The dawn breaks. Warm sun rays playfully sneak in through the gaps between the curtains and falls on the bed where four arms held each other. Unlike weekdays which usually started with screeching sound of the alarm clock, their Sunday started with the chirp of sparrows in the balcony. Zara was awake. She slowly sneaked out of the bed without waking up Kabir. He was having late nights at work as deadline of the new project was around the corner and he was project executive manager, which meant he was responsible for everything that turns out in the end, good or bad. Zara made herself a cup of coffee, a habit she had quickly picked up after her two year stay in Hyderabad. She walked out of the bedroom door tiptoed and stepped out in the balcony, her favorite place of the apartment. The only reason she had said yes to this apartment when the broker brought them here was the balcony view. You can view the whole colony, the creak and the hills from here. It was her little heaven in midst of the busy city, Mumbai. Usually in the weekdays the park was overcrowded in the early morning, with joggers and bikers, beginning their day. The scene seemed quite different today as it was the weekend. There was a calmness that was tuning Zara’s mind. And as she stood there sipping coffee from her “My foodie-buddy n wifey” mug, her mind was running after her thoughts. There was more than one feeling her heart felt at that very moment and it was too much to limit all of them inside her mind’s contour. She had to pen them down. She peeked through the curtains. The clock struck 5:45am. She had at least 5 hours until Kabir would wake up. And that was all the time she needed with her diary.
Zara quickly washed her mug, dried her hands on the towel and sat on her table. She loved her table for it had everything she needed to save her soul. As Zara unlocked a little compartment below the table, tiny velvet covered, handmade paper notebook smiled at her as if it knew she would take her out today. Zara took it and locked the compartment again. “Hello diary” she whispered as she held it in her hand, with a curve on her lips. As the nib of her ball-pen met the page of her diary, she felt her heart beating after a long time. Blood was flushing out in her veins and she felt alive. This feeling was the magic that happened every time she sat to write something. So what would it be today? Politics, religion, elections, wars, environment- what could possibly be the idea her mind is going to unfurl onto these pages? That was a mystery even for Zara herself. But she had to start, the clock was ticking. She started with the date. 9th March 2027. There was a shine in her eyes. “There you are! Gotcha” and she led out a quick laugh. The sparrows on the window seal were startled and flew away. It was on this day ten years back she had embraced her freedom after being jobless at home for about 10 months. It was a new beginning for her. That’s what this day was all about? “Umm… No!”Zara shook her head and wrote “ All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am.”
Zara wasn’t always like this. She thought of all those times she had heard people asking her to stop being so lost. She would either get lost in the past or procrastinate about the future. But either way she was never happy. Both the phenomena of using her mind as the time machine and rewinding or forwarding through the moments hit her hard. One day she realized her exercise had robbed her. She had lost moments she actually got to live in. She is not sure when the realization struck her, but it did strike her hard for sure, for the next thing everyone noted about her was her “happy face”. Of course, she had bad and rough days that made her mad and tired. But she tried to walk past them all and move on. One night at the dinner table for the first time, Kabir was looking at her and not focusing on the food on his plate. After he gazed for more than five minutes, Zara looked up, tilted her face, raised her brows and smiled, ‘What’s up with you? Not hungry today?” He took a moment, smiled, shook his head and went back to eating his food. But his gaze had stirred Zara’s curiosity and she wasn’t going to leave this mystery remain unsolved. “Why were you looking at me that way? Am I looking weird or something? May be my hair is messed up. I knew I needed hair straightening done again. Sorry if I am ruining this date, but I can fix it if you tell me what’s on your mind” and she reached out for his hand. Kabir kept his fork aside and looked at her. “I always thought you are my work under progress. It’s like you were the Cinderella, lost behind the dusty kitchen whom I found and made my princess. I always felt you changed for better ever since you met me. But in past few weeks I realized I was wrong. You are your own project, not mine. You have worked on yourself in every possible way to let the circumstances sculpt you inside out. You have become a woman who lives in a moment. I never thought that was possible for anyone to do. Today you look so beautiful and charming and confident, I feel I am blessed to be your man”. Zara blushed and smiled wider than before “God! You scared the hell out of me! You owe me a drink now!” And their laughter filled the restaurant with a happy tune.
