What a tumultuous night it had been so far, and yet it had much more in store for our poor professor before it was going to be over. And paving the way for this ‘much more’ was the brilliant idea that struck Kamal as he was halfway through his bottle of beer.
“Why don’t you ask her for a dance?”
“A dance you say?”
“Yes, a dance. I have this beautiful song that I came across last night. I think it is a perfect melody to bring the two of you together.” And without warning, he grabbed Raghuvir’s arm and pulled him inside in to the living room. Once there, Kamal left him and to get everyone’s attention, went over to the music system and switched it off.
“Alright, guys. What do you say we have a romantic track for all the couples in the party?” He announced, and getting some acquiescing nods from the crowd, went on. “So everybody grab your partner, I want you forward on the dance floor,” urged he, and using his sinewy arms, pushed aside some of the furniture to make room for the dance.
As people began to step forth, he hooked up his tab to the music system and got ready to play one of the tracks that Kritika had mailed to him last night, a romantic melody performed by an all girl band, Angels in the Shadows. As the first few notes of a sweet cherubic guitar riff began coming out of those speakers, somebody in the room dimmed the lights.
Kamal rushed to Raghuvir, who was still standing in the place where he had left him, unmoved.
“If you don’t go ask her for a dance, I swear I will give you no more rides in Rosa. You be walking your way around for as long as you are in this city,” Kamal warned him in a hushed voice, trying to bring him out of his stupor.
No more rides in Rosa! That in itself was enough of a lure for Raghuvir to happily relinquish not only Anoothi, but every other woman in the world as well. But too beautiful she looked, dressed in red in that dim yellow light, smiling almost like a child as she sat on that sofa with her arms folded around her knees, swaying herself back and forth to the beautiful music that was filling up the room.
Fascinated, he walked to that couch and extended his hand out to her, asking her for a dance, and she in return just smiled even more before giving to him her hand. To the make shift dance floor they moved, holding each other and swaying to the melody.
Now as the first verse of the song is about to begin, imagine yourself in front of a split screen, on the left are Raghuvir and Anoothi dancing in that dimly lit room, and on the right are Angels in the Shadows, true to their name they are just silhouettes on a stage, three figures on chairs, one holding a guitar, other a saxophone, and the one in the middle, the lead singer about to break in to the first stanza.
‘From where comes this song..
This happy melody..
That reminds of the times..
When you held me..under the starlit sky..’
That voice, that voice he knew! That voice was hers.
‘A promise of love, and the meeting of two souls..
As crickets buzzed, a nightingale sang, the ditties of loving hearts..’
Was there any doubt? There could not be, for that voice was imbibed in his very soul. He stood frozen; the woman in front of him looked at him with concerned eyes, but he stepped away dazed, towards that Tab, and here he came face to face with those silhouettes.
‘Sunshine..oh..sunshine..
Won’t you sooth me a little longer..
Dark clouds I see, far above those trees..
And with the raindrops, my tears a will come falling too..’
‘But I know you be there, to shed some tears with me..
For crying alone is a very lonely thing to do..’
And indeed he was crying, overwhelmed, tears were running down his face.
‘As I sit and talk to my guitar at night..
It whispers your name in every note I play..
And as I scream my pain, to the heavens above..
A picture of you, smiling at me comes..
And soothes me like the sunshine..’
‘Oh the meeting of our lips, like a drop of dew kissing a rose..
Oh the life that could have been..
The joy we could have seen..
But what’s left is a distant dream, and a picture, your picture..
Smiling at me..
And soothing me..like sweet winter sunshine..
Like sunshine..like a little place that is all mine..like home..a place like
home..our home..’
And as the music ceased, and the crowd broke in to applause, as the lights on that stage turned on to give those silhouettes back their distinct appearances, there she indeed was, his eternal love, his Roshni, our ghostess of dreams.
*******
“It is her, the one singing that song, it is my Roshni,” A breathless Raghuvir said for what was the umpteenth time in the past one hour. Anoothi and Kamal both nodded to show that they understood, but it was not going to stop him from keep saying that.
All three of them were out on the balcony, the party having been brought to an abrupt end by Anoothi when she had come to learn of what Raghuvir had seen in that video. She was standing in one corner, watching him pace the length of that balcony with anxious steps as Kamal was on his tab, trying to find anything he could about this ‘Angels in the Shadows’ band.
“Damn it, this connection just keeps breaking,” he suddenly groaned in frustration.
“I have an Ethernet connection in my room. Use that,” Anoothi suggested, and went back in with Kamal to set him up at her laptop.
When she returned, she saw that Raghuvir still continued to pace that balcony. The ceaseless yearning she now saw in his eyes towards this woman, she wondered if she would ever be able to find a similar place in his heart for herself, or may be after tonight, there will be no place left in his heart at all for her. But now was not the time to dwell upon these thoughts, now was the time to step in and support her friend.
So she stepped back on that balcony, trying to placate him however she could, at times by indulging him in conversation about his Roshni, and at times leaving him in silence to dwell upon her memories.
“I hope Kamal would be able to find something,” said Raghuvir, a lot of time had passed and he found himself growing more and more impatient.
