The Wind

I have always known how to suffer in silence. I can hide my pain. Even when the heart splits into two jagged halves, my lips still keep the smile stitched tight. No one ever notices. A small, unnecessary sorrow—yet perhaps never before had it come so piercing, so absolute.
 
When I first saw you, your cheeks were swollen with pimples. You were not beautiful—not in the way the world calls beauty. Yet the innocence etched across your face enthralled me. All my life I had searched and wearied myself for something nameless; suddenly I felt as if I had found it—within you.
 
Perhaps I would never have carried any expectation to your door, if not for the stubborn endurance I have always borne toward life. And then, in that deep forest—mist-choked daylight, where no sunbeam could pierce, where silence itself grew like moss on stone—I discovered you. Shilbhadra had warned me: that jungle is a labyrinth, a chakravyuha. There is an entrance, yes—but once you walk inside, there is no return.
 
Do you remember? A little away from your house there was a graveyard. From the first flush of youth, I had felt a strange pull toward it. I used to spend long hours there, beneath the soundless satin of the satinwood trees, by the side of some young man’s grave. I would read the epitaphs carved in stone, word by word, and through them the fragments of love and lives long gone would blaze before my eyes.
 
Sometimes, you too would come. In your school uniform. A dark face, a scatter of pimples across it. You would sit by Alfred’s tombstone, near his feet, pulling one or two books from your bag. Then you would lose yourself in reading. I would watch you from a distance, astonished. The city beyond the graveyard walls would vanish for me. It felt as though, within a riotous, clamorous town, I had stepped secretly into a hidden paradise. Astonishing, astonishing! Helen of Troy herself, asleep in a secret garden—while outside, the world raged in endless war.
 
Though I never had the habit of tying together the severed threads of other people’s stories, yet some muted longing stirred in me: to know the nerves, the inner quivering of your little chest. Alfred D’Souza? Who was this twenty-four-year-old dead youth? What bond bound him to you?
 
Shilbhadra had warned me: don’t wander into the dense forest, don’t choose needless torment. But unknowingly, perhaps, one day I strayed into that feral wilderness. A place where no particle of light would ever reach, where my mind would fester, where my soul would be struck by intoxicated winds. From the world of light, I had crossed into darkness. From the ordinary, I had stumbled into the extraordinary.
 
You came sometimes—alone. Sometimes with a heavy, matronly woman, flesh sagging lifelessly, beyond her youth. She would doze beneath the trees or nibble fried potatoes. She hardly spoke with you. Once she called you—“Franka.” Ah! What music in that ugly mass of flesh calling your name. Like a mynah bird’s cry across blue sky and green fields.
 
But what can one ever divine from a name? Alfred—Franka. Franka—Alfred. I kept shuffling the two names in my mind, as if playing a game with cards. And without knowing, I had knotted myself into their story.
 
One day Franka came dressed in a white gown, carrying white flowers in her hand. She sat for a long time near Alfred’s head, her face lowered. Then she tore the blossoms apart and scattered them over the grave. She lit a candle. Evening was slipping in. In the glow of the flame Franka’s face was illuminated, bathed in a strange humility—as though she had surrendered herself to someone unseen.
 
The raw magnetism of that dark face drew me then with an unstoppable force. Sitting at Alfred’s feet, Franka murmured something under her breath. As darkness thickened, only the trembling flame of the candle could be seen, swimming in the cemetery’s still air.
 
“Franka—” a grave male voice called her. Until then, I had not even noticed him. A man was standing under a distant sirish tree, smoking a cigarette.
 
“Let’s go,” he said.
 
Franka rose. She walked toward him.
 
Inside me, some illicit presence wanted to rush forward—toward Franka—as if I could resurrect Alfred himself. As if I were Alfred. I longed to snatch her away from that thunder-voiced man, to carry her into an unknown realm where no one would ever call her in such a hard, commanding tone. There, she would sit forever in silence, and I would simply gaze, gaze until eternity dissolved. This was the one I had searched for all my life. She had come so close. How could I let her slip away?
 
The silence of the graveyard broke within me; I wanted to shout aloud, to tear open the night with my voice. Franka was leaving. She would never come again. Perhaps tonight she had given me a chance. If I had only reached out my hand, perhaps she would have been mine. But my hesitant step, my uncertain vision, froze me in place. I did not move. I only watched, from afar.
 
O ruin of ruins! I ran forward, crying out, circling in the shadows of trees, hiding my body beneath the dark leaves of the krishnachura, searching around her like a madman. Then I made a vow in my heart: I would reveal myself. I would go close.
 
I crept nearer, so close. Franka lifted her eyes and looked at me.
 
O God, what a desolate gaze! Her eyes, drowning in sorrow, extinguished the drunken gale inside me with a single breath. I trembled and dared not meet them again. Had I been wrong? Was everything I had thought, dreamed, imagined—false? Why did the fire in her eyes suddenly go out?
 
In the darkness I writhed with pain. Franka left. I could not speak a word. I beat my forehead against the unseen coffins of strangers, as if smashing myself against Alfred’s tomb.
 
Shilbhadra had spoken truth: once you step into this labyrinth, there is no escape. And I too was trapped.
 
I returned to Alfred’s grave, pounding my head like a madman. Franka’s candle still burned there. I groped in the dimness for the white flowers she had scattered, clutching them like relics, sobbing with the death-cry of despair.
 
Alfred, Alfred! I wanted to raise you from the dead. Brother, friend, husband, lover—whoever you were, I wanted to embody those eyes through which Franka once saw life itself. But, O beloved, I failed! Franka’s sorrowful eyes had cast me out, driven me away into exile.
 
