an sms story55

Anna was sitting in vatika.the bright lights.seemed there were no
ugly-looking and badly-dressed people in the world.the gleaming counter
with a computer. you pay and collect the slip. give it to the food counter.
you wait. patiently as your number comes up on a screen on the wall
of the counter.the escalator just in front of the railings where  Anna sat.
her favourite spot. a spot of green in the form of  an ornamental plant.
there was a staircase also, winding upwards to the movie-theater above.
the shops around the space by the restaurant..clothes, ice cream-parlor,
computers,photo-binding services, gift shops...she has inserted the VSNL SIM into
her red n black mobile as its screen was better for messaging and message-reading.
and she carried it always with her nowadays and kept the other one at home.

she has not grown up seeing these things.like the pony-tailed little girls here in
three-quarter jeans, holding their jeans-wearing moms' hands.she felt
like an immigrant,often, in this world. this well-fed, well-moneyed
ambience that advertised itself all the time...Anna felt lost. paradoxically this losing
 herself gave her a sense of security. amidst the crowd of anonymous faces, she was
one anonymous face..society couldn't challenge her here as the people knew no
antecedents and had no right to interact with her..no claim over her privacy. and
she was one of the conspicuously best-dressed ladies.all the more right to be sitting
there and having fun all by herself.

Anna experienced a sort of unreality in this place always, isolated from the outside
world of suffering and greed, poverty and diseases. the MATRIX. and she needed
Armaan more than ever with her, as she sat, watched people, listened to songs,
brought tea or foaming coffee to her table. to lend to her affluent life some kind of reality.
to enjoy these new things..this world of mobiles, net, posh people hanging around,
this first-world illusion....everything. how she wished to send Armaan a message,'i
am sitting at Vatika!'..'i am eating pizza!'


she would share it all with Armaan...Armaan in his black T-shirt, the white inner
peeping from under, on his shoulder. Armaan...in his shirt, with some buttons open
in the front  and the hair on his chest, not like a teenager at all, of a fully-grown man...
how it attracted her! and she blushed when he felt her eyes on his chest...the writing
in the Draft contained Jalauddin Rumi's words..

'Ur task is not to
seek love, but
merely to seek
and find all the
barriers that u
have built
against it.'

and sitting there,Anna drafted the message she meant to send to Armaan.
A quote.
       (to be contd.)