All Of This Might Not Be Important

Part-1

It is sometime past midnight, he stands at his window and watches the road below. This part of town does not attract much traffic at night, and the road is an empty, shiny strip of black reflecting the yellow glare of the streetlamps. In the distance, a morose traffic signal blinks its lonely eyes amber, red and yellow to its own, forlorn rhythm. He cannot now remember whether he cannot sleep or had slept and woke up or whether he even tried to sleep at all. This insomnia stays with him, and he will be faithful to it.

None of these are facts, these are all merely feelings. He prefers the concrete reality of fact. That he cannot sleep is a fact, that he is standing by his window is a fact, that the road far below is empty is a fact-all these are data points establishing beyond any doubt the frame of reference of his existence at this moment. If someone asks him what he is doing right now, he can answer that he is awake and standing by the window in a seventeenth floor apartment, watching the empty road below. To these facts he could add that the time is past-midnight, the name of the building, the name of the locality where he lives, and myriad other details. All data, some more accurate, some less, building up to a complete picture of what he is. If, on the other hand, someone were to ask him the reason why he is awake, he would probably have to resort to conjecture- I was asleep and probably had a bad dream and woke up, or I tried to sleep but could not or sleep did not come for me this night. He might even add a bit about what he thinks of this peaceful night, the quiet, empty road, and the somnolent traffic signal. But none of these are facts-merely his opinions, what he thinks he thinks. And how exactly does one try to sleep, anyway?

He shakes his mind off these things. What is; is. If he cannot sleep, he might as well read something. Subdued, efficient movements. He moves to the study table, switches on the lamp and fires up his laptop. The intense, slightly yellows glow of the lamp mingles with the soft glow of the laptop as he wills himself to focus on reports which do not seem to be making very much sense at this time, and so a few minutes pass. And then, as if having come to a decision, he shuts down the lid on the computer, switches off the light and goes back to stand by the window. The traffic light continues blinking.

And then, he turns back to look towards the table, and there she is, sitting in the chair, illuminated only be the glow of the reflected ambient light that is coming in through the window. She is in the dark, but he has no trouble making out her sharp features. Instinctively he knows that her eyes would be black and were he to see them in the light, he would get the feeling of light being reflected on him out of those black pools. She has hair which flows around her shoulders in a tangle of curls, and somehow makes her seem taller than she probably is. Even though he cannot make out the look in her eyes, he knows that she is looking intently at him. A moment passes before he remembers that something needs to be said here, that everything is not all right, that she cannot logically be here. But when he speaks, the calm in his voice surprises even him, as he asks her who she is.

She takes a moment to respond, as if trying to figure out the best way to phrase her response. When she speaks, her voice is neither shrill, not flat, it is just right.

“I am a contradiction.”

***

I have only three distinct memories of my father, each almost ten years apart. Not too much to show for a life time of knowing. Or, enough to suffocate a person.

The most distinct image is of a time when I was around fourteen; a callow youngster returned home boarding school for a couple months of summer vacations. It was late evening, and powercuts, or load-sheddings, as they euphemistically called them, were rife. Father used to come home from work in the evening, and would spend the rest of the time either on the roof of the house where the breeze lowered the temperature somewhat, or in the sitting room. He would listen to radio, AIR or Vividh Bharti or BBC Hindi service, and I would sit in a corner of the sitting room and pretend to study by light of bulb or lantern, as the availability of electricity dictated, one eye firmly cocked to the radio, the other tuned to the sounds from the kitchen, listening to the familiar sounds of my mother cooking dinner- the grating of the spoon against the pan as she stirred the sabzi or the slight twinkle of the tongs as she deftly flipped a roti on the tawa. Around nine thirty in the evening, she would announce dinner, and I would take my plate and bounce off to the roof.

That evening was a power-cut evening. Father was leaning in a chair, his head rested on the wall, face lit in shades of morbid yellow and inscrutable dark in the chiaroscuro of the flickering lamp my mother had placed on the windowsill, and the radio was playing a SD Barman song from Guide. I don’t know why I was looking at him at that moment, when he called out to me.

It was a strange evening, all right. I could see his eyes were closed for most part of our conversation, as if he was seeing something which he did not want to lose sight of, something which would probably flutter away the instant he opened his eyes.