“Stop! What am I doing? Why I am walking back in the past moments? I am not that girl anymore. Damn!” And her nib broke splashing blue ink everywhere on the table. “Oh no! I have to clean up this mess now!” She reached for the drawers in her table in search of a piece of tissue paper or a piece of cloth. As her hand went in the drawer, reaching out for the tissue paper something rolled out of the drawer. Zara looked and everything that happened a moment ago washed out of her mind. It was a blue sapphire stone. It was beautiful and precious. Sapphire is often termed as the king of all gems for it stands for wisdom, royalty, hope, faith, as well as spirituality. Amma had insisted her to take it when they had gone for shopping together a few years back. Zara picked up the stone and wiped it with a cloth. She held it in her hand, between her thumb, index finger and middle finger and lifted it up to look through it. The gem was beautiful for sure. The light passing through it seemed to be breaking into several tiny images and again becoming one as it reached her eyes. She had refused to buy this beautiful stone for she felt it was too extravagant to become her possession. But at this moment she said a silent thank you to Amma for making her buy this one. Carefully keeping the stone aside, Zara picked up a new pen from the pen-stand, and restarted. Zara had once been a perfectly talented girl. She was on the top at everything she did in school- let it be academics, extra curriculars, anything… you name it and she would nail it. Then she got over that phase. She got into the “still popular but not so perfect” group of her school. She wasn’t the topper anymore but she was still in the neighborhood of winners. She got over that phase and moved onto the average phase. This according to Zara was more of a low-confidence –self-criticism period of her life. At the end of this phase she got back to the neighborhood of winners again and it felt good. But fate has a wicked way of changing everything just when you start liking it. As that happened, she started slipping into deep tunnel of solitude. She wished to go out nowhere until she had an answer to their questions “Hey Zara, now that you are done with your post graduation, what is your next plan? PhD or job? You have qualified your PhD entrances? Or you are going to take a year break?” All these questions made Zara doubt her fate but never her choices. Life was not fair to her. And as years rolled by and she met people, she realized not everyone gets the easy way out. And even for the one who does get out feeling lucky runs out of luck somewhere down the road and have to pay the price to refill their luck tank. As she lifted her head to look at the wall clock that struck 7:30, her eyes fell on the wall writing. She had insisted Kabir to get this quote written down on the wall above her table. He wasn’t much in favor of wall writings but had to give in. The quote read “We’re known by the choices we make and the chances we take”. She is not sure if the original quote matched with this one or she had mixed up two entirely different quotes into one. Whatever it may, the quote was making sense in that dreamy Sunday summer morning. “I have mastered the art to shrug off the past”. Zara often told this to herself when she was alone at home or workplace. This made her feel confident. But in this morning as she sat there walking back and forth old conversations and moments, she was on the verge of a whole new revelation of human nature. When we cut down a tree, the rings in the bark tell us the age of the tree. Those rings are like the experiences that we gather as we grow older. We make mistakes as we step in and out of different phases of our lives. But we learn as we make our way through those moments. With every moment that we live, we turn into a different being. Little by little we become better versions of ourselves. At every moment, we are met by two choices, both equally tempting. We make our choices and we reach our destinies. At the mountain top, we plan our next milestone. That’s how our choices and chances make us who we are. There are people who spend a lot of time trying hard not to repeat their mistakes. Then there are people who have accepted their past, made peace it with it and have focused on their future. But a group of people, may be small or large group, believe that they have mastered the art to shrug off their past. But is that really true? Even if the snake shreds off its skin and moves on, does it become younger? If we peel off the bark of the tree layer by layer, do we succeed in turning the clock back for the tree? Experience is a stubborn fellow. If it gets to know you it stays with you. You may not visit your past, and may be you are actually living in the moment but that doesn’t mean you have shrugged off your past experiences. Without the past, we all would have been hollow souls with no story. “I guess we all started from once upon a time even if we don’t reach our happily ever after”. “Hon, are you talking to yourself again?” Kabir’s voice startled Zara as she jumped on her chair. As she breathed a sigh of relief seeing it’s Kabir, she looked up from her desk and said “God! You made me skip a heartbeat!” “HAHA did I? Good to know I can still make your heart skip a beat,” said Kabir winking at his wife. He held out her coffee mug. She kept the pen down and took the mug from him while Kabir lifted her diary and asked “May I?” They have been best friends for 14 years, including 5 years of their marriage. There was individual spaces for each of them but they were allowed to cross the lines with due permission. Zara nodded and sipped her coffee.
