someone called clouds

Her name meant clouds. It still does. Just that i dont know her anymore. She used to say that whenever she cried it rained.

She was a soft skills trainer with a BPO here, a nicish kathak dancer and training to be a Bharatnatyam one too. Id met her when we were working as volunteers for a fashion show for a common NGO we used to spend time at. She was so beautiful.

She had just broken up with someone and I too had, with someone id been with for 5 long years. And we had connected. I still remember that moment during the show when id finally closed the ticket window and was sitting in the last bench. She had come and sat next to me and said - Amit i dont have friends here, can I hang out with you. She was wearing a brown Sari with a big bindi on her forehead. and id said of course, im feeling useless myself.

Ill call her meggie. Meggie and i dated for a very short but very turbulent 5 months, sometime starting the autumn of 2004. She had been hurt very badly in her previous relationship and I too had hurt and had been hurted by someone who, at that time id felt, was perfect for me. And in those windy, rainy and about to be winter months, the way they are here, we had scripted, driven by our own fears and longing, the most intense, passionate, mad, angry, dirty, conniving, loving, sad and unfulfilling relationship ever.

The first time we kissed was with pizza in our mouth. 2 days after we had met. The first time we had sex was in a school for disabled children that we had painted the previous night with stencils for drawing angels. The first time we fought was just after having had sex in a school for disabled children that we had painted the previous night. id called her a slut once and she had spent a whole night crying. It HAD rained all through that night. And at that time I had attributed it to the season. The first time she'd called me a bastard, id cried too. And had to skip office because my eyes were so swollen. And she had attributed to a binge night. Such was our relationship. In those few months that we were together, we had completed our recently broken incomplete selves and we broke whatever semblance of completeness that some parts of our bodies and minds had managed. We had the most magical sex possible. She had once blacked out after we had been at it for the larger part of an afternoon. Id once not showered for a full 3 days because she was not in town and id not wanted her smell to go away.

I still pine for her lips. I imagine her saliva on my body, lingering in a small thread between our lips as she pulled away after a kiss. i sometimes think of the way she used to smell a very nuetral 'woman chumming' smell. She had a dancers body and i used to remark on how graceful she was. I remember that. I sometimes think, in a niteclub, in between shining lights, how she used to sweat when dancing. Sometimes when driving back home, I stop and wonder what used to make her cry whenever she used to see little kids begging at late nite traffic lights. I remember the times id gone to watch her dance performances, she bowing to the audience and I clapping and whistling, like, maybe, a proud husband. She'd always called me her cute devil and had once even made me act out the role of a 'Rakshasa' in a durga puja dance play she had done.

Sometimes now, I think of meggie, and I cry. and i wonder how I let someone so beautiful go away. she never forgave me. and i never forgive myself. but then this isnt the first time i have asked forgiveness of myself and NOT got it.

Everytime it rains here, like it did last nite, and it is right THIS moment, the warm dripping rain of the summer months, i suddenly get warm and scared and welled up in my eyes. I imagine that we are still together and that i am rocking her tears away.