We talked of boardings, of living alone, of spreading roots in places, of packing up and moving away. We talked about growing as people, and about getting diminished, of being ever changing and of growing stagnant. I did not recognize it then, but it was probably the most intimate conversation I ever had with him. He spoke of music. He was no connoisseur, of course, and he spoke of books. Again, he was not a great reader of books. But he spoke of them as metaphors- of music and books as sails which gather the winds life directs at you and channelize it into directions you want to take. Of music and books as pillars against which you could rest your back when you were too tired. He spoke of the world, and dreams, and making of dreams and of living them. He told me how important it was to be ‘happy’.

The face of my father that evening, head leaning on the wall, chair tilted, a two-day salt and pepper beard, eyes closed behind those silly carbon-frame glasses, wearing an expression as if he had found something profound and was contemplating what it would mean to lose it- that is the sharpest memory of him that is etched in my mind. That evening was the most intimate time I spent with him, a span of a half hour or so. There were no more such intimate conversations ever- first there was no time, and then they took him away. After that evening, I never saw him except as a withered husk of the man he was.

***

‘What does that even mean? ‘I am a contradiction’?’

‘Look at it this way: Five minutes ago you were alone. This is a seventeenth floor apartment, and the doors are shut. By rights, I cannot even be here. How is that for a contradiction, to start with?’

“…”

Three calls of some distant bird disturbed, the blaring horn of a car driven by a drunk and some five minutes pass. The traffic signal keeps on blinking as if it is marking time for something. The girl keeps watching him intently until he breaks the silence.

‘Who are you?’

‘Are you familiar with the concept of the Invisible Pink Unicorn?’

‘The IPU? Yes. Why?’

‘Well, let us assume that I am her.’

‘…’

Then, ‘Invisible Pink Unicorns do not exist. In fact unicorns of any kind do not exist. And why IPU, for God’s sake? It is not even funny.’

‘Because that is simple. I might or might not exist. I am a female. Do you know of any other female who 

meets these criteria?’

‘…’

Then, ‘So you say are not real?’

‘That is something on which have to take a call. Are you real? How real is real, and do you believe reality changes?’

‘That does not mean anything. Something is either real or not. How can reality change?’

As he says this, another drunk driver passes on the road far below-silence for so long, and now two in a few minutes. But then, it does seem like an unusual night. It dawns on him that instead of talking to this woman, he should be calling the police right now, or someone. Perhaps he should be switching on the lights and be offering her a coffee. He feels like a coffee, himself. He does nothing.

‘Does reality not change? Say, for example with time. When you were six years old, did you ever check under your bed before going to sleep?’

‘That is different.’

‘Why is that different? When nine, or may be fifteen, you stopped believing in ghosts or monsters under your bed. Why does that make what you knew to be true when you were six any less true? Just because you grew up?’

‘No, because I knew there were no monsters.’

‘Hmm. True. But how do you know there were none when you were six?’

‘This conversation is kinda getting on my nerves. Also, I know there weren’t, because there has never been any proof of the existence of monsters or ghosts or anything.’

‘Does something not being proved conclude that it does not exist? Till gravity was proved to exist, were we floating around like the earth was a spaceship?’

‘That is a stupid analogy. Everything has to be within bounds of reason.’

‘And who decides what these ‘bounds of reason’ are?’

‘…’

‘Ok. Let me offer an analogy of something which you might find ‘reasonable’. Assume a frisbee, only, one that has a battery and LEDs inside. Now, powered by that battery, the Frisbee changes colors at variable intervals. Is that too difficult to imagine?’

‘Go on.’

‘Now, someone shows you that Frisbee, let us say I show you that Frisbee, and not tell you of its color-changing property. Say, at that particular moment it is pink. You check it for a minute, and it does not change its color. Then you go and place it in the other room and come back here to talk to me. So, what have you placed in that room?’

‘A pink Frisbee.’

‘Yes. That is your reality. But now I go in that room and bring that Frisbee back to you and it is green. What is your reality now? Can you ever be sure of what it will be next?’