After finishing their coffee, Kabir and Zara were sitting in their balcony as Shahbaz finally finished up reading Zara’s morning note. They were quiet for a moment or two. Or, may be more than that. Zara broke the silence “So what do you think?” “I don’t know. I mean you got me thinking. It’s like you are saying our past is our root. We wouldn’t be where we are if not for the past we came through. Is that what you meant to say?” Kabir looked at Zara, still trying to figure out why she wrote such a soul revealing piece on a beautiful Sunday morning. “Umm” Zara opened her mouth to say something but before she could start, she got up and went inside. She came after few moments and held her hand out to Shahbaz. “The Sapphire! You could have made this a pendent”, Kabir exclaimed as he picked up the gem from her hand. “Can you see through it?” Zara asked. “Of course I can! Its transparent crystal, Hon. Why do you ask?”, Kabir thought it was a trick question.
“I realized my soul is like this gem. It’s transparent and crystal clear. There is no dust of regrets clogging its transparency. I feel once we accept our past, learn from it and keep moving without worrying how much we are changing in other’s perspectives, we can be happy. We all can have a soul like my sapphire- clear and blue.” She was smiling now. “You know your words, creativity and spirituality made their way into my heart even before your beauty did?” said Kabir as he returned her the diary saying “Write down the last part you just said. You won’t always have days when your thoughts get the wing of words.”
Zara took the diary and got up to get back to her desk. “And after you are done, can we go out for a lunch date? I know you are not in a mood to cook today.” Kabir asked with a playful smile. “Yes. Sure.” Zara replied with a smile as she knew, of all the choices she had made to keep her sapphire crystal-clear, being with Kabir was the best one. This was the happily ever after for Zara’s once upon a time.
Disclaimer: This piece is original except the following two sentences where original written by Anita Nair, author, as a prompt for writing contest for which I initially wrote this piece:
All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am.
Zara quickly washed her mug, dried her hands on the towel and sat on her table. She loved her table for it had everything she needed to save her soul. As Zara unlocked a little compartment below the table, tiny velvet covered, handmade paper notebook smiled at her as if it knew she would take her out today. Zara took it and locked the compartment again. “Hello diary” she whispered as she held it in her hand, with a curve on her lips. As the nib of her ball-pen met the page of her diary, she felt her heart beating after a long time. Blood was flushing out in her veins and she felt alive. This feeling was the magic that happened every time she sat to write something. So what would it be today? Politics, religion, elections, wars, environment- what could possibly be the idea her mind is going to unfurl onto these pages? That was a mystery even for Zara herself. But she had to start, the clock was ticking. She started with the date. 9th March 2027. There was a shine in her eyes. “There you are! Gotcha” and she led out a quick laugh. The sparrows on the window seal were startled and flew away. It was on this day ten years back she had embraced her freedom after being jobless at home for about 10 months. It was a new beginning for her. That’s what this day was all about? “Umm… No!”Zara shook her head and wrote “ All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am.”
