Sudhir, do you remember...how we used to write together? So much has changed with time, and yet the letters we wrote have remained suspended in an unwavering intensity, again and again.
You were cruel once—I wept for six straight days...a terrible fever came upon me! In the dead of night my eyelids would grow heavy...and I'd look out suddenly at the window and see the rain falling. Still, my heart found no peace. After that, as long as the rain fell, I stood in it, drenched.
That time I was alone, utterly alone. After being soaked by the rain, my body would shiver with a strange tremor, an odd sensation would ripple through my mind like waves breaking loose, and I would go mad wanting you near me—what did I do to myself! Something terrible?
Sudhir, from that day on, for so many years, I didn't let a single tear fall from my eyes. Now I cannot cry—my eyes have gone dry, and blood runs instead.
You know, for a time only thoughts of death would come, and the obsession with writing about you has grown so old! You had accepted my world, and you became like a habit to me—I made you a part of my very existence...and that's where the mistake was born.
That day it came to me: what good is my living?—I didn't know the skill of controlling emotion. How I would go mad for you!
How many of my letters have you read until now, Sudhir?—every one of them is dead.
# The Ravings of Existence The old man sat on the hospital bench, his thin legs not quite reaching the floor. A newspaper lay crumpled beside him—yesterday's news, probably picked up from the waiting room corner. His fingers, liver-spotted and trembling, kept returning to the same page, as if searching for something he'd already lost. "Do you know what existence is?" he asked no one in particular. I was sitting three benches away, waiting for my turn at the cardiology clinic. I pretended not to hear. "It's a disease," he continued, undeterred. "A prolonged fever that mimics life. We mistake the symptom for the cure." His voice was peculiar—not bitter exactly, but worn smooth by years of saying things nobody wanted to hear. He had the cadence of someone who'd rehearsed these thoughts so often they'd become automatic, like breathing. "I've lived eighty-three years," he said, turning to look directly at me now, "and I'm still waiting for it to make sense." A nurse called his name—or tried to. It came out mangled, uncertain. He didn't respond immediately. He was folding the newspaper with deliberate precision, each crease a small meditation. When he finally stood, he did so slowly, as if gravity had become a matter of negotiation. "The waiting room," he said as he passed my bench, "is the most honest place in the world. Everyone here is waiting to be told whether they still exist or not." After he left, I found myself staring at the spot where he'd been sitting. The newspaper remained, folded now into a compact square. I didn't open it. I didn't want to know if his ravings continued on the next page, or if silence had mercifully cut him off mid-thought. When my own name was called, I realized I'd been holding my breath—as if his question had somehow opened a door inside me that I'd spent forty years keeping locked. The answer, I understood then, was still waiting in the room ahead.
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