“ Hello Nadeem, I have really missed you”. Her greetings took me back to the day I had first set my eyes on her. It was our first day in a well known management institute in western India. The sitting plan was put up outside for the red bricked, high ceiling semi circular lecture hall. The student officers chatted excitedly amongst themselves as they waited for the first Linear Programming lecture to start.

She wore a pink salwar kameez and an attitude, long legs balanced on high heels, no make up, shoulder length jet black hair, honey colour complexion, intoxicating brown eyes, about 30 years. “Hello Sir, how are you?’ she asked as she slid next to me. I had to fight the enticing perfume and presence to concentrate on the lecture.

A few lectures past, I realized two things – she was a tad deficient in her upper storey but made up for it with loads of attitude and chutzpah. I was more than happy to help her with the occasional answers in return for a company and a dimpled smile. Men will always be boys and 500km away from home, staying in a hostel; men will be boys with loads of testosterone!

The moot question hammering my intellect was – can a person have more than one soul mate? Are human instincts and happiness subservient to man made rules, to be sacrificed on the altar of “acceptable behaviour”? Do we come across friends, confidants, loved ones and enemies from our previous births in our present lives? How else can one explain instant like or hate when we run across certain persons? Soulmates are fellow travelers from previous lives or maybe part of our soul which has transmigrated to different physical forms, now trying to get together again……

As students we, armed forces officers, were acutely conscious of the fact that we were the chosen ones to study in the hallowed precincts of the institution. The red stoned building with its sprawling lawns had an old world charm; there was feeling of freedom and expectation in the air. The faculty and alumni of the institution boasted of names from the who-is-who of the academic and management world. Two weeks into the course, we had our first get together with the faculty in the local army mess.

A typical army party on the lawns besides swimming pool, local DJ playing popular numbers. She wore a light blue crepe sari and was letting her hair loose on the dance floor – a figurine full of mischief, masti and oomph. The full moon cast its luminescence on her; the songs talked of her beauty, the music made her come alive.

On the way back to the hostel, I composed my first ode to her and like a love smitten juvenile, emailed the poem to her on the intranet. I didn’t give a damn about rules anymore. I was in love

I peer through the gathering haze into my laptop to read the FB message ‘Hi Nadeem,  Howz life treating you’; darkness slowly engulfs me. I hear a door open followed by a high pitched scream but on the threshold of new world, I may have well been mistaken. And I don’t care.

Heaven (or Hell?) has a nice antiseptic smell to it. I slowly start becoming aware of the environment – the smell and the sounds. My eyes open to revelation that after life is full of fancy gadgets and tubes protruding from my body. I can make out the beeping of technology which has obviously pervaded the after life too. As my eyes become more focused, I can discern my wife sitting at the bedside. Has she followed me here? I force myself to look around, to think rationally. I discover that I am in ICU, very much alive. The scream I had heard was succour in form of my wife walking into the bathroom.  Unfulfilled in love, unsuccessful in death – I feel waves of nausea and disgust. The drugs are welcome as they push me back into the void.

The next time I surface, I am better prepared to face the reality. And so is my family! I see my son and daughter and wife around – looking expectantly at me, smiling, trying to reach out. My mind is blank. The outflow of blood into the bathtub seems to have obliterated all the memories and desires. I feel relief at having a family, at having someone by my bedside as I re surface into mortal life.

Over the next two weeks, I rest, recuperate and rediscover the joys of being a mortal. The family keeps me company, keeps me going on. I rationalize – Powai is near and real, Gravesend by Tilbury and far. Who is more important – the one who made you feel alive or the one who kept you alive? Confusion. What are my priorities? What are my responsibilities? Unrequited love is romantic but is story book romance real life? Can life really be lived in the pages of a romantic novel? My brains struggle with the questions and slowly start taking control of my heart – for good or bad.

The day of my discharge – wife is running around to get the papers cleared. I have conditioned myself to look forward to going home and spending time with the kids. Memories have been entrapped in some dark, dingy corner of my mind. I am undead. There is this tap tap of someone walking in the hospital corridor. The tall woman is wearing high heeled knee length brown Jimmy Choos, a dark green Dior skirt, soft beige blouse and a matching jacket. The hair is soft, silken, shoulder length wavy; the skin honey coloured and dewy fresh. The face is made up to accentuate the high cheekbones, the eye shadow and mascara highlight the smoky brown eyes. The smell of Elizabeth Arden awakens my senses as I realize that she has learnt my lessons on being a sophisticate quite well. She smiles and says in a husky voice “Hello Nadeem – I have really missed you”

Eternity is a long long time. And I could feel my temporal resolve weakening as I waited for her response on the Facebook.

