To be or Not to be...

-Not Hamlet. Not Gimlet either.

“That moment, I felt like jumping out of that window,” he said.

“Why didn’t you?” I blurted out before I could stop myself. I am notorious for such out-of-time comments.

“Dude,” he said with what sounded like exasperation, “I’m hungry. Besides, that’s gonna happen soon anyways.”

The last time we talked was exactly a year ago and I vaguely remember him talking of something not very different. Decembers never did him any good- Poor guy! Last year, he had just been ditched by a girl he loved. This year, he was ditched yet again. By the same girl. So, yeah!

Anyways, while I was thus regaled confided in, I was part-amused, part-appalled at his monumental stupidity. I mean, I got burnt only once before I’m awfully cautious every morning with the geyser. Mind you, this was the guy who once told me:

“A tragedy is that moment where a hero comes face to face with his true identity…” Of course I later found he nicked the line from Aristotle.

This was the first thought that sprang up in my head when I heard his tragic tale tonight. Here’s a perfectly sane person, who is trained on logic and reasoning, very much rational in his choices; the heck, he does a cost-benefit check before changing a brand of shampoo. In fact, he was the only one who I found laughing when a certain Prime Minister rendered most of the bank notes in our wallets useless. “I never trusted those papers,” he later said and I must confess his smugness roused a pugilistic loathing in me. Anyways, definitely not the type who’d make mistakes in the first place, much less repeat them.

So, in my amusement, I asked him how he had been so…naïve. I wanted to use ‘stupid’ there, but pride was his undoing. The ramble that ensued had a lot of words such as trust, feelings, betrayal, anger, jealousy, solitude, peace et al and sounded a lot like Bollywood movie material. I realized this is the moment he ‘turned’- Aristotelian literature uses the word “Peripeteia”; Google defines it as ‘a sudden change in circumstances’.

Either ways, it took him a year to realize that certain things have changed, this time irreversibly. “It’s been a terrible year,” he continued, “so much lost…”

“Like what?”  I couldn’t stop myself asking automatically.

“Like currency, like Severus Snape, Harper Lee, Fidel Castro and the whole frikking USA… What did you think! It’s not always about me…” he sounded indignant.

“It’s alright. Just 3 more days,” I tried to comfort him rather uncomfortable myself.

“I know. But does it matter how many days are left in a calendar we made when you don’t know how long to hold on and how soon to let go?!”

That got me thinking. And I realized it’s not such an uncommon dilemma, one I’d seen people face very often too.

A deep growl from my stomach jolted me out of this contemplation, and I realized I was gone for almost 30 minutes. I noticed that he was gone too, back inside my head.

Well, it’s dinner time…

-MaCh

Gurgaon

29-Dec-2016