“Don’t worry, he will. He is very good when it comes to stuff like this,” Anoothi tried to assuage him, wishing herself that Kamal would hurry up. And her wish was soon granted, as a flurried Kamal rushed out on that balcony.
“Alright, after a lot of snooping around, I found a website that listed some information about this band. Now it had not been updated for long, but I found some numbers there, and dialing them, I found one of them to be active. This person I got through to, used to be the band’s old manager. Well, after a lot of begging and pleading, he finally consented to give me the number of one of the band members. It was not Roshni though; it was Meghna, the one on the saxophone. So I dialed her up, and call it dumb luck, but she is in the city right now and she has agreed to meet us. She is leaving in the morning though, so we will have to go straight away. She is staying in the Le-View. It is a hotel near the railway station. Come on then you guys, we got to move,” He urged, eager to get going.
“Wait. I actually…” Raghuvir hesitated a little, but eventually spoke out his mind. “I actually want to go alone if you guys don’t mind.”
Although Kamal felt a little disheartened by it but he could understand Raghuvir’s need to make this journey by himself, and so could Anoothi, therefore none of them made any objections to his wish at all.
“She is expecting you. Just have the reception call her in room 503, and she will come down to the lobby,” Kamal gave him all the information he would need.
“And take my car,” offered Anoothi, as she thrust her car keys in to his hand.
Raghuvir thanked them for their help, and carrying their best wishes with him, hastened out of there. As Anoothi saw him wa
lk out of that door, she could not help but wonder if he had just walked out of her life too.
“Quite a night, huh?” Kamal broke the silence that had spread momentarily, flopping down on one of the couches, there was nothing for them to do now but wait.
“Yeah, quite a night indeed,” Anoothi agreed, as she looked at that big punch stain on her carpet and smiled rather fondly at it.
“A couple of very strange things happened though,” Kamal started to reveal. “Firstly as I was talking to that Meghna woman on the phone, she talked to me like she had already been expecting this kind of a call. And secondly, during my internet searches, I found that Roshni was not using her real name in the band. She went by a pseudonym rather, almost as if she was avoiding discovery.”
“That is strange,” Anoothi agreed, her brows furrowing.
“Indeed.” But before Kamal could go on any further, he received a text on his phone. “Ah! It is from one of my friends. I had asked him to help me in my search about Angels in the Shadows and he has just sent me a couple of relevant links. I think we should check them out,” he opined, and soon thereafter, the two of them found themselves in front of a laptop, browsing through those links.
The first one was just another database website that had not been updated for a long time, and it was quickly discarded off as useless. The second though, proved out to be far more interesting. It was an old fan page of the band, apparently on some college’s website.
“So it actually started off as more of a college band, based in the city of Shimla, three band members, the instruments they played, some of the songs they wrote, indeed she was not using her real name…” Anoothi was skimming through the page, looking for any relevant information that could help them locate Roshni. And then something on that screen suddenly caught her attention. “Wait, what is that link, yeah, that one near the bottom right corner.”
As Kamal maneuvered the cursor and clicked that link, what popped up next on that screen left them pale with shock. For several minutes, there was just ominous silence in the room as they stared blankly at the screen in front of them.
“We have to go at once. We should be there for him, when he finds out,” Anoothi said at last, and both of them hurried out of the house.
*******
The drive to that hotel was a long one. Every yard stretched in to a mile, every mile in to a lifetime. The window of the car was rolled down and the night breeze was pricking his face like thousand jagged edged splinters. His more than a decade long search was finally coming to an end tonight. He could feel his heart palpitating in his chest, sweat rolling down his spine as he drew nearer and nearer to his destination.
And when he was finally there, his feet refused to move, as if they were set in cement. Somehow he managed to drag himself out of his car and in to the hotel lobby. At the reception, he asked for the person he had come to meet. In his turmoil he thought he had forgotten her room number, only to remember it at the last second.
And then there was more wait, more agonizing wait, as his eyes stared without blinking at the elevators. Finally she came out of one of them, a woman in her mid thirties, dressed in her night clothes, holding what looked like a folio sized scrapbook under her arm. She had a pensive look on her face as she approached him.
“Raghuvir, is it?” she asked, although she already had a strong inkling that it was him. Ever since the incident of yesterday evening, she had been expecting to meet him.
She was sitting in her bedroom, doing some embroidery on one of her dresses when all of a sudden she had felt the presence of a strong warm energy around her. The next moment, the beads in the tray on her lap had begun to slide around all by themselves, and while she looked on in utter astonishment, they had arranged themselves to form the following words.
‘go to ludhiana take the songbook’
First thing this morning, she had taken a bus to Ludhiana, and now some twelve hours later, as she stood in front of him, she could say that her trip had not been in vain.
“Raghuvir?” she asked again, seeing that the man was lost in some sort of a stupor. This time he nodded his head and as he did, her hand reached out to his arm in kindness and she led him towards a sofa in that hotel lobby.
