After two mugs of coffee, the grey woman started humming. She let her eyelids shut, but could not stop those beads of sun glistened tears. She started singing, lost in the praise, not about God, but some mundane up in the heaven. It was certainly not a devotional praise, but what this song was about?
Is it a love song?
Was it for someone she lost?
A lullaby?
Struggle for ethnicity?
Or a failed anthem?
But the tune was sweet and lyrical with pain. Sweet because, it had this variance. She started with few phrases, than stanza, one after another. She kept on adding words, repeated again and again. At the end, she was humming, the way she started. I guessed, like all things of agony and despair, she need to unwind the accumulated pain. She somehow completed her song, but..... she was still looking for phrases, as if waiting for someone from distant to finish the song. Picking up flashback scenes from growing up, dreams and struggle to keep her head high, blotched sequence of words and phrases, but she could remember the song like her breath. Like a song which serves aphrodisiac for her agony, she refuses to let it go.
Difficult for me to resist. Perplexed with curiosity and the aroma of fresh grounded coffee beans. She did not stretched her arms for the coffee, but kept focusing on the horizon. May be she was trying to hide those two drops of tears. Stubborn drops, metaphorically refusing to roll down her wrinkled cheeks. Khonoma weather and the afternoon sun was bestowing grey tresses into silvers. She could stand straight, but she's ageing. She took my hands out of my jacket and kissed gently and murmured a line of two, wishing me peace and solitude. Her hands were firm, palms toughened with age. Or was she a soldier, not hesitating to kill without warning? Or a farmer, who reaps from the plants they sow!
I took a long breath to ask, but she started saying something in a monotonous note - “this song goes like this". Still looking to horizon. "42 years ago, their was this slender woman from the blue hills met a soldier in uniform in mist and fog. A uniform without name and rank, but with red-cross on the soldier. This soldier, after their short affair, had to move to support the fellow platoons in the jungle. He was assigned to help and reduce escalating causalities in the skirmishes. While parting, he wrote in chit to this woman "me and my head says - lady, you are too good to be true. But my heart says - give me a chance, even if I don't have anything to give you at this hour?"
"Skirmishes turned into full scale war. Letter in a week reduced to once in a month. Those letters would tell about the dying wishes of the fallen soldiers, their family, jokes, affairs, hunger, pain. But he would add a last stanza about how he misses her in this beautiful valley, the jungle streams and stargazing. Stars and moon were special coz they would communicate them as uplink and downlink satellite in those days". She giggled. "With no letters in between them, they were getting tired with radio news, so they took stargazing and moon sighting. After some weeks, the radio announced "Unilateral Ceasefire". Newspaper frontpage flashed picture of two old burly men in star studded uniform, behind two flags, shaking hands, not smiling. The bloodshed ended, the war is over. She would book a trunk call every week. But the soldier never returned, neither his red-cross uniform was found. He was declared a Gallantry Hero among prisoner-or-war and Doctor Handsome by foes. Missing in action."
I asked her "who did you believed? Head or heart?" But she said (as if she can read faces) “I believed them. How would live a dream without hope?"
There was this serene silence. Only chirping and cracking sound of firewood in makeshift earthen stove. Was lost in thought. Our coffee was getting cold. Need to warm it up. But why am I crying?
~Aang #fanpost