A Short Story About Love

They smoked a joint and made passionate love. Sex is always better when you are high- it juxtaposes two surreal experiences in perfectly synchronous harmony. Every single time, it felt like a group of soldiers in boots, marching in unison on a wooden bridge.  

It was a lazy Sunday. The weather was balmy, the sun benignly coming in through the curtains. It was winter in Kolkata, with its short lived and delightful charms.

Sahana got up lazily from the bed. To Ashim, she felt like the mist that lingers on seductively every winter morning. She pulled the curtains open, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke on Ashim. Ashim inhaled. It was one of their many games.

They had only a few more hours. Sahana was going back to her husband. How does one spend the last few hours with the woman you love? Over the last few days, Ashim and Sahana had religiously gone through their usual rituals. They listened to their favourite playlist, watched the trilogy that brought them together and read poetry. They got high, they laughed, they walked in the empty streets of North Kolkata at three in the morning.

So they decided to write a letter together, each of them alternately writing a paragraph dedicated to the other. It was something they had never done before. Remarkably, both of their closing paragraphs were almost identical. It again felt like sex on dope.

As promised, Ashim did not stay in touch with Sahana. It was a promise he had made in that letter. Love is great in literature and cinema, but truth is shittier than fiction, Ashim would often say when drunk. It helped that she was in a different country, many miles away. It also helped that they had no common friends and no social media to provide sneak previews of the lives of others. It also helped knowing her for only three months, when she was in Kolkata to be away from her abusive husband. It was the best three months of Ashim’s life. Three months so overwhelming and so fulfilling that Ashim never needed to love anyone again.

It had been fifteen years to the day Sahana left. Ashim waited patiently at the Howrah station, under the giant clock. When they had promised, in the closing paragraphs of their letter, to meet after fifteen years, the challenge was to identify a place in Kolkata that would remain relatively unchanged. The giant clock no longer told the time, but the nostalgia-loving city had campaigned to not have it removed. So now the clock always said it was ten minutes past ten; somewhat apt for a city where time often stood still.

Sahana did not come. Sometime around the evening, the police came searching for Ashim. He just stood listlessly, looking at the giant clock. 

It was time for the schizophrenic patient to head back to his small grey dorm room in a grey hospital in the greyest part of the city.