… and once again there was hope.

I don’t think I know the reason ‘hope’ has come alive again… but she has and that’s what’s most important.

A friend recently glibly termed my condition as … ‘isn’t this called numbness?’ and I agreed or did I comply? Yes, I would like to think of it as compliance rather than agreement because hopelessness had given birth to lack of judgment and for lack of better judgment I had left decisions to be made ‘for me’ by ‘others’. Is that what shook me out of my reverie/ phase/ condition/ numbness???

Whichever it was - out of the options given above or those that are not – it’s gone now … I would like to think. It went away in phases and I came back to life in waves … Each day a vision, a spark, a word, an argument, a decision, a view point drew the delirium/ the coma/ the freeze away …

And now there is warmth … I can feel it in my hands … my typing fingers … my heaving bosom … my jiving being.

What visions … words …arguments? Who did they belong to???

There isn’t just one single person actually who managed to influence me this time around and even though I’m afraid I’m forgetting some of them … its but fair to put down some of the names … to thank them as well as for future references …

Think the first was the American woman who chatting up a Malyali passenger sitting besides her on a rickety plane jabbered inconsolably – “… You’re from Keralaaa? Oh well, I’ve traveled a lot in India but I haven’t been to Keralaaa. I mean like down South I’ve been to like Trivandram and …” On being told that Trivandram is situated in Kerala, she exclaimed making sure the whole plane heard (despite the squealing of the plane and the snack time clattering) including me with my ears stuffed with earphones generating high decibel noise to drown out this noise and my mind enmeshed in a quagmire of consuming revelations from the past … (in an unusually nasal voice) …”Oh! Wooooonnnw! That means I’ve been to Kerala. That’s gorgeous. My gawwwwwnnd!” Believe me it doesn’t sound half as bad when it’s written.
It shook me … brought me out of wherever I was … only the effect wasn’t permanent or even half as temporary in comparison to certain other events. Out of sheer contempt for this woman, her voice, her pompous being, the United States of America and its degenerate citizens, I went back to my ‘condition’.

Think next time I woke was when I saw the dolphins … I had to for I would have missed a vision more precious than life itself … after that every time I met the ocean … I was wide awake …

I woke up when I found love where I least expected it. I woke up when I sat down to have a meal by myself. I woke up when I spent a day with myself in a world not my own – a world where I was a total stranger at complete odds … with everyone in it, with its totality … I woke up when I started hearing dawn approach.

I woke up when I met Geo George. A man unlike most others, a man of substance in his own right. A man so simple that it put me to shame to think of any of his actions as malicious or unwarranted. A man who taught me in the few moments spent together to be devoted.

I woke up when I met Joseph Fiennes in a local daily. A star unlike other stars – one you don’t expect to meet in the local daily … who’s hazel eyes can bore holes into your head if he stares at you … who said – as if to me exclusively - “I love life.”

I woke up when I met Ch’mma. A friend, a companion, a compatriot, a mentor, a philosopher, a guide, a mother … she can be who she wants to be, who she thinks you need her to be. And she loves. Truly. Plus she writes beautifully – at leisure and at length…

“You have touched my soul, I want you to know, you are wonderful”

… and once again there was hope.