Legitimate Tears

When your dreams lie shattered around you, do not cry. If you do that you do injustice in more than one sense of the term. One simple mathematical fact: Shedding tears would not help anyway. Understood that there are scattered pieces of the diamonds you had been working on. Now they are broken, shattered and may cut through flesh if you just close your eyes and prefer to cry. Kids have a copyright over crying and rightly so. We elders can spare this copyright infringement. Just look around the dashed diamonds, your so called broken dreams. Just see the glimmer in still shapely left out pieces. The dream is the soul; it just cannot die if some hammer momentarily dislodges its outer shape. No hammer in the world has the luck to kiss the soul of your dream. It’s always safe. That’s its fate. Simply. Plainly. Why cry if the thing has not died yet. If you do, it’s just like mourning the death of someone who is still alive. I think we can simply avoid this irrational act. Broken shards of your dreams are, let us say, the blood-thirsty and hard chisels. They can help you in cutting through such mighty rocks as you could have never imagined. So it is simply better to cut bigger rocks for larger prospects instead of allowing the pieces to cut through your physical and mental selves.

She was a motivational speaker. She had delivered the above speech and the likes many a time to gather her share of conference money and acclaim. Tired employees told her it seems to give them a new direction and meaning in life. Her exquisitely polished manner, sleek hair, business suit, fragrant classy perfumes and radiant smile made her look a perfect personification of whatever she spoke: success and succour. But make-believe polished exteriors apart, all of us carry naked bits of truth stuck up to our nudity, below the outer layer, the invisible, private, inaudible world, that rarely shows its face even in the privacy of the bathroom because we get so habituated to see ourselves like others see in our public avatar.

The CEO of the company that had organized that motivational retreat at a sea-side resort in Goa was beaming with pleasure, promiscuity and her effeminate proximity, ‘You are a diva, you can put life even in a dead body. What powerful words, so uplifting!’ He was drunk and considered it his right to flirt with the one who had been hired to pump motivation in those servile souls who cringed before him. With a polite thanks and a still more formal smile she backed away from the famed gamer with the opposite sex.

It was a world of hungry males around her. She was in her late thirties but could beat any younger employee in feminine radiance. Finding the head lion away, a junior manager rushed to grab his chance, ‘My God what speech you deliver! I never thought life will become so meaningful after all the messed up projects in the office and still messier situation at home!’ He seemed ready to kiss her hand. She was having just a lime breezer, very well in control of herself, and very felinely warded him off. Then there were many more eager souls approaching her, coming to congratulate apparently, but with the real intention of impressing her to take her to bed. That of course is the invisible, almost inevitable, buried under the clothing and good gracious mannerisms, the real, naked basic, primal instinct of the educated males to come wooing an equally educated female.

All of them seemed to sense their chances with her. She was famous enough in the corporate world to lay bare bits and pieces of her personal life on the open platform of gossips and desirous gesticulations. She was a single mother. Her daughter safely put in a boarding school in Mussoorie hills. Whenever the guilty pangs of depriving a girl from the grooming love and affection of her mother would stalk her, questioning her popular march in leadership and management motivating talks, she looked at the bank statements, the account details of hundreds of thousands she siphoned off to the reputed school’s account towards her daughters education and boarding fees. An inner voice would tell her that she might fail as a mother. But then the world around was all praise for her, both as a person and as a professional. She had all the reasons to believe herself to be exactly what others told her to suit their purposes and motives.   

Her husband had dubbed her too ambitious. An Indian man prefers a docile and manageable wife playing slightly subordinate role to his patriarchy however talented she might be. ‘You are too self-centred and ambitious to adjust to the smaller confines of domesticity,’ he had shouted during their last days together. Those words pinch her many times. She recalls these many a time while her audience is applauding her inspirational oratory. From the broken shards of her broken marriage she definitely carved out her destiny. To prove the equal right of her matriarchal spirit, she took up the responsibility of raising her daughter singlehandedly.  But was it enough?

The biggest challenge for a beautiful, successful, single, middle-aged woman is to pick out the right man to go into bed with out of every Tom, Dick and Harry falling at her feet. She has allowed two men to follow her into the bed after her marriage broke. Both were married, of equal stature, and talked intelligently, approached her with utmost care and as it usually happens after enjoying the fruits of their disillusionment had gone back to their wives and families. Sometime she felt like they just used her body. So she was very careful now about men. A void was but building up in her because at some stage you need a partner and especially when you and others consider yourself to be a success story.

In the resort’s party hall, the spirits and souls were now getting more intoxicated. Louder talks, stretched out phrases, peppier dance numbers and more flirtatious deeds. Caught in the whirl of the times, she had graduated to some cocktail rounds from the earlier cautious breezer and the world around appeared no longer needing any type of inspiration. A perfect world, drowned in its booze-born, slow-paced aura. She pined for space, tranquillity and shelter in a caring man’s arms. She came out of the party hall, walked over the sprawling lawns to exit through the sea-fronted gate to walk with stumbling steps to the sea calling through its roar across the beach. Walking through the waves kissing her feet, she felt a hand on her shoulder. The lecherous CEO was following her. He knew about those other two company heads and very well thought he could be the third. It was dark, she was alone, the sea roaring to add to his surging passions, so no polished mannerisms required to reach a woman. On top of that he was drunk, and knew she was drunk also. As a successful hunter he knew from his experience that straightforward approach clicked many a time. He spun her around and before she could react or think anything his lips were on hers. She had not been touched by a man in this raw manner since almost six months. Tipsy and beyond all thoughts and reflections she found herself helplessly melting under his rapacious surge. He was on her now. All wet on the sand she was just about to give in if not for the momentary steamer light that went piercing through her eyes. ‘Move out and climb however high, you but will be a convenient game for the successful men around you,’ her aggrieved husband had shouted when they had parted finally. During those times he had looked less attractive, almost unsuccessful and plainly jealous to her. In revulsion she pushed the predator away. Used all the physical force that all her inspiring words would allow her to muster up. With a wounded self, she beat his scared mass like anything. His hunting demeanour going wrong, he just left, ran away rather and would not tell anybody about it.

She was lying on the wet sand missing her daughter by her side. She missed a genuinely caring male hand on hers. She could afford to cry in the dark inaudibly by the noisy sea waves. It will help her in keeping herself as presentable as she was during the glorious day. She allowed her naked real tit bits to lay bare their identity in full nudity. She cried. She still remembered what she had spoken about during the day.