Love Trilogy – Part I

A Gape Out of Ptolev’s window

 

38 year old Ptolev sat by the window looking at the Himalayan peaks which were as calm and composed as a meditating sadhu. Cut off from people, he stayed in a wooden house, standing lonely night and day in fraught silence that is sometimes broken by the sweet chirps of a bird or two from above the decrepit snow covered tree beside his window. This building, in Darjeeling, has been Ptolev’s house for seven years. Sunshine was, like the sounds of birds chirping, very rare. The small house, with four rooms though, is always faintly lit by the weak white light reflected by the snow all around through the windows.

Most of the time Ptolev just sits on his bed by the window peeping out at the high scaling magnificent mountains trying to decipher the meaning of their sturdy stillness, while the ink on his pen’s nib dries for he doesn’t write a word for hours. Sometimes he even imagined the peaks coming nearer to him but felt sad when he realised that that didn’t really happen. And when the mountains didn’t appeal to him, he selected a tree afar and wondered about it. Nothing in specific but just musings over the tree and its sillhoute. The only thought that often got him away from the himalayas and trees is that of Sofia (his love and 10 years younger to him) rejecting his love years ago before he left to Darjeeling. Why go into its wrathful description when we have the beautiful white mountains bestrewed with ever snow covered coniferous trees to discuss about.

Everything Ptolev does, from splashing freakishly chill water on his face every morning to listening to his bed creak in the night when he moves on it, is perfunctory but for his gaping at the mountains and the lake (just dozen meters away from his bedroom window) that is frozen in the winters ever since he came.

Because of the silence the place possessed, even the slightest and the puny and paltry sounds like that of his breath, his footsteps, the door knob when used, the creaking of his bed, the sound of his pen nib while on work and even the churning in his stomach be very important and noteworthy for him because very rarely do his ears get to feast upon better sounds. Anyway, I don’t think we should be minding as Ptolev lately is trying to find happiness in these insignificant sounds and normally never minded actions too.

Silence and solitude was all that he desired and this house in Darjeeling satiated him abundantly. But, since a month, every night before he slept, a strong feeling (or call it a sense) of lacking subverts his thoughts and moors with all forte untill sleep takes over. A chiding sense of loss, as if losing something that has just come in reach. A sense that something pertaining to him is happening elsewhere and is haunting him like the silence that surrounds him but not revealing itself. Every night! Philiping thoughts about some lack. About some unfilled gap seeking to be filled. So lost was he gaping at the himalayas, little did he realise Sofia was looking everywhere she could, yearning badly for him, after seven long years.

 

 

For Part II,  https://pratheekreddy68.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/love-triology-part-iii/

 

Comment section for me is like Ptolev’s bedroom window to him…!!