Meer had fallen in love with someone. So we took the words “everything begins with loving a person” as our authority, painted them on a banner and took to the streets. We declared the day a holiday of our own, carried bottles of soda into the square, lined up plastic chairs and bought confetti in every colour. We had even arranged fireworks—the first we would ever launch straight into the sky. For a moment, we thought every hurt in the world had come to an end.
Then Pura appeared. He walked quietly to the middle of the square, planted himself at the foot of the flagpole and began lowering the flag to half-mast. “You’ve got it wrong, Pura. That isn’t for times like this!” we shouted after him. Everyone else was celebrating, and his little act made us furious. We called him an idiot for ruining the day. We tried everything to stop him confusing grief with joy, but he would not listen.
Pura has always been like that.
Always a bit of an idiot,
a bit of a child,
and look how old he is now.
Then Vera stepped in. A yellowed, battered file was tucked under her arm, a pencil in her pocket. “Pursuant to the law of love,” she said in an exceedingly official tone, “it has been ruled that, the case having been left without action and not renewed within the statutory period, it shall be deemed never to have been brought (dismissed).” You might also say Pura’s petition no longer had a subject.
Vera rose onto her toes to serve notice that the ruling was final. Vera was a stern one. Without sparing any of us, she repeated: “That smile, that look, that longing are not for you. It has been ordered that you forget.” Even Vera’s eyes filled a little as she announced the ruling to our faces. A ruling was a ruling, after all. Pura shouted, “Rulings have no stories!” Nobody heard him. Like a pair of fools, we bowed our heads and kept drinking the soda in our hands.
We sat side by side in the square among the decorations and the litter. Stray pieces of confetti were still falling from the sky. Pura held the rope of the flag he had lowered and stared silently at the ground. I am not angry with him anymore. How could we be? I edged closer and held the straw from my soda out towards him.
The soda had gone warm and long since lost its fizz. Lukewarm sugar water caught in our throats, but we clung to the bottles simply because we had nowhere else to put our hands or feet.
Vera took a piece of yellow chalk from her pocket. With the solemnity of someone carrying out the most important duty in the world, she drew a makeshift circle around us. “Zone of suffering,” she said, her voice trembling. “By law, those within this line may not interfere with the outside. You may not speak to the ones you love, look into their eyes, or even say that you miss them. From now on, you are spectators only.”
Pura sucked furiously at his straw. It buckled and went flat; nothing came through, but he kept sucking. His eyes were bloodshot.
Just then, a street sweeper crossed the square. A fellow worker swept up all the coloured confetti we had scattered through the streets that morning to proclaim that love existed. We had declared a holiday; everyone else had gone to market, and the workers had carried on working. “Vera,” I said, tapping my straw against the bottom of the bottle, “put an end to this nonsense. We’ve made fools of ourselves.”
Vera dropped her solemn manner and set the yellow file aside. She looked at us in silence, as if to say there was no appeal left to make. She wiped the corner of her eye with a handkerchief. “Love does not end when love ends. Such are the laws of love.” She had taken pity on the law she had invented herself, and sat down beside us as though she were the last person alive who still cared about laws.
At that very moment, a wind rose. A wind that smelled of salt and vanilla. We all turned towards it. Pura tightened his grip on the rope with sudden hope, Vera shaded her eyes to see better, and I swallowed the last mouthful of soda.
Perhaps because we were sitting inside the circle of suffering, nothing happened. The wind seemed to take the circle for a border, brushed past us and moved on. No one was coming. No one wanted to put anything right. Meer, it appeared, was already raising storms on someone else’s shore. And there we were inside the yellow chalk line, seemingly trying to drown ourselves in flat soda.
“Pura,” I said quietly. “You might lower the flag a little more. It’s still close to the top.” Pura looked at me for the first time. He smiled faintly, like a commander who had won a war. “Write the banners properly next time,” he said. “No sentence should be left unfinished.” Then he added: “Loving—everything begins with loving a person; here, everything ends with loving a person.” A piece of pink confetti was stuck to his front tooth as he spoke. I could not decide whether to laugh or cry. I reached out and removed it, placed it on my knee, and the three of us sat staring at that tiny scrap of pink paper.
The bad news about Pura reached us in the middle of the night. Pura had been taken to hospital…