“…”

***

Part-2

The parents always had this odd belief that there was only one home, the one where they were born, the place they had their roots in. So, for years after I got a job, whenever my mother would call me in the evenings, the question would always be “have you reached the dera?’ Dera being a very interesting hindi word signifying a place where you half for the night, also taken in some colloquial sense, to mean home. But when she asked that question, we were never in any doubt about the meaning she was referring to. I distinctly remember once dad was transferred out of our home town, and I called him from my hostel one day and my first question was, ‘Have you reached home?’ and he replied, ‘Yes, I mean I have reached dera. Home I went last Sunday.’ This colossal insistence on sticking to roots was one thing which I could never understand, and which was probably what made them what they were. And yet, their indefatigable belief that someday I would come home, when all three of us knew it was one of the more unlikely things we could ever imagine. For having lived away from home for so long, having shifted houses every year, I had simply become inured to the idea of a home- paradoxically enough, where I would have my dera would be my home, and all my homes would be deras. You could almost say I had no idea what a home really was.

 It is in this light that I remember the second vivid memory I have of my father. Of him having been transferred to a strange town. Those were troubled times.  I was in college and going through turbulent times myself. Trying to face the hypnotic, self-deluding madness of my first love, and dealing with the reality that she hated me. It was quite possibly the end of the world. And then there were the parents, trying to put down roots, however temporarily, in a strange place.

The problem was, I could not tell them my problems, and had no choice but to listen to their problems, which I could not understand. Having lived for most of my life out of a galvanized aluminum trunk with my name printed on its face in bold, confident, black capitals, having changed friends every four years, having had known the parents only as a sort of close-distant relatives who I had to visit twice a year, I was, I think, utterly unequipped to understand what they must have been going through. And yet, I was the only person they had, the only one they could turn to with their problems- my mother would call me in the evening on the hostel telephone and for thirty minutes I would patiently listen to her problems with the people who lived below her apartment and had a problem with her hanging laundry out to dry early in the morning, the water dripping on the tin awnings they had put above their balcony apparently waking the young couple from their sleep at seven in the morning; her problems with my father who would come back from office at six in the evening, and would spend the rest of the evening, who had taken to staying obsessively glued to the TV for the rest of the evening, listening to news on 13 channels, cursing the buffoons who were running the country, the cricket team, the central prisons and the municipality. She would tell me how she was pushed on the edge by this, how he would eat dinner at irregular times, sometimes hungry at eight in the evening, sometimes not eating till eleven. How he would wake up in the evening, and pace their tiny bedroom in that tiny flat till he got too irritated and then he would come back to the bed and toss and turn, as if trying to replicate that agitated pacing through the room in the bed. As if he was very angry at something, but did not know what.

Some four months passed like that, and all this while I would listen to her, make the obligatory sympathetic and consoling noises while not registering a word of what she said, almost trying to scream out to her that I was almost a kid myself, and I had problems of my own. That I did not know how to deal with obnoxious young couples who lived under your balcony, or what was the solution to the problems of the people who ran the country, the municipality, or the state or the hockey team of the country. That I had no magic potion which could relieve angst of unidentified origins. That if I had some potion which I could sell to give immediate peace of mind which I could sell for thirty five rupees a night’s dose, I would have been my first customer. But that of course, was stuff I never said.

And then vacations came and it was time to go home. Only, I found that they refused to call it home. That it was always a dera for them, a temporary caravanserai in their lives; that even my mother would not understand where I was coming from. Somehow, when I look back now, there always seemed to be some crisis of belonging- their bodies lived in that apartment, but their souls were always back home , the place where they lived for most of their lives.

It was not a happy vacation. For most of it, I saw him watching the TV, cursing what he saw, pacing through the living room and remaining withdrawn throughout the vacation. And yet, he would not speak to me, and I found a perverse joy in being around him when he was in those moods, sitting on the sofa in the living room as he grumbled, watching his face, his every movement, waiting for him to make eye contact, with all but a neon-sign put up on my head: I am here if you want to talk to me about whatever it is you are feeling.

All this time, I knew that he would not. He was many things, but he was not weak. And it was as if I used my expectant presence in the living room as a taunt to him- letting him know that he could talk to me, and yet knowing that he knew he could talk to me about what he was feeling, and also knew that I knew that he never would. It was my revenge on him for my not being unable to talk to him when I was going through that first crisis of my life with that girl, maybe for all the times I had laid awake in all the hostelrooms in all my life, wanting to talk to someone, but not having anyone to talk to- my way of telling him that I dealt with my problems myself, now you deal with yours’, that I am there for you, if for nothing else, I will be a shoulder to cry on, but that comes with a big emotional price tag.

