UNMASKING LAUGHTER

To

The girl with earth shattering laughter

Laughter is the best medicine, they say. But how bitter, how unbearable can it be for the person administering its doses. This is perhaps the only medicine that heals when ingested, but ruins the healer in this process. To make someone laugh is not easy. 

And if you’ve taught me anything, it is exactly this.

It boggles me that there are so many of you behind that dazzling, electric smile. The more I get to know you, the more I try to rake out everything hidden behind that simple smile of yours. In fact, I know there is so much more to you. 

Do you remember the first time you brought out the devil in me? That voice, which one could hear from millions of miles away, was booming through the hallways of our college.

“HI!” it rang out excitedly in my direction.

A friendly greeting to an absolute stranger.

And I, like a clueless chicken, got tagged along with that voice. But boy was I glad! I will forever cherish the first day I spent with you in the shady college lawns. You spoke and I listened. You and your obscene antics, absolutely shameless yet seemingly perfectly content with yourself, beckoning me to “LIVE” a little. You went on speaking in a voice boomeranging through the hushed lawn. I went on listening and laughing and making merry. After all, doesn’t the speaker need a listener to make that perfect pair? It was the best day of an otherwise miserable summer. 

So you can draw, and write a complete paragraph in reverse alphabet (which, by the way, is a skill I haven’t witnessed ever before), and you’re hiding a couple of wounds behind your laughter. But let me tell you that you’re complete-a whole person. And I’m so touched that you introduced me to this whole person, your flaws included, unlike the others who are content with gauging you through the width of your smile. 

I love you just the way that you are. But I solemnly swear that I would never judge you based on that laughter alone. Don’t let it fade away. But just in case you needed a shoulder to rest upon, I will be there. 

Forever. 

Yours truly

VOICE

To 

The man with a beret and baritone

Voices speak their own language. Like people, they come packaged in different shapes and sizes. Some are coarse and jarring, like sandpaper on rusted metal. While others flow like a stream of sickly saccharin in our ears. Seldom, however, does one hope to rake a jewel in this cacophony. 

To find that one voice-authentic, complete and utterly inimitable in itself. You’ll know, then, that you couldn’t possibly forget it. Not even if you tried. 

I’m fortunate to have come across one such voice, embodied in the guise of a scrupulous man with white hair. The hair on which sits adorned a trademark beret-the crowning glory. Where else, but in his voice, would Shakespeare have found apt company. How else would Roman comedy have provoked actual laughter?

Imagine, with your eyes closed, a massive theater in some mighty English town. The curtain rises, and an ornate stage appears. A bewildered audience, clasping silence to its heart, goes on waiting. It waits for faces to emerge. But no one comes onstage. There is no actor. Not one, save for a solitary voice. And through that voice alone, the audience can visualize an entire play. Such is the magic of ‘one’ voice... 

Not all are blessed with this voice, though.

To growl with the authority of an emperor at one moment, and emulate the meek, whimpering servant at the next; only some can carry it out with haunting finesse. There is a ray of sunshine everyday when we get to immerse ourselves in this treat to our ears. 

I hope that it continues to amaze us, as much as I hope that the power of a voice continues to inspire me...

Yours truly

A FLAXEN LETTER

To

The girl with epic earrings

College never really began until my eyes had swiveled a full hundred and eighty degrees and fastened upon that bench-third from the first row. It seemed as if it would be a good place to start a new life. It’s the bench that led me to you. It led me to beginnings.

It led to ‘us’.

Asking for the exact bit of conversation with which such bonds begin, is always an impossibility. It’s absurd. I wouldn’t have an answer, neither would you. In fact, why should we create those boundaries? Let’s not pose unanswerable questions like these-”God, when you thought of a pine tree, how did you think of a star?”. (And that’s Angela Morgan for you, because poetry is love.) 

Some things just are. We might as well let them be. 

I’ve learned that such is the order of things and the universe conspires thus. And you, with your hair gently fluttering in the wind, the smug eyeliner and round ‘bindi’, like a dot on the forehead. You’ve taught me to love the written word just a little bit more. Your tiny gestures when you talk about poetry, they make your eyes light up. You do find meaning in every new word. And you, my dear, do flow like poetry itself. 

There is a definite quality about your imperfect laughter, and you talk just the way you do. But you don’t realise how you do surprise those of us watching you. You sound like a fool and an intellectual, all at once. I’m certain that there’s someone out there who held you on a very high pedestal once. And just maybe, you punctured that notion with your laughter. You don’t see it but you’ve become two different people. 

There’s something magical about both sides-one immersed in laughter, the other solemn and serious. Like the actor that you are, you aspire to be infinite. You seem to be and you are, different people embodied in one person. And I enjoy being with each side of you.

I write this letter to a wondrous girl and to this new, blossoming friendship of ours.

Yours truly