It was the last night of the year-dark, chilly and windy. She lay huddled on an uncomfortable, alien bed that she was sharing with two other people. Every now and then, she would sit up to cough; her face was red from repeated coughing and forehead was burning hot. The two people on her both sides cast anxious glances at her; they were worried about her deteriorating condition-one of them asked the other, ‘Do you think we could find a doctor in this unknown city if her fever aggravated later in the night?’ She was too exhausted from intermittent bouts of coughing to protest or to say anything to assuage their disquietude but she wanted to do both.
And to tell them how wonderful the night was for her-she was sleeping with her parents, or rather in between them, for the first time in twenty years or so. She was reading Shosha for the first time in three years. To be ensconced in between a couple she loved the most and to have for company, another couple she related with the most, was a dream which she never dreamt without feeling like Amelie the next morning-ready to embrace the world with all the tender affection of her heart. Every muscle in her body was aching and throat was so sore that she felt as if a thorn had been struck somewhere along her gullet. Traveling from Ahmedabad to Mount Abu to Udaipur in the span of a single day had taken its toll on her, her mother had concluded. But she did not mind the pain, the fever or the exhaustion. She was in a state of bliss, reading Shosha, while her parents fussed over her. Her father wanted to go the other room in the hotel where her brother was sleeping alone but she begged him to stay back. And she pondered.
Shosha’s love for her Aaron was selfless-she was too simple to comprehend his personal perversions and his intellectual disappointments or ever to have any expectations from him; Aaron Greidinger, the philosopher-playwright, was too fatalistic to not to be aware of the impending doom that awaited him and his fellow men in the form of the Holocaust or to have any expectations from his illiterate, ‘infantile’ sweetheart but they still loved each other, fearing no dictator, no political turmoil or penury.
And she loved her parents just as much. She realized that just as Aaron and Shosha could be themselves only in each other’s company, she could be herself-she who felt no anguish, no hatred, no envy, no discomfort-only in their presence. That did not make her love for them exactly selfless, she reasoned this out in her febrile condition. It is, however, an exquisite state of being, she told herself as she dozed off to sleep. She knew that on this new year’s eve night, she would dream that she is announcing to her parents that she has written her first book called Shosha Revisited. Too fanciful a dream it is, she heard a voice within her as she entered slumberland. But another voice replied, ‘But it is a beautiful dream, a beautiful night, a beautiful state that would last only until the day breaks in!’