It sometimes feels as if he saw through my ruse, knew me for the poseur that I was being, as if he knew that there was no solution I could offer him to whatever it was he was feeling. But he did not. And so, I did.

A couple weeks before I was due to leave, I sat in the living room as he grumbled about the world in general, and I asked him outright.

‘Why do you not ask for a transfer back, if you are so unhappy here?’

He looked at me, and then back at the TV, and then at me. He muted the TV.

‘What makes you think I am unhappy about my transfer?’

I let that go, even though I could see that this was going to become a quarrel with me, which would be fought with my mother.

‘Nothing. Why don’t you ask for a transfer back, anyway?’

He paused before replying, as if acknowledging my letting him off the hook.

‘I did. Not possible for three years.’

‘Well, that seems to be that, then. Nothing much you can do about it. Probably you should make some friends here, for the next three years. You should maybe go out more. Go for walks in the morning, I am sure a lot of people do.’

He doesn’t answer.

‘I know you miss your social circle from back home. You want to spend time with them. You hate being stuck with the TV. But that has to be let go, no? We just have to accept it, and move on.’

‘…just like hostels’ is what I do not append at the end of the sentence, but he understands perfectly. He looked at me steadily for a minute, his eyes unblinking, face set in a manner which I now realize was full of pity even though I took it to be sternness that time, the two day stubble that he seemed to carry all the time seeming to bristle with indignation which might just have been sympathy. And then he turned away from me, and unmuted the TV. And almost muted under what seemed like a sudden blare of noise, I could hear his words, ‘You would not understand. They are my people.’

We never discussed this topic again. Three years later he was transferred back. And life returned to normal. Six years after that that, they took him away.

***

 ‘What is real then?’

‘Oh, whatever you believe. Whatever you want to be real. Because, whatever you do not believe at this moment, however physically real it may be, how does it matter to you? And, there are no bounds of rationality. For there is no rationality other than what your reality is at a given moment.’

And then she morphs into something else. Even in the reflected light of the night, he can imagine he sees her body shimmer and morph into something wispy, almost like tendrils of smoke, and silently, he imagines he sees the color of the smoke change to pink, then purple, then violet, then black, and then there is nothing. And then, there she is, back in the chair.

‘You saw what you think you saw.’ she says. This is a statement, not a question, almost like she wants him to deny it.

‘An illusion.’ he says, his voice sounding unconvinced of something, and yet he cannot tell what it is he is not convinced of.

‘Ok, then. Think about it: am I real, or am I an illusion too?’

And she disappears, just as quietly as she had appeared, leaving nothing but a question-mark hanging in the air.

He cannot sleep that night. The next day, he goes about the daily business of his life, in a distracted, not-quite-there fashion, waiting for the night to descend. He wonders whether she will appear again that night. Perhaps she will not. No, hopefully, she will not. Or maybe she will. Hopefully.

She does. And every night for a week afterwards.

***

Part-3

They took him away for one night. I was back home for a vacation from my job, when one morning they came in one of those beat up gypsies, in civilian clothes (even then, it seemed like they wanted to save embarrassment-to themselves as much as to us). A man in light colored trousers and a light colored check-patterned shirt said that they needed to talk ‘in private’ and so, he led the man to his study. The rest of them we showed into the living room, where they lounged on the sofa and were served tepid tea by my mother. For the most part they stayed silent, their loud striped shirts and indifferent attitudes doing most of the talking for them. After a half hour, father emerged with the man, looking visibly exhausted, as if he had just run for many miles with a history of many sleepless nights behind him. He just told us that he had to go with these gentlemen for some discussions regarding his work, and that he would be back tomorrow.

As we spent that day in panic, frantically calling anyone we knew, answering calls from anyone who knew us- from the garbled pieces of consoling phrases and snide remarks passed just inside our hearing, from people who wanted to talk to us and from those who cut calls as soon as they learnt who was on the line, a pattern began to emerge. ‘Financial irregularities’ was the word which emerged most often: a polite, but insistent metaphor for corruption. Bribery was the word which was used when they thought we could not hear it; or maybe they knew better. I did not know what to believe. Or whether I wanted to believe anything anymore. No lunch was eaten that day, or dinner. All the frantic telephoning of people did not seem to have any visible results. The next day morning, he came back.

I did not speak to him; he did not seek to speak with me. He just looked tired, as he stood in the doorway, light framing his slightly stooped figure as he stood there, almost as if hesitating to cross the threshold into our home. And then he walked in, into his study. One week later, I went back to my job, and returned home only once.

