. I had never dared to face the spirit, in fact. I knew my friend John Varghese had embarked upon a journey that would inevitably invite me to one of those maddening fancies that appear in all those books that many read, and say changed their lives. For me life had been unchangeable.

Then he said something that irritated me to hell and I was right about him too. There he was, telling me a story.

“Once upon a time,” he started; “In a small country, there lived a young girl. One day she read a book and liked it. She liked it so much that she decided to meet the author who lived in another city in the same nation. She met the writer and asked him if she can help him sell his books in other languages, as well.  

“She moved in to the city where the author lived, with her boy friend, leaving behind her studies in chemical engineering.

“She approached many publishers with the book. But not a single publisher was ready to go through the book, not a single stone had been turned.

“One day the author came to meet the girl. She was making a living by doing the work of a waitress and distributing pamphlets. At a café nearby, they both sat down and talked. The author was not at all hopeful about the success of his book, and he felt bad seeing how the girl was suffering for something impossible. He urged her to go back to her city and continue her studies, and not spoil her career for a dream that seemed almost impossible.” He stopped abruptly and looked at me in my eyes. I saw his eyes surveying mine. I saw his lips too. I knew they haven’t finished yet.

“But she knew she was taking the path her heart wanted to, just like you.” He picked it up again, with a voice that felt very dramatic then.

“After six months, the author came to see her. This time they met in the apartment she recently bought. Now she owned a car too. The book she was trying to sell the publishers became a huge success and was phenomenon in the publishing industry.

“That book was The Alchemist, author, Paulo Coelho and the girl, his literary agent Monica.”

He might have read it somewhere. He was not a writer after all. His creativity had no such charm to cook such a story all of a sudden from nowhere.

I said good bye abruptly and walked away, as if I can pay back the internal humiliation caused by my father that way. I was taking it out to Varghese. I had this thought then that he would understand, it’s my deeply wounded heart that made me behave that peculiar way. We trust upon our intuitions even if there is no guarantee they would be true; and think people can understand what we feel as if the screams of our wounded mind is in some audible frequency. I could not get another chance to meet Varghese, because all these days after that encounter I had been in a search for a route to find myself from what seemed an endless maze of confusing theories of ‘being what I am’.    

I spent the whole day in Kannur beach. Nothing productive happened. I was just beside myself. Then the sun went down. And darkness brought a whole new situation to the forefront. It was not where I would go; as my father had thrown me out of my house; but it was how tall would be the wall my absence could build inside my family.  

{Will be continued in the next post}