Zara wasn’t always like this. She thought of all those times she had heard people asking her to stop being so lost. She would either get lost in the past or procrastinate about the future. But either way she was never happy. Both the phenomena of using her mind as the time machine and rewinding or forwarding through the moments hit her hard. One day she realized her exercise had robbed her. She had lost moments she actually got to live in. She is not sure when the realization struck her, but it did strike her hard for sure, for the next thing everyone noted about her was her “happy face”. Of course, she had bad and rough days that made her mad and tired. But she tried to walk past them all and move on. One night at the dinner table for the first time, Kabir was looking at her and not focusing on the food on his plate. After he gazed for more than five minutes, Zara looked up, tilted her face, raised her brows and smiled, ‘What’s up with you? Not hungry today?” He took a moment, smiled, shook his head and went back to eating his food. But his gaze had stirred Zara’s curiosity and she wasn’t going to leave this mystery remain unsolved. “Why were you looking at me that way? Am I looking weird or something? May be my hair is messed up. I knew I needed hair straightening done again. Sorry if I am ruining this date, but I can fix it if you tell me what’s on your mind” and she reached out for his hand. Kabir kept his fork aside and looked at her. “I always thought you are my work under progress. It’s like you were the Cinderella, lost behind the dusty kitchen whom I found and made my princess. I always felt you changed for better ever since you met me. But in past few weeks I realized I was wrong. You are your own project, not mine. You have worked on yourself in every possible way to let the circumstances sculpt you inside out. You have become a woman who lives in a moment. I never thought that was possible for anyone to do. Today you look so beautiful and charming and confident, I feel I am blessed to be your man”. Zara blushed and smiled wider than before “God! You scared the hell out of me! You owe me a drink now!” And their laughter filled the restaurant with a happy tune.
“Stop! What am I doing? Why I am walking back in the past moments? I am not that girl anymore. Damn!” And her nib broke splashing blue ink everywhere on the table. “Oh no! I have to clean up this mess now!” She reached for the drawers in her table in search of a piece of tissue paper or a piece of cloth. As her hand went in the drawer, reaching out for the tissue paper something rolled out of the drawer. Zara looked and everything that happened a moment ago washed out of her mind. It was a blue sapphire stone. It was beautiful and precious. Sapphire is often termed as the king of all gems for it stands for wisdom, royalty, hope, faith, as well as spirituality. Amma had insisted her to take it when they had gone for shopping together a few years back. Zara picked up the stone and wiped it with a cloth. She held it in her hand, between her thumb, index finger and middle finger and lifted it up to look through it. The gem was beautiful for sure. The light passing through it seemed to be breaking into several tiny images and again becoming one as it reached her eyes. She had refused to buy this beautiful stone for she felt it was too extravagant to become her possession. But at this moment she said a silent thank you to Amma for making her buy this one. Carefully keeping the stone aside, Zara picked up a new pen from the pen-stand, and restarted. Zara had once been a perfectly talented girl. She was on the top at everything she did in school- let it be academics, extra curriculars, anything… you name it and she would nail it. Then she got over that phase. She got into the “still popular but not so perfect” group of her school. She wasn’t the topper anymore but she was still in the neighborhood of winners. She got over that phase and moved onto the average phase. This according to Zara was more of a low-confidence –self-criticism period of her life. At the end of this phase she got back to the neighborhood of winners again and it felt good. But fate has a wicked way of changing everything just when you start liking it. As that happened, she started slipping into deep tunnel of solitude. She wished to go out nowhere until she had an answer to their questions “Hey Zara, now that you are done with your post graduation, what is your next plan? PhD or job? You have qualified your PhD entrances? Or you are going to take a year break?” All these questions made Zara doubt her fate but never her choices. Life was not fair to her. And as years rolled by and she met people, she realized not everyone gets the easy way out. And even for the one who does get out feeling lucky runs out of luck somewhere down the road and have to pay the price to refill their luck tank. As she lifted her head to look at the wall clock that struck 7:30, her eyes fell on the wall writing. She had insisted Kabir to get this quote written down on the wall above her table. He wasn’t much in favor of wall writings but had to give