Waiting For A call

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Two minutes, she said, I’ll call you. I held the phone slightly loose away from my ears, appreciatively looking at the slick instrument but heart, mind and soul fully focused to listen to vibrations and feel them in my palm. None came, she perhaps cut the line dead. My heart sank. Is  two minutes such battery consuming or so expensive that she had to off it! How long is two minutes, one twenty ticks, two rounds of the second hand, two 360 degree motions: but I can hold my breath for two minutes, there are people, especially, swimmers who can hold for more than five minutes. Why did she snap the connection. Did she do it deliberately or the insensitive mobile phone cooled off in indifference? Does she not know after how long, after how many eons of anxiety I wanted to talk to her? Two hours is a long time in a man’s life. Long two hours! Bhubaneswar to Delhi, Madras, Mumbai! When concorde operates one can go to Beijing even. Two hours sealed the fate of Napoleon. Two minutes after a  two hour hiatus is a blank in time. The world ceases to move, life is in coma. Nothing happens. No birth, no death, no motion. There is an inexplicable pause in sound and silence. Spheres are at a stand still. Eyes do not see as the nerves do not get signals from a blank mind. Breath is inaudible. The invisible air is dumb, the elements have suspended their functions as the prime mover is dazed.

I never imagine time, space and the creative process of supernal life could ever be self-apathetic. Nothingness reduces time to a non -being. Consciousness is being. If consciousness is stuck at a point of non-reality the sub- conscious too lapses into a stasis. Time and history get detached. Detachment causes a death in life. Poets call this a separation from the paradigms of being. The lover calls this separation- biraha which is like a pause in the heart beats- not death but worse. You feel death is more welcome than this nothingness. You stay put in a state of freeze.The sky, earth and all the shenanigans of cosmicity are on hold. You are divorced from the origins, your roots and your vital encounters with life.

Waiting for a call from your alter ego is painful to say the least, it reduces your being to a bundle of shame. Shame slowly leads to fear, the fear of being a non- entity. An identityless moron who is taken for granted. Whose soul force is undermined. Whose manhood is ignored. This fear of loss of personality leads even to self –loathing. Your existence falls apart. You are like a banned drug seller hiding your ware even from yourself.

Waiting for a confirmatory call from a potential employer is a temporary heartache where your being does not lose its power of defiance. You have done well, you deserve the job, if it is not offered, you feel cheated but you don’t feel everything is lost. You will try and retry and will succeed one day  like this year’s IAS topper Anudeep who after four failures found his name on the top of the list.This waiting gives you determination. You accept the challenge with defiance. As Churchill wrote- In victory magnanimity, in defeat defiance- you rise up to the binaries heroically. But when you lose your innocence you often lose the strength to fight back.

A political party can wait. A leader can wait. A jobseeker can wait. A favour seeker can wait. They may say in disgust – life is an endless argument before an empty Bench, there is no judge in sight-but they will wait, plead, argue, appeal, and even fight. That’s what man is. He will wait to fight to win or lose. He never gives up. Never says nothing- to be done.

But love is perhaps the only divine thing which man is not fated to win. There is no victory in love.  If you love someone she/ he becomes your total reality of this life and even of lives to come. Waiting for two minutes to listen to the golden voice of your love is more important than a Waterloo. If the call does not come the two minutes prolong to pervade all your time and space.You cannot say well, why wait for a proud woman, there are others. No, It would mean you never loved. Time comes to a standstill for a person who loves without boundaries of space- time, all limitations are meaningless. You lose patience which is your only possession and sigh away your deep agony.

But why does this happen? Should love overpower your soul force? Well, no answer or explanation will ever satisfy a lover for whom love is the only name for life. Yet … well  the phone is vibrating, a ring resonates the heart.

All is not lost. Nothing ever is lost except the silliness of overarching impatience.