Natalie

In the queer light, in twilight

In April of the year

I meet a thousand women

But I never meet my Dear.

Yet each of them has something

A turn of neck or knee

A line of breast or shoulder

That brings my Dear to me.

One has a way of swaying

I’d swear to anywhere

One has a hat, and one a laugh

And one a trick of hair –

Oh, hints and glints and gestures,

When shall I find complete

The Dear that's walking somewhere

The Dear that I’ve yet to meet?                 

Rupert Brooke wrote that poem a long time ago, when he was a very young man. The poem is titled ‘The Young man in April’. Then he wrote ‘If I should die...’, and then went to war and got himself killed. Lucky boy.  Not all of us have the same good fortune to go early, and leave behind only our works for people to admire and sigh over, and perchance to think “I wish I had known him”...

Now I have been a young man in a certain sense for a very long time, and I am growing old now, and I was also the sort of young man  who read Manusmriti and Arthasastra and Kamasutra and Paradise Lost of his own volition in teenage, and admired old men of the likes of Bertrand Russell and Tennyson’s Ulysses, you need to keep that in mind too. And I have been looking for my Dear for a very long time.

That hasn’t stopped me from having many nice-to-wonderful ‘affairs’ as people call them, a good marriage, a most satisfactory family life, and a daughter I am very proud of.  Yet, as the poet says, ‘always roaming with a hungry heart’, hethaa noy, hothaa noy, onyo kothaa, onyo konokhane... it has been an extraordinarily rich life, in a sense, therefore, but most intensely frustrating too. My Natalie I have never found.

‘Who’s Natalie?’ asked an old boy in his late '30s today, and I reminded him of If winter comes.  I created Natalie, and she has been all that I have wanted from a woman.  In the so-called real world, to paraphrase Russell, ‘I found ecstasy, I found anguish, I found madness, I found loneliness/ I found the solitary pain that gnaws the heart/ but peace I did not find’. What I did find was a lot of gifted and good women, and also crazed ones and foolish ones, obsessed ones and misguided ones galore, women who eventually hurt me more than they gave joyance (to use an archaic word), and yet women I am thankful for having known, however long or briefly. But the fact remains that I didn’t find Natalie. I have had girls asking me to adopt them too, but no one has ever said ‘I want to be your Natalie’. She is my manaskanya, girl born of my mind, and she will go to the grave with me.

I am not sad as I write this. There are feelings much deeper than sadness.  Some people say they know, but of course, that is just a form of words. In the end, we are all alone, and too foolish even to get close to those who have tried hardest...

Rituparno the noted filmmaker has died suddenly of a cardiac arrest. He was just about my age. I could very easily be marked for the axe, too - my doctors assure me I am a prime candidate! There are many who delude themselves with the thought that there's lots of time in hand to make things right. Of all the saddest things ever written, nothing is sadder than the words 'It might have been'.