Sakshi - My Mirror in Life

A story about falling in love for a person with personal demons.

SAKSHI
- My Mirror in Life

The day I met Sakshi, she was
the best friend of my girlfriend (Elika). She had a boyfriend of her
own at the time. Some of our earliest conversations included she
getting a tad bit too excited about the way I could seemingly talk
about anything. That excitement, I was told later, was frustration.
Needless to say, this was the start of an obvious dysfunctional
relationship between two opposites.

Sakshi's thoughts in first person:

"How could this guy (a boy
almost) know so much about everything?! This must be a fade. There
is a gap in this boy and I will find it. He is a Muslim boy from
middle-class after all. How different could he be from the rest?"

The animated conversations
aside, it was a very ordinary occurrence in my life otherwise riddled
with extremes. There were no sparks or glances exchanged. Sakshi did
not interest me significantly more than any other person. I was
curious about this spark she had in her -- this inexplicable spark of
life that I can only explain in half-formed words and sentences
(probably because I don't understand it myself). In a few days, the
always escalating problems in my life took center-stage and I did not
have the time or energy to think about the small spark that I might
have imagined in a girl I met once.

My relationship with Elika did
not last long. It was expected not to. She was the rebound girl who
was aware about her rebound status. She understood that neither of us
had any real feelings for the other person. She cared about me just
as much as I did. However, "like" would be a rather strong word
to be used for the feelings we had for each other. Using the word
"love" would be preposterous.

After the end of our doomed
relationship, Elika was upset for a while. And by a while, I meant 2
weeks. That is usually how long Elika took to "mourn a
relationship". And the end of this time span, she dove headfirst
into a relationship with another guy who was probably as
self-absorbed as I was at the time. Eventually, I and Elika decided
to be friends. To be precise, I suggested being friends many weeks
before she decided to agree to it. And I was glad for it. Being
friends implied no regrets and I wasn't waiting to add on to the
colossal pile of regrets I carried around with me.

However, being friends with
Elika presented a complex situation. Elika became friends with my
friends and I did with hers. This involved occasionally talking with
Sakshi and her boyfriend Purab. I did like spending time with them.
But, I wasn't excited about being around Elika. There were reasons
why I had broken up with her - one single reason if I am being
honest. The reason was quite simple. She bored the hell out of me.
Despite my reservations about Elika, I did not mind the occasional
company of an always over-the-top happy group that was Elika, Sakshi,
Purab and their friend Radhika.

After a few months of hanging
out with them, I realized that Sakshi and Purab were having problems.
The serious kind.

It was quite shocking in fact. I
always believed that Sakshi's fingers fit perfectly into the spaces
of Purab's. Clich it might sound, but to my oblivious eyes it
seemed like a match made in heaven. They were just incredibly perfect
for each other, like a sea that is also part of an ocean. And yet,
they were separating.

Once I and the rest of the group
got over the shock of it, everyone had to pick sides. The girls in
their group (Elika, Radhika) were understandably on Sakshi's side.
I was rather neutral about it. Well, I was neutral until Elika told
me that Purab hit Sakshi in public and then ran away, like a coward.

If there is one thing I hate
more than anything or anyone in this world, it is violence against
some defenseless soul. I can take a verbal bashing. I can be
humiliated in public without any repercussions (verbal or physical)
if the situation demands it. But, hit a defenseless person in front
of me and I might kill you. In fact, I will kill you...........if I
am able to. This is obviously a rather drastic reaction from someone
who is otherwise so composed, but I have my reasons. However, this
passage is not about me. Not completely anyway. So, let's talk
about our story and not about my disconcerting inclination to
violence in the presence of violence.

Falling back to our story which
is at the point where Sakshi has, unceremoniously, dumped Purab. He
has, in turn, become an insecure and violent person. So, he hits
Sakshi (enough to bruise) on more than one occasion and in public.
He, also, threatens to "tell her parents" about him, her Hindu
boyfriend. It seems like a harmless threat. However, to a girl with
conservative Muslim parents, this tell-all is the end of life as she
knows it. To this unmanageable fear of her parents, add the fact that
she has been with this needy guy for 3 years and you get a
significant problem. Every moment of her time away from home has been
spent in his company. He knows all her delicate secrets, every
awkward thought she had, every time she bitched about her friends. He
knows it all. To her, he is a grenade of secrets waiting to blast
every relationship she has carefully constructed in the last few
years.

This cocktail of horror, alarm, panic and terror
enveloped her and evolved. She, in a short time, developed a
pathological fear of Purab. To her, he was capable of ending her
world. He could do anything, be anywhere. He was invincible, not
unlike a force of nature.

