The Sound of a Breakup — Shehnai By The Sea

If you have read any of my former writing and are here for poignant observations, candid analyses, or witty quips — leave.

Here you shall find none.

This blog has been created, and shall exist, for just one purpose — to bemoan (very, very soppily) the loss of the only man I have ever loved. This series is but a heartbreak notebook — to go through every longing, every lament, every thought, passing through my head.

I have loved in private, but I shall mourn shamelessly in public. After ma and him, I have little to lose, you see.

These blogs will also, in some ways, be an investigation into what caused the end of something we’d both thought to perfect. An investigation that may save others from stumbling into this destiny.

Enough preface. Let us start today: At a B-beach.

It’s Day Two of the break-up — and I’m in a popular beach-town to pack my brother off to college.

As our train hurtled towards its destination this morning, I told my aching heart (maybe thanks to the Imagine Dragons the brother and I were listening to), that this whole trip was a good distraction. Great timing, great breather to steel the heart and move on onwards.

But now, sitting in my hotel balcony, bathed in the colours of a sunset, listening to the ceremonious peals of the shehnai, I am gloriously on the verge of tears.

‘Shehnai by the beach? Well, let me explain.

Here at B-beach, where the sky is pink and blue, and the waves full-breasted; amid a ring of elderly coconut treets a lovely couple is being joined in holy matrimony.

A pink and gold mandap sits on the edge of the sand in which the happy couple is exchanging garlands, promising to keep each other ajeevan happy. In her red-green-and-gold saari, the bride is resplendent. In his white sherwani — the groom cannot stop smiling.

And as if planned by a terribly unfunny scriptwriter with a penchant for irony, the wedding is not just in the same language my former beau spoke, the groom even shares his name.

And thus, I am here, in this location of ethereal beauty, listening to the shehnai at someone else’s wedding, almost crying.

Truth be told, though, I’ve never believed in marriage, and certainly not in weddings. I’ve always thought them to be gaudy congregations of people practicing outdated rituals in unnecessarily extravagant settings. So many evenings with The Man I have spent arguing against every aspect of a wedding.

And yet, now, every mournful note of the shehnai seems to pierce my heart, my whole being is breaking.

Because: In many ways what this couple has could have been the culmination of what we had. The fact that they made it, and we could not, seems like a mockery of the blue-eyed girl and boy who, one December night two years ago, saw each other and fell headlessly and heedlessly in love.

(Cue: Fade in shehnai)

It is a reminder of why, despite our differences, we found love. My man — former man? Once lover? Ex beau? What should I call him now? — who believes in love, religion, god, family was in many ways the antidote to my cynicism. Even while I cantankerously disbelieved, through him I could lower caution and briefly believe. Through his faith, I could fleetingly be a part of those larger systems which I had rejected so long ago.

In many ways my antithesis, he kept me on my toes. He knocked the lack of logic out of my beliefs, challenged what I knew, what said I know.

In many ways, he tempted me to be vulnerable enough to believe — in love, in us, in a marriage with him, maybe even a wedding.

Between strings of ancient verse that magically unite man and woman, the shehnai plays its tune wistfully. So melancholic a note — I have often wondered why it is played at weddings.

Either way, this shehnai punctuated by the rhythm of the sea seems a fitting soundtrack to the wild current of emotions I seem to be feeling. Suitably solemn it is helping completely register the seriousness of what has truly occurred: that our relationship, earlier bruised and broken, is now entirely shattered.

As I conclude this first piece, I wonder why I am writing this blog — it is certainly not what anyone would want to willingly read. Is it really to process my feelings? Or is this just a pathetic excuse for that part of me that he will somehow stumble upon this, read it and in romance-movie style come back with a gesture and a glimmer to once again win over me and my cynicism?

Or maybe, I am writing this, because the person whom I wrote to is no longer an accepting recipient of my thoughts or my feelings.

As the guests leave the mandap, the shehnai is replaced by popular film music. The sun has set, but alas, my hope will not.

Why foolish heart do you still believe?