He and I never spoke of this matter anymore- I came to know that there had been charges of certain financial irregularities, he had neither confirmed nor denied it, refused to defend himself, and then, oddly, charges had been dropped. Of course, all this I came to know later- in stilted conversations with my mother, or in even worse conversations with a few close friends, but never with him. Both mother and friends tried to tell me it was all a misunderstanding, all charges against him had been dropped, that such departmental witch-hunts happen everywhere. One year later, he had resigned his job. I was surprised he had lasted that long there. Four years later he was dead.

I returned home once in that time period. The house I returned to was the same, but the people had changed very much. I saw that he had grown into a frail and shriveled shell of his former self; he sat in front of the TV for hours, apparently catatonic, not seeing whatever was happening in front of him. He would shut himself in his study in the evenings, closing all doors and windows, sitting in a chair, peering in the dark as if trying to peer into the future. We had no conversations at all.

Mother, on the other had had changed to the other extreme. She had put on some weight, and was stout now. She had gotten shrill and took offense at small things. This was not the place I had occasionally grown up in. These were not the people I had grown up with. I hated this place. The next time I went back, it was for the last rites of my father.

***

He does not understand whether he looks forward to her visitations. Somehow, she seems to know everything about him. When he asks her how, she merely smiles. It never occurs to him to ask her the why of it- why does she visit him, why does she know everything about him, why does she talk to him. If it were to occur to him, if he were to ask that question, she would probably again smile that smile of hers and that would probably be it.

As it is, they talk and talk. About him. Or rather, he talks, and she mostly listens. Talking is like some form of catharsis, all the pain that he has hidden inside and never speaks about seems to well out of him, leaving behind a calm void.

Perhaps there is something about talking to complete strangers that  makes us give far more of ourselves away than we would normally, to someone we know, making for moments of unassailable intimacy with people we would probably never meet again which would be completely impossible with people we know- friends, relatives, siblings, parents. Perhaps it is the absence of fear of being judged, perhaps it is just that the people we actually know have been measured by us and found wanting on the scales of empathy-identified as non-kindred spirits showing our wounds and conflicts and contradictions to whom would be a complete waste of time, or perhaps it is just the yearning; no, hope; that we all have of finding someone who will Understand. Maybe this is what we want more than anything else in our lives, to be understood, to be known for what we are and to be accepted for what we are and why we are what we are, to have someone who would not speculate on the motivations behind our actions, who would be in complete tune with the way things are and will be in our lives, and who can live with that fact. And in that context it is ironic, and yet not entirely ununderstandable why we seem to open to strangers more- strangers represent the unknown, and when the known has been measured and found wanting, the unknown always represents hope.

And perhaps this is why he answers her every question, in fact questions himself when she questions him and tries to offer answers. The answers are not always cogent, or non-conflicted, or logical. But trying to put out in words what he feels about his life and all that is part of it, attempting to lay a shape to that unidentifiable muddle which is inside him and which sometimes threatens to swallow him inside it, seems to give a sort of relief to him. And so he talks.

In those nights, he attempts to see which side of the fence he falls on in his love-hate relationship with his father; about his only serious relationship which girl left him saying that she liked him, probably loved him, but did not know if she was ready to start a family; about his mother and the way she keeps calling him every evening just out of a desperate loneliness-which calls seem to project their overwhelming, unmentioned despair over his world too like the overwhelming oppressiveness of a musty room  which is being opened after having remained locked for a season of rainfall; about his despair after they took his father away, his guilt over the fact of his accusation, his ambiguity about the silence of his father in the fact of the facts; and, most of all, the relief he had felt when his father finally passed away. He brought all these out from the attics he had hidden inside, almost as if they were relics of a childhood he had tried desperately to forget, and reexamined every one of them, not finding solace or closure, but just a substitution of turmoil to sadness, and relief at his sadness.

And then, she stops visiting.

***

Those few years from the morning they took him away to the morning I woke to my mother’s high, shrill voice on the phone telling me between sobs that he was dead and I needed to come home were the worst of my life.