in. The quote read “We’re known by the choices we make and the chances we take”. She is not sure if the original quote matched with this one or she had mixed up two entirely different quotes into one. Whatever it may, the quote was making sense in that dreamy Sunday summer morning. “I have mastered the art to shrug off the past”. Zara often told this to herself when she was alone at home or workplace. This made her feel confident. But in this morning as she sat there walking back and forth old conversations and moments, she was on the verge of a whole new revelation of human nature. When we cut down a tree, the rings in the bark tell us the age of the tree. Those rings are like the experiences that we gather as we grow older. We make mistakes as we step in and out of different phases of our lives. But we learn as we make our way through those moments. With every moment that we live, we turn into a different being. Little by little we become better versions of ourselves. At every moment, we are met by two choices, both equally tempting. We make our choices and we reach our destinies. At the mountain top, we plan our next milestone. That’s how our choices and chances make us who we are. There are people who spend a lot of time trying hard not to repeat their mistakes. Then there are people who have accepted their past, made peace it with it and have focused on their future. But a group of people, may be small or large group, believe that they have mastered the art to shrug off their past. But is that really true? Even if the snake shreds off its skin and moves on, does it become younger? If we peel off the bark of the tree layer by layer, do we succeed in turning the clock back for the tree? Experience is a stubborn fellow. If it gets to know you it stays with you. You may not visit your past, and may be you are actually living in the moment but that doesn’t mean you have shrugged off your past experiences. Without the past, we all would have been hollow souls with no story. “I guess we all started from once upon a time even if we don’t reach our happily ever after”. “Hon, are you talking to yourself again?” Kabir’s voice startled Zara as she jumped on her chair. As she breathed a sigh of relief seeing it’s Kabir, she looked up from her desk and said “God! You made me skip a heartbeat!” “HAHA did I? Good to know I can still make your heart skip a beat,” said Kabir winking at his wife. He held out her coffee mug. She kept the pen down and took the mug from him while Kabir lifted her diary and asked “May I?” They have been best friends for 14 years, including 5 years of their marriage. There was individual spaces for each of them but they were allowed to cross the lines with due permission. Zara nodded and sipped her coffee.
After finishing their coffee, Kabir and Zara were sitting in their balcony as Shahbaz finally finished up reading Zara’s morning note. They were quiet for a moment or two. Or, may be more than that. Zara broke the silence “So what do you think?” “I don’t know. I mean you got me thinking. It’s like you are saying our past is our root. We wouldn’t be where we are if not for the past we came through. Is that what you meant to say?” Kabir looked at Zara, still trying to figure out why she wrote such a soul revealing piece on a beautiful Sunday morning. “Umm” Zara opened her mouth to say something but before she could start, she got up and went inside. She came after few moments and held her hand out to Shahbaz. “The Sapphire! You could have made this a pendent”, Kabir exclaimed as he picked up the gem from her hand. “Can you see through it?” Zara asked. “Of course I can! Its transparent crystal, Hon. Why do you ask?”, Kabir thought it was a trick question.
“I realized my soul is like this gem. It’s transparent and crystal clear. There is no dust of regrets clogging its transparency. I feel once we accept our past, learn from it and keep moving without worrying how much we are changing in other’s perspectives, we can be happy. We all can have a soul like my sapphire- clear and blue.” She was smiling now. “You know your words, creativity and spirituality made their way into my heart even before your beauty did?” said Kabir as he returned her the diary saying “Write down the last part you just said. You won’t always have days when your thoughts get the wing of words.”
Zara took the diary and got up to get back to her desk. “And after you are done, can we go out for a lunch date? I know you are not in a mood to cook today.” Kabir asked with a playful smile. “Yes. Sure.” Zara replied with a smile as she knew, of all the choices she had made to keep her sapphire crystal-clear, being with Kabir was the best one. This was the happily ever after for Zara’s once upon a time.
Disclaimer: This piece is original except the following two sentences where original written by Anita Nair, author, as a prompt for writing contest for which I initially wrote this piece:
All of us live with our past. All of us allow it to shape our future. But some of us know how to shrug the past. I think that is who I am.
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