Address

For so many years, I had so many memories of her and our time together and never did the name of the locality where she lived really strike as something that would one day create a knot in my throat. But it did one day. Years after we had last seen each other, I stumbled upon this innocuous piece of information in a conversation with someone that she doesn’t live there anymore. From that moment, something bugged me as I went through with the day without giving it too much of a thought. And as so often, it was only at night as I lay down on my bed listening to the solemn tick-tock of the clock, the whereabouts of the pain revealed itself. It was again the heart that was hurt.

The address had changed. The name of the locality that so dominated our conversations once didn’t house her anymore. At once, the scenes from the bygone era flashed across the ceiling that had now turned into a veritable projector screen as I lay on my bed thinking about that one line – ‘The address has changed’.

So many of our meetings ended at that bus stop where we would wait for the bus with the name of her locality written on it as one of its end points. Probably, that’s how the name got etched. For her, the bus meant relief and for me, it signalled an end to a beautiful part of the day as we hugged each other goodbye. And then there were times when and if around that place, I would always leave her a message saying, ‘Hey, I crossed your place’. Pointless as it was, the exercise was just another of those innocent attempts to make her smile, and as I later realized, one that would etch the name deeper in my consciousness. However, it was once when she left the city and our brief tryst came to a crashing end that the name of that place grew even bigger on me. By a quirky twist of fate planned strategically by whoever writes those scripts, the next few months saw me boarding the same bus. While life moved on as did we, for me it daily came to a screeching halt for the briefest of seconds every time the name cropped up during the bus journey. It had suddenly become a signpost of a closed chapter. The closed chapter with its all intricate memories was thwacked open with a single harmless piece of information.

Somehow, over the many years, in that name of her locality, the memories of my time with her had found an address as well. It happened without me realizing it, but it did happen. To come to know that the address had changed was akin to a feeling of coming to know that the bank that had my safety deposits had suddenly vanished in thin air. The memories had been rendered homeless. The signpost was gone. Or, at least, it had ceased to have any meaning. It just stood there as a mute meaningless object, like most of the things in this world. All this time, the name had this effect of teleporting me back to those times. While everything changed so irreversibly between and around us, it had stood as the only constant in our story. Not anymore, though.