*******
Some distance away over a Peepal tree, Neha was hovering. Her eyes were closed and she was enunciating a Dvijya. A few seconds later, the leaves and the branches of the Peepal tree began to shake vigorously, before it suddenly spewed out from its thick foliage, our ghostess of dreams.
The evening Roshni had found out about Raghuvir being in the city, the evening that she had learned from Neha about his wanderings of the past eighteen years, violent and irrepressible emotions had overwhelmed her good sense, and in desperation, she had adorned her erstwhile mortal form with the desire to meet her lover.
It had only been Neha who had stopped her at the last moment, for not only were the repercussions of such an action going to be dire for her, but it could have left Raghuvir with scars that would have marred his psyche for the rest of his life.
Somehow Neha had convinced Roshni that the best way forward was the truth, to tell Raghuvir of what had befallen Roshni so he could get a sense of closure and move on with his life.
When Roshni had expressed to Neha her inability to endure the coming episode as well as her fear that she might end up doing something drastic under the effect of her sentiments, Neha, using one of her Dvijyas, had put her in to a state of hibernation from which no one but only the ghostess of love herself could rouse her, which she promised to do once this was all over. And that brings us to the present, with Neha having just brought Roshni out of that dormancy.
A little bit of time it took for the ghostess of dreams to regain her bearings, before she finally asked the pivotal question. “Is it done? Does he know now?”
“Yes it is,” Neha told her, moving closer and giving her a warm embrace.
“Can I go see him now?” Roshni asked. “I won’t do anything stupid.”
Neha thought upon her request, and after some deliberation, gave Roshni her consent. “Come on, I will take you to where he is.”
*******
“I can’t believe your stupid car broke down again, it’s a lucky thing there was an Auto passing by or we would still have been stranded there,” Anoothi grouched. She had just paid off the Auto Driver who had brought them here, and along with Kamal was briskly making her way towards the hotel lobby of the Le-View.
But just as the two of them reached the front entrance of the hotel, they saw coming out of it, the slouched, grief stricken form of their friend. One look at his haggard face, and they knew that he knew.
As he came to a halt in front of them, his teary pain streaked eyes looked in to theirs.
“Sh..She is gone..she..di..ed..” his frail, strained voice told them.
No words his two friends said back to him. Instead they just stepped up and put their arms around him in a tight hug. Instantly he broke down in to tears, his form slumping forward but his pals were there to hold him.
Up above, Roshni was looking down upon the whole scene with moist eyes of her own.
“Don’t worry. He has good people around him. They will help him through this,” Neha told her, rubbing her shoulder.
“I can see that,” Roshni said, wishing for nothing else in life but for him to find his happiness.
The two of them remained there, looking on as the three underneath them continued to remain in each other’s embrace. It was a long while before they moved from the entrance of that hotel, Kamal and Anoothi helping Raghuvir walk towards the road, as they would help him walk towards a fresh beginning in the coming months.
“Come on, I have got some good booze stowed away from my last trip to the nether world, let us make a night of it,” Neha tried to chirp up her friend, as the two of them watched the other three depart. She knew that there was no feeling in this world more terrible than the feeling of being left behind.
*******
“You never told me what happened though?” Neha inquired, her voice slurring a little from the effect of the alcohol. She and Roshni were hanging out at her Banyan tree, about to finish their second Madrico bottle of the night.
“What happened was…” Roshni began, the booze having lowered her inhibitions. “Not long after we came away from our town, I was pressured in to an arranged marriage by my family. I tried to refuse, but in the end, neither my reasons nor any of my pleas moved them at all. So like an idiot, I let myself be forced in to it…” here she paused, shaking her head at that horrid memory. “And I got what I deserved, an abusive marriage.”
“Anyhow, it took a couple of years of abuse that made me see the light. So one day, I just ran away, away to Shimla, away from all that shit. Heavens knew it was time for me to do that. Anyhow, as I made my great escape I had the good wits to take some gold with me, and this kept me on my feet. I enrolled myself in to a Mathematics course in one of the colleges in Shimla and eventually graduated in it. It was there itself that Angels in the Shadows also came about.”
Neha nodded her head grimly as she came to terms with her friend’s life story, before she poured another glass of Madrico for her. “I still don’t understand one thing though,” Neha could not help but ask. “Why did not you try going back to Raghuvir?”
A heavy sigh which carried the heartache of a million lives suspired out of Roshni’s bosom.
“I often thought about it but I always had two things holding me back,” she looked up at the stars with a somber expression on her face. “Guilt of not having fought for my love and fear of him having moved on from it.”
*******
A little while later, while the inebriated ghostesses were still busy sharing their life stories with each other, arrived on the scene a frightened looking Ankit.
“He, he has shriveled!” cried he as he came nearby. “You need to come see it.”
“Who has shriveled?” Roshni asked, her weeks in abeyance having left her unaware of many of the recent occurrences.
“Arjun. He has been sick. As asked by Neha, I have been checking up on him daily. And now he has shriveled!” Ankit shrieked again.
“What are you talking about? Ghosts do not fall sick. Are you out of your mind?” Roshni looked at the messenger with a distasteful frown, the alcohol making it even more difficult for her to grasp the situation.