Competition

From the moment he stepped inside his train to the next stage of his journey, he knew he still loved the girl he'd just left behind at the platform. The first time they had parted, he had moved ahead with hurt and anger, and with almost a vengeance he had told himself he had left her behind him forever. Still they met, and for a second time he told himself he was leaving her behind forever, but this time something inside him knew for sure that he loved her still. Even in two years he hadn't got over her. Even two years hadn't taught his eyes to not find her exceptionally pretty, and his heart not to find her exceptionally special. Yet, she was far from him, and he knew that. Conflicting views of the mind and the heart turn life itself into a battlefield!

He had been traveling for the last three months now. It was a part of his job, and he had to cover a number of cities more in the next two months. He liked all this traveling a lot, although he always had dreaded this city on the itinerary, simply because he never wanted to face the same places again. Yet, he was face-to-face with her again, and not completely out of coincidence. She had tried to be nice and polite as usual, and he had tried to hate and curse her as usual, but she was always far more successful than him. In everything.

The journey lasted seven hours, and each hour brought back to him the memories of the seven fastest months of his life. Those months when so many things had happened in such little time that it was hard to believe that there was any time for time itself to pass. Yet, those were the seven months that turned his life on its head, and that too more than once. But it all seemed so blurred now. Opposite to him on the train, a six-year-old sat engrossed in his sketching book joining dots with straight lines to complete the sketch. His memories were equally vague and disjoint now, and he too spent those few hours joining dots with straight lines.

He knew he loved her, even now, and he had never doubted she had loved him too, at least then. Perhaps a part of the problem was he always felt she loved him more than he loved her, and that she somehow wanted to make him feel inferior by caring for her more than what he thought he did. Still even now the memory of the first two months of euphoric passion made him feel dizzy, when they had both fallen in love with each other almost instantaneously and in less than one and a half months, found each other married to each other. That hurry nearly consumed both their lives in entirety. The excitement at working with the spouse in the same office soon gave way to an invisible competition in which he always saw himself losing. She was better, she was smarter and she was the boss. The boss who doted him with love and comfort, and brought in more money than her. The line that connected the him who was lost his heart to her and the him who lost almost everything else and every competition to her was a broken one. He knew she had done that deliberately. And when he could not stand it and asked her to resign and stop proving her goodness, she acted so ignorant and so stubborn that she completely refused to do a thing till he explained why. In other words, till he publicly accepted his defeat. Outraged, he just left the home, the city and her that night without saying anything and asked for a transfer from the office to the remotest place he could get to.

For two years he had not heard from her. No phonecalls, no letters, not even a divorce notice. How easily can women pretend love! Only sometime back he had learnt she had quit her job too. Maybe she had already found another aim and another man. The train reached the platform. He cursed himself for still being in love with that woman and moved on. At least she had signed the divorce papers he had met her for. He was free!

*******************************

Seventeen years have passed. This morning as I was sorting his mail, I found one personal letter in it. Like always, I opened it to read, but what I read surprised me.


"Hello,
My name is Tina and I'm the daughter of a foolish mother and an insecure father. My mother died yesterday after wasting an entire life loving a man who for some reason believed that his marriage was a competition that the loser had to quit. My mother was foolish enough not to realize it till she lost him, and still wait for him to come back even though all was lost. She lost her husband, she lost the father of her child and she lost every meaning of living but she never lost the love in her heart. My father won his freedom, but could never even call his daughter his own.
But today, I'm the lost child both whose parents were losers. I'm the only one who lost the competition.
Have a good life."



I thought for a moment, then had the letter meet the same fate so many others over the years had met at my hands. But even as I threw the ashes away, I couldn't help feeling even in death she had still managed to somehow win the competition away from me, forever. She had come from nowhere and took away my love, my boss, but in round 2, I had managed to break their marriage and then keep them apart long enough that they divorced. I won Round 3 relatively easy and got him to marry me and also keep me his Secretary like always, for the sake of convenience, habit, love and ego-boosting. But today something tells me Round 4 was the final one of this competition, and somehow, she's won it.