It is rather difficult to
explain pathological fear to someone who hasn't experienced it.
Very few and unfortunate people have ever experienced something so
primal for a person, a living breathing human being. To most people,
fear is in the darkness around them, in the dangerous animals around
them or at the edge of steep heights. To most people, fear is bodily
harm or death. So, they cannot comprehend how this entire multitude
of negative emotions can be experienced for just a living, breathing
person - a person who is just as fragile as I am or perhaps you are.
When an average person comes across someone like her (a person who
isn't control of their primal fears), they become uncomfortable or
scared depending on their nature. However, they never want to delve
into the recesses of this weird anomaly -- something they have never
seen before. But, I was quite comfortable in this situation. I could
understand "primal fear" then and I can understand it now; for a
simple reason -

I have felt it.....................in
my bones.

I have lived for years under the
roof of a person who represented the sum of all my fears to me. I
have lived under an invisible whip that keeps waiting for me to
stumble so that it can remind me of its existence. The whip has not
always been invisible either. But, I have overcome that whip and the
fear that it wrought upon me. I might not have moved past it. But I
have won many important victories against it. I have had time to
understand this fear, attempt to rationalize it and develop coping
strategies against it. Perhaps, I sound desperate when I tell you
this. And I probably am desperate. But, this is something I have
learnt.

You never stop being petrified about your pathological fears.
At best, you settle for controlling that desperation to a manageable
level.

Sakshi, intuitively, understood
this. I believe that she could see empathy instead of apprehension in
my eyes when she behaved wildly and alarmed everyone else. So, she
turned to me. I hope I do not come across as glib when I say that I
was probably the only person around her who could understand her
fears and the depth of them while remembering that this tunnel has
light at the end of it (even if I cannot always see it).

So, I helped her the only way I
could: I talked and she listened. She occasionally asked questions
and I answered them as best as I could. I am not entirely sure if my
seemingly impractical advice amounted to anything definite. I would
like to believe that it did; that I helped her achieve a minor
victory over her fears. But, I was never very confident about my
advice. I never am.

If you are curious about what my
"impractical advice" was, allow me to curb your curiosity with
disappointment. It was nothing spectacular. They were just stories
about my inherent fears (of an authority figure in my life and
myself) and how I overcame them. Most of these loosely related
stories would end with a motivational "If I could do it, so can
you" speech. The part I always left out was the fractured nature of
my declarations of success.  I had never really overcome my fears. I
had learnt to control them. So, the spirited battle cries I ended my
stories with were as hollow as I have been.

Therefore, when Sakshi succumbed
to those fears and cowered with Purab staring her down every single
time, I didn't get disappointed in her or angry with her. In fact,
I saw myself in her. I saw a person trying to stand tall under the
weight of this crushing boulder and failing while blood runs down
from his shoulders. It sounds rather clich, but I saw Atlas, a
Greek hero who is cursed to keep sky's insurmountable weight on his
shoulders; his knees almost giving out under the impossible weight
that he cannot hold but has to strain against for all eternity.

Dear Lord! Do all writers honestly feel as pretentious as I do
after making a Greek hero reference?! ?

My distracting declarations
aside, I did feel something akin to companionship with her. And in
that moment, I fell for her. Not for her beauty or her expressive
nature. I would like to say I fell in love because of her ability to
feel the same fears I did. But, I am not very accurate. I have
pondered over this question for a few years now. For a while I
thought that this was to fulfill my sick need to find some poor girl
that I can "save" or perhaps I wanted a mirror to fall in love
with. A mirror that reflected my worst fears so clearly, it felt like
magic. Perhaps, I needed a 'mirror' I could fall in love with
like any ordinary narcissist. Or it could be one of the million other
reasons swirling in my head. I have, in time, come to accept that I
do not know the exact reason (or reasons) and I might never know.

What I do know is that, in that
moment, I knew what caring for someone is like. I understood what
exists beyond infatuation or familial love. I perhaps began to
understand what the riddle of love is. And the second I came
across this word (love), the questions faded to
oblivion.......rather quickly.

In time, Sakshi helped me
understand myself better. She gave me answers to the most intricate,
uncomfortable and complicated questions I had. I hope that I, in
turn, was able to help her in some insignificant way. I did try to
make her understand people better. While Sakshi saw a few qualities
in a person, I gave her a glimpse of the infinite dimensions that
exist inside each of them. We both have moved on in life now. At
least, we are trying our best to move on. But, I will never forget
the only time in my life when I saw a mirror. A mirror that was also
a person!

Her name was Sakshi............Sakshi
Sharma.