Chapter 1

Some people have everything. Some people have something. And then, there are some people who have my Angel. I am not a man. And this is not about a woman. I don’t even know what this is about, to tell you the truth…and I am not a writer, so I cannot really imagine and craft my fantasy from letters to words to phrases to sentences and paragraphs. All I write nowadays are notesheets, anyways.

I bought a book of love stories from a bookstore last week. It’s edited by Jeffrey Eugenides. I was steadily plodding through the stories with the stupid smile, tremulous mouth and sparkling eyes as is wrought to happen while reading love stories till I stepped into “The Hitchhiking Game” by Milan Kundera and Lord, how I hated it. It was this corroding despise rising from my navel and worming its way up my throat till it tasted like an aftertaste of bile. Yet, I could not skip the story and move on to the next. I tried skipping pages first. Then I tried skipping paragraphs. Then conjunctives followed by punctuations, the random article. Nothing worked. It was as if I was doomed to read it, line by line and recoil further and further away from my erstwhile feeling of calm, sheltered, gently swaying ecstasy. So, I kept the book aside and broke another cube of dark chocolate.

My angel had gifted me chocolates. There are many ‘best’ things about my Angel. Let’s begin from the beginning. Although, I am not sure where the beginning is, but since this is a not kiss but tell all account, let us attempt to find one end of the string.

When we were children, we had a popular game. It was to act as gypsies and fortune tellers. We would try to gather our knowledge, most of it drawn from fictitious rendering of palmistry by seniors at school, elders who deigned to spend time with us and siblings who passed on tit-bits of ‘stuff’ learnt at school during lunch breaks. Once, such knowledge was gathered we would attempt to discern the details of the future and believe with utmost commitment that can only come to a child. We always drew girl angels with golden hair, in a white frilly dress, a straight halo and a lop sided wand. Who knew then, that my angel would be a man? Indeed, a beautiful man who would wake up in my mind and traverse across my soul and hold me while I laughed and wept and sink into my sleep, never letting me go.

So, I had a letter. The first letter of the name of the man I would love (the concept of being able to really love a woman was not very clear to us then) and I tucked this precious letter away in the folds of my mind. Over the years, this letter never really peeped out although I often believed myself to be absolutely in love and even named my imaginary friend with the letter. And then one day around 6 years ago, it did. And without making the connections, I was absolutely, wonderfully in love. So much so, that I realized that all my earlier liaisons had meant nothing. They were meaningless trysts with destiny, a sort of preparatory ritual to pass into this one.

My angel often travels with me. He says he enjoys it. I have a curious tendency to fall asleep whenever there is any intensity of emotion at the offing. I have been known hence to slip into deep sleep after illness, disturbing incidences, declaration of love, hatred, problematic situations, desperate attempts at the pursuit of happiness and so on. I fall asleep every time I am with my angel. The deep sleep of the alive punctuated by dreams in Technicolor, none of which I can ever remember. Probably because, in my half sleep, I know, I always know I am waking up beside my angel. It is pure joy watching my angel sleep, with his wings folded beneath him, his face a calm mask of self containment, smooth supple skin strained over features so different and yet so perfectly aligned that it makes him look only closely human. He sleeps straight with his hands folded over his chest, as if ready to hold, to love and to protect. His love is a bottomless pit where you never really hit the ground, just an ethereal feeling of falling forever.

I often fall ill. I am not frail, infact I look disgustingly healthy. I believe that coupled with my mind, my body has also learnt the art of absolute eclipse of the real. I also fall ill while asleep. Strange things happen to my body. I turn cold, sometimes bluish but mostly just cold or unbearably hot. My muscles stiffen and I am about allergic to most things you would encounter and set aside with not as much as a sniffle. My angel often remains awake beside me. He rarely sleeps. And he holds on, as if afraid I would let go. In my sleep, while with him, as I grow ill, I have tugged at him, involuntarily as my spasms have taken over. It is only during retrospect that I wonder what led me to reach out to him while over years of sharing my room, I have never in my sleep, while falling ill reached out for the person beside me. It is somehow with utmost trust and faith that I believe he can heal me. No medicinal plant and certainly not the constant drugs that would course through my veins till I finally decided to put a stop to it.

My angel moves in a symphony of silence. His grace is not haunting, it is comforting. He despises staying still and he constantly moves, fixing this here and that there, as if it is all his to heal, to mend, to protect. I enjoy watching him. When he is not aware of being watched, his face transforms from polite disinterest to a portrait of moving shadows, flitting emotions and hooded eyes, looking inward as if in deep introspection of the autumn rain. This introspection fascinates me, and all I want to do is reach out and touch his face. But, I am afraid that the moment, so very fragile will shatter and the shards I will loose forever and even if I find some, I will be unable to put it all together again, for the sake of the missing pieces. So I stand back and watch with awe as the shadows flit across and my angel throws back himself and by mercy of the sweet Lord, he feels and holds close to his heart, the secrets surrendered to him.

And then one day, I left my angel and walked away, and have been walking since. As, I said before…some people have everything, some people have something. And then, there are some people who have my Angel.