I spent that time hating him. I hated him for being corrupt, or for not being corrupt. I did not know his truth, nothing had been proved against him, the world had accepted it, even the judgment in the streets had moved on other, more pressing, juicier scandals. Someone’s girl entered a love marriage, someone else’s son divorced his wife, somebody’s son got fired from his high-flying job in America, the street needed to move on, and it did. But in the end, in the crater that was caused in our lives when they took him away for a day, called in for discussions about ‘financial irregularities’, when the dust settled, the three of us were left standing in the pit, each trying to get out in their own different ways.

He grew withdrawn, forlorn, within himself. My mother coped by growing shrill and offensive and petty. And I coped by hating them. I took to drink. I took to chainsmoking, laying awake at night, trying to read patterns in steel-grey smoke drifting towards the ceiling, only this time, unlike the ancient fortune-tellers who told the future by reading the innards of dead animals, I would try to untangle the past. Morality was an issue which I had so far only examined from afar, now it was a monkey sitting on my back. If he was guilty, how much of my life was tainted by his guilt? How much was I party to it, me and my mother? For I had never known him to be anything but an austere man who never aspired for anything much from life- I knew colleagues of his whom I knew for a fact to be corrupt, he was nothing like that. But, if he was not, why did he not speak to me? How could he bear it and not tell me? And did he not think about what I would be going through? In the end, I think it was this not talking to me was what I could not forgive him.

And then, that morning, my mother calls me, and tells me he is gone. Passed away in his sleep, and I think back to that night he had told me that I could be ‘happy’, I see his face in that pale yellow-dark interplay of light and shadow, and wonder if it was he who had really understood, and not me. I think about the distance created between him and me, I think about the immediate aftermath of the incidents that oppressive year. He had soaked through everything. I fly home that very day, and I see his face on the bier, and I see as I lift it to my shoulder that this time he seems to be at peace. His eyes closed, his features have frozen into the expression he must have died with, in his sleep, one of having finally having shrugged off the past. Somehow, sleeping on that bamboo frame, he appears to have lost that stoop. This is the image of his I want to keep with me for the rest of my life. He was my father, and whatever his faults, I loved him.

He has found peace. I still have to find mine, because there are many questions still to answer. And love does not mean forgiveness. He failed me that much I realize even as I deliver him the final flames, he failed me as a father much as I failed him as a son. I was never there for him when he most needed me, immersed in my self-hatred, trying to pretend it was hatred of him, loathing him for being part of me, while loathing myself for being a part of him, in a complex circle of guilt never proved.

Whatever the charges laid on his door in lifetime, whatever be his guilt or innocence was immaterial to me at that moment when he came back. Since the time we are children, we learn to look at our fathers as infalliable, even as forces of nature. We learn walking holding their fingers, the first words we read are their words, the first dreams we dream are their dreams. Fathers are the foundation on which lives are built. That day, when he came back, I waiting for him to come to me and tell me that it was all wrong. Or that they were right, and he might have been wrong. But he was going to set it right. That everything was going to turn out just fine. Because he was the father and he would make everything all right again.

Instead, he chose to walk into his study and out of my life.

-----

I asked mother to come with me, to live with me, even though I was not mentally relishing the prospect of sharing her irritable life. She refused. Now she gets lonely and calls me every evening. I talk to her about everything and nothing. Somehow, grief seems to have leached the shrillness out of her. She seems to have had some of her questions answered. I still cannot sleep. Most of my questions are still unanswered.

***

He has not slept the past few nights. He stands in front of the window, looking at the blinking streetlights, unseeing them. He waits for her night after night, after night, and she does not.

He does not wonder in those days, whether she was real or not. He remembers her words, ‘the only reality that matters to you is the one you have.’ There is a vague understanding that the reality he faced with her, the questions he tried to answer, they were far more important than the fact that it was she who asked the questions. It might as well have been him who had asked those questions and that in asking those questions, he has understood more of himself than he would ever have otherwise. And maybe, the need to ask those questions to himself was probably even more important than the fact that he had tried to answer them.

I wonder if all this is about some kind of desire for self-forgiveness. Some kind of reconciliation that is awaited, with a self that is lost, and probably a need to accept what happened. She said that the only reality which mattered was the reality I saw, and she was true. But that also meant that the reality which I saw at this moment could be different from the reality which I saw earlier. After all, people do exist in sepia worlds.

This also means that what was, was and cannot be changed or erased. And so there is no self-forgiveness, or closure. But there can be acceptance.

I mentally shrug my shoulders. Most probably she will not come again. Most probably, it is time to sleep.