Outlaws

I do not know why I fell in love with him, maybe it was because like all loves, ours were blind, perfect and with no critical intelligence.

***

'Albin, you should participate. It has been 10 or 11 times you've been here and every single time it was only me who was speaking. Say something today.'

All I could hear were faint murmurs from times begone. I had a lot to say, perhaps even more he could perceive or begin to understand. And yet I used to watch him, like everyone he was human and his features; the way he drifts his lower jaw to stress his point and the general sarcasm to perceive himself being well off and in a position to advice, dominated him throughout.

'Albin, you see, we all have problems, everyone of us hold a lifetime of emotions underneath. But we all decided to smile, ain't that what you should do?'

Ah, fuck off, Albin is dead, what you see is an image of him, perhaps your own reflection!

***

Before Albin, the person I used to be, died. And many years before the obsolescent counselling, which from beginning to be dreary turned repulsive, bothered the existing human being, there was a life I have now begun to forget, A life which would have taken an obvious route of job, marriage, kids, retirement and eventual death, unless it was drastically led into a path of revolt and an irresistible, passionate love which I found with him.

'Society serves on a brutal domination politics by the majority. It has a nature wherein it makes you think like them or destroys you completely. Go follow the tribe, or die wandering! Life is pretty much that!', Sushant once said at our Student Circle.

'All majorities were put into power with a revolution!'

'The days of the revolution have come and gone Albin, it is a continuum today, of people striving to improve their wealth while holding onto their primitive thoughts. True revolution should happen inside the human mind, sadly which is not being used too much today.'

Sushant, the person who had climbed to the thinker's pinnacle - a world where humans are not any different from animals. He wished to stay there, a place which is equally shared between the living and the non living. At first, it would have been admiration to a person who brought to words my repressed thoughts. But sooner rather than later it turned to a feeling of deep emotional appeal.

'Sushant, I don't know how to begin to say it. I am not even sure how you'd think about it. I can't help it, I have fallen in love with you!'

How clogged with perturbation his face looked then, how charged with thoughts. He hugged me, and asked me if I knew the implications.

'Do people love by thinking about implications?', I asked.

He smiled.

Loving him was like planting revolution within us, which grew like effervescence with our meetings. It bore fruits which initially tasted bitter but one whose addictive power kept pulling us into it. I felt like I was trapped inside a vortex of flame, drowning into it every time and emerging as a transformed person. Society and all its taboos, its pity views, its narrow mindedness, its filthy acts of drawing people into the tribe, and the crushing venom with which it destroyed the divergent trace would never have the expansiveness to accept us. We would be considered as the outcast, the people who poisons other minds just by physical contact. Night after night, my life kept drifting, mind playing games with the body. We were criminals. They are going to arrest you, they are going to showcase you like meat, they will mock you and they will eat you in the end!

***

By article 377 of Indian Constitution, we were criminals who could even get a life term in prison just because of who we were. At first it were our friends who segregated us as untouchables. It was the demarcation of an alien idea, which will then be subjugated by society's own law.

'Kutthhe, college khatham aapka, bilkul khatham!' 

'You dog, your college life is over!', the shouts at home grew incessant.

And both of us cracked. Sushant got TC from the college and was asked to pursue his ancestral job of fishing in the backwaters of Kerala, while I searched for redemption amidst a patriarchal law. It didn't last long, as the day my course ended I was given a job as a sales executive in a car showroom owned by my father's friend who regularly placed a scanner on the places I went and people I meet. And in that famous summer when a nationalist party residing on religious agendas obtained supreme power and when half the population was evaporating in the heat waves with nothing to dream or eat I got a goodbye letter from my friend.

'Dear Albin,

We should accept that we are different. It is perhaps a mistake that should not have happened. Both our lives should have been ordinary. It would have been better. I am going to Qatar tomorrow, I may not come back again.

Yours own,

Sushant'

*** 

'Why were we different? Was it my mistake, my wrong? Could I have been somebody else? Does this difference make me any less a man than the next person I meet?'

'Albin, it is not your mistake. Please stay calm.'

I could feel the way his jaws remained straight. He was deceptive now, his assurances were blatant lies. And I exploded with the revelation.

'You don't get what it is like do you? Can you imagine a day when you having a relationship with your wife will be considered an offence because she is a woman? Can you imagine a day when your identity, your gender would remain so obscure, so irrelevant that you yourself would fail to truly understand it?'

***

My mind kept searching new valleys of freedom, though my body remained arrested in my bed. Tomorrow, distinctly, another day shall come by, people would forget me and my story. But I could never forget Sushant, he was my friend, he was my lover, he was my world. Hopes for new horizons no longer await me, I have come to feel that no good can ever happen. Yet words from somewhere far away in time still calls out to me:

'All majorities were put into power with a revolution!'

The words still ignites my soul and brings light to my path.