She got up, clutching her throat, the book Agony and the Ecstasy, lying by her side, falling to the ground, her silken hair chaotically confused all around her once pretty face.
Her beauty was lost between the many lines which now were so much a part of her, prematurely settling on her forty year old face.
There were different lines, different strokes which were part of her life once.
Lines which she had picked up from Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh. She could talk on and on about the surrealism of Dali and how Frieda Coelho’s surrealism reflected more of her reality than her dreams.
“ ‘I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.’ Frieda had said, never believing she was a surrealistic painter.”
It was Dr. Dorab, the friendly art teacher, at his impassioned best. It was he, she heard, not the friendly owl hooting outside. Voices from the past continued to hammer away at her head colliding with the beatings of her heart.
Bang, bang, bang they went, and hoot, hoot went the owl outside. Incessant chatter rained and reigned.
“I am crushed under the nimiety of your incessant chatter.” Her dad, a professor of English had remarked one day, a naughty twinkle in his eyes.
“Nimiety? What on earth is that?” She had stuttered.
“Coleridge had criticized Schiller for the nimiety of his blank verse”.
“But why use nimiety when you can use ‘excess’, papa? You are a professor of English, but I am not yet a graduate.” She had said, throwing back her head, laughing uproariously and thumping her dear dad playfully on his back, and she had then waltzed out of the room, only to come back with a question hurled at her dad. “Schiller, who?” and again dashed back without hearing his answer.
“Friedrich Schiller. He was a German poet, playwright, writer, philosopher, and historian. Coleridge even wrote a sonnet on him.”
“She is my grasshopper, my gorgeous grasshopper, always in the flitting and hopping mode.” Her dad had said, smiling indulgently in her direction.
“She is another Picasso in the making”. Her art teacher had announced to the class, one sunny morning twenty years back, as she sat giving deft strokes to her painting of a mother and child. Now this painting hung forlornly behind her ornate bed. She herself had been reduced to a painting which had faded and lost its luster. A painting which cried to be restored.
“Her poetry, with its tragic intensity surpasses even the most tragic of poets.” Her Hindi teacher had remarked.
She was a multi-talented girl, who not only excelled in painting, and theatre but also dabbled in poetry. But now the nightingale did not trill, the grasshopper did not hop, the painter had gone into oblivion.
“The quality of mercy is not strained,” her clear voice had mesmerized the audience, as she played Portia to the hilt, while Shylock, played spectacularly by Vivek Dhar, had mesmerized her, a handsome boy from the prestigious Tyndale Biscoe school. She had tumbled into love with him, her heart had almost bled when he delivered these words with an effortlessly heart-wrenching pathos, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?”
And from then onwards, she was there, along with Vivek, in every Shakespearean play jointly staged by the girls’ convent and his school. Playing Juliet, to his Romeo, Desdemona to his Othello, Cleopatra to his Mark Antony, and Ophelia to his Hamlet. Be it as Mark Antony, or Othello or King Lear, Hamlet or Macbeth, Vivek excelled in every role, and she had glowed and glowed.
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