For many days afterward, morning and evening, I lingered like a sleepless sentinel beside Alfred’s grave. But Franka never came again. Sixteen-year-old Franka, who once scattered white flowers, never returned.
 
Still, I waited. My sleepless eyes burned through the days. Time piled upon time. My age increased. Youth drained away. Energy dissolved. My life became, in truth, a failure. What meaning remained except the slow death of feeling? All my pain, all my love, I buried like a butcher hides carcasses in the pit of his chest. Over my eyes I pulled down a shutter of steel. I became a man blank-faced, distracted, lifeless.
 
I no longer wished to see clearly. I no longer could. Hope decayed into helplessness, helplessness hardened into sloth. Even to walk and sit by Alfred’s grave felt like too much. Everything seemed meaningless. Those for whom life still carried purpose made me laugh—laugh with a bitterness sharp as gall. What magnificent excuses humanity invents to keep living! All of it only to arrive one day at the recognition of death.
 
And yet—strangely—there are borders beyond which, once crossed, some meaning may be glimpsed. Though I have never believed in coincidence, still, in my own life, something uncanny occurred.
 
It was as though a ship long sunk in storm returned to the surface with all its passengers intact.
 
After so many years, a young woman of about thirty arrived at Alfred’s grave. She was dressed like a bride. My eyes widened. The tomb had grown ragged as an abandoned house—epitaph dulled to gray, inscriptions faded. Who could tell now whose son, whose husband, whose beloved lay here?
 
And yet, the woman’s face carried the faintest shadow of Franka. My fingers pinched my own chest, I rubbed my eyes. Could such error exist in the cosmos?
 
And then I saw him. The man who walked beside her. The supposed bridegroom.
 
Shilbhadra.
 
Yes, Shilbhadra himself—the man who had once warned me never to enter this labyrinth of the forest, who claimed truth as his only lamp, who left my hand behind on the dark road. Now he had entered the same darkness, carrying Franka’s shadow with him.
 
O wretched Alfred! You were betrayed.
 
Franka’s shade no longer bore the innocent pimples of girlhood. Her face was powdered smooth, her skin oiled in sheen. Certainty and assurance had possessed her, subduing the purity that once radiated. Happiness now seemed written upon her—though Shilbhadra, strangely, looked more miserable. His restless eyes searched around Alfred’s grave like a hound sniffing for danger, rehearsing imaginary disasters. Survival had etched caution deep into his soul.
 
And yet, Franka’s shade retained something…something familiar. What exactly, I could not name. More pride than arrogance, more dignity than vanity. For the first time, I understood the phrase “divine enjoyment”—pleasure that arises only from renunciation. Franka embodied it. She seemed present in everything and yet absent from everything at once. The feeling was so drained of passion that I nearly hated it.
 
Her departure filled me with a strange disgust. And yet, as she walked away, it felt as though someone was stealing her from me again. My heart longed for her to look back, to see me—but I could not step forward. She had looked at Alfred’s grave in such a way that revealed no desire to see anyone else. Her gesture was a ritual, nothing more, an observance in honor of the dead.
 
When Franka’s shadow left, I saw myself more clearly than ever. The burden I had carried so long seemed lifted. Emotions drained out of me. From a dead life rose a flash of happiness. I felt suddenly light, like the wind itself. Like the air, embracing all but never held by anyone.
 
For years more I lived like this. Dancing alone sometimes at Alfred’s grave, laughing madly in middle age as though youth had returned. Franka’s shade never returned. I sat in solitude, imagining her happiness, blessing her.
 
But one day—a nun came. A real woman, not a shadow. She arrived with two masons. At once they cleared away the weeds, rebuilt the crumbling grave with bricks and mortar, as if reviving an ancient death.
 
Why such an arrangement? My astonished eyes watched. Could it be that joy might return once more?
 
I saw Franka’s face again in that nun—her radiant composure overlayed with an otherworldly tremor. Only then I realized: I was selfish, cruel, tyrannical, antisocial. I who had thought myself priest of truth, prophet of reality, was only a hollow man. A fraud.
 
It was autumn. Bliss stirred again. My body, aged and heavy, began to whirl like wind. I wanted to run, to clasp Franka to my chest, to spread wings into the sky.
 
From then on, Franka returned often. Regularly. Ritualistically. And yet she never grew old in my eyes. She remained the girl I once knew. Only—I no longer understood the language of her face, the color of her heart. Perhaps with age, our capacity to perceive dwindles.
 
Then one summer afternoon it happened. A violent day.
 
Franka stood long at Alfred’s grave, then suddenly lifted her eyes—straight at me. She stretched out both hands, arms wide, a gaze of desperate invitation. She was calling me!
 
Franka, calling me!
 
She turned her face upward, blazing with indescribable radiance, as though she were surrendering everything in pure devotion. Her smile was a miracle. I will never forget it.
 
In that instant, I pierced a great secret. The language of her face, which I had never understood, was suddenly revealed by some invisible sorcery—the language of unconditional surrender, desireless love, a spirit exulting in some unknown utopia.
 
And I—I was paralyzed. My feet rooted to earth. I could not move.
 
Franka lingered, arms outstretched, then with sorrow turned away.
 
She never came again.
 
Except once.
 
Years later—inside a coffin.
 
Like a lecherous lover I threw myself upon it, beating, sobbing, cursing heaven, clawing the air with unbearable grief.
 
And then—before her coffin—a girl of twenty knelt. A black-skinned girl.
 
At once my tears froze. Terror, sharp as lightning, pierced me.
 
Could it be? Was Franka returning again?
 
Was the cycle repeating? Another sorrowful life, another doomed desire? To love, to long, to ache, to surrender, only to be cast into unreachability again?
 
A gust of wind rose, striking the young girl’s body.