It is surprising how life can obsessively revolve around waiting for a single response on the Facebook. My Blackberry had the account, the office computer had the site opened and minimized as also the PC at home. Every moment spent in waiting. Hope and anticipation waxing and waning everyday! Bouts of intense despair where the air seemed poisonously heavy and the lungs incapable of drawing it in. Disinterested and divorced from the mundane happenings of everyday life. Hope is all I lived with, hope which was increasingly giving way to dark, dull despondency.

The temporal self is weak; Eternity a vast chasm for the temporal to bridge. To wait for Eternity, I needed to divorce the temporal and take an ethereal avatar. Maybe time as we know ceases to exist on the ethereal plane. Maybe, the astral self could cross the oceans and watch her sojourn in the temporal till it was over and we were united. The idea slowly began to take root.

I had always been a sybarite – loved the good things of earthly life. But those were means to an end and without her presence in my life, meaningless. I followed elaborate rites for my passage from the temporal to the ethereal. No loose ends to be left behind, no other attachments except for my singular goal – Her.

I sit in the bathtub – soaking luxuriously in warm water with a bottle of Elizabeth Arden’s Mediterranean poured into it. I sit surrounded and immersed in her smell as I remember her. A mellifluous voice renders a popular composition of Ghalib, romantic nuances float in the background. The crystal glass on edge of the tub is filled with my favourite single malt on the rocks – the temporal savouring the last pleasures of the physical world. My laptop runs a slide show of all the images I have stored of her and my brain makes those nostalgic moments come alive. And I watch the white foamy perfumed water change colour – from innocent virgin white to a promising irrevocable red. My sights are dimming as I concentrate on the slide show – locking the last vestiges of her physical image, imprinting them on my soul. I have started feeling cozy and lightheaded when there is a tong from the laptop.

I peer through the gathering haze into my laptop to read my last message.  It’s from her and reads ‘ Hi Nadeem, Howz life treating you?’

The Facebook account had been freshly made and a smiling face overshadowed the iconic architecture in the background. My long wait of 31536000 seconds had been finally rewarded. Obviously, she was alive and well and once again had access to the internet. ‘ Howz life treating you?’ I quickly typed a message to commence the  second phase of my agonizing wait.

She was an ex army officer from the northern part of the country – rustic but with a tremendous zest for life. Five years in the army had not separated her from her penchant for loud lipstick, garish colour combinations of synthetic clothes, loud make up and the hard twang of rural accented English. But she had guts and an attitude which showed promising potential.

I was the sophisticate by Indian standards who could differentiate between Chenin Blanc and Shiraz, Gucci and Armani, between Poison and Opium. I loved my Mozart and Bach while she liked hindi pop, I read Orhan Pamuk while she enjoyed Chetan Bhagat, I played golf while she jogged to keep herself fit. We were as different as cheese to chalk; add an age difference and you have a well nigh impossible situation. But the opposites sought each other desperately. I taught her to be a sophisticate while she taught me how to be alive. I explained etiquettes and learnt the joys of breaking rules from her. We were soulmates – she and I.

Love sneaks in your life only once. That is the time when each joyful pore of your body feels alive, each breath intoxicating. It is a phase when societal laws, familial ties and peer pressure cease to have a meaning. Each moment is exhilarating, pleasurable and filled with immense happiness. And when you make love, stars twinkle, bells jingle, lights explode, there’s the crescendo of Bach in the background. You loose your identity, your souls merge, each day is better than the previous day. You live just to be with her, to see her, to smell her, to allow her to fill up your senses. Obviously, such happiness and love is not meant to last. Human beings in such love would be liberated from the bonds of hate, social norms, religion – disrupting the harsh real world we know.

She went off to distant lands to join her husband exactly a year ago and we lost contact. The intervening year was spent in pining for her, in hoping she was happy, in agonizing over a thousand what-if scenarios, in being caged in the rationality of worldly rules. One year of non-existence until she popped up again on the Facebook.

It has been two months since I have sent the Facebook message to her. She has not replied. I wait patiently. After all, eternity is a long long time……