MAYA - PART 2

...Why? How? But she could have...

Psychedelic Maya, was she? Did drugs prove her undoing. She was a free spirit after all but then, not the likes I knew of. A heightened sense of self and her environment, overpowered all her other instincts. So how could she?

Since Jaipur, we had become good friends. A few misadventures aside, she enjoyed and thrived in Delhi. We went places, rather, I took her places; where she never would have been in her wildest dreams. The Delhi of earthy delights, the bizarrely rich and dreadfully dirty Delhi, the spiritual Delhi and the intellectual Delhi, the Delhi of spices, aromas and street-sides, the one of annals of power and malfunction. Together, we were riding the wave of life.

But Maya's crests and troughs were much bigger. She lived in two worlds. Curiously she disappeared for days. According to her it was required as the Israeli embassy suggested, ordered and advised. One time, she resurfaced after exactly two months.

It was my routine to pick her up from the embassy after each such hiatus. "A government order for government official's daughter".

One mystical summer morning we were on the outskirts of Delhi, returning to the city. She made me stop the car. Maya got out with her backpack and said something confounding. "Prashant, I need to leave right now. There are things which I cannot explain. Certainly not now. Just know this. If I enter Delhi, I may have to go back home. That I don't want to do."

"Unexplained but most definitely not intentional, I leave you with the hope that you will receive a phone call either from me or about me. Bye for now, but know that not all questions will go unanswered."

I did receive a call, almost three years later. It wasn't from Maya.

Next I remember myself sitting in a bus going towards the hills.

I had followed my addled brain to discover that Maya was the daughter of a senior Mossad operative. Her father was sent places on secret missions. Being the only relative alive, Maya also lived a secret and detached existence. She visited the embassy often to talk to her Dad. Never in person. For security reasons she also stayed in close observation of the authorities.

Like a hibernating polar bear she came out to live and thrive like any other free soul. She was allowed to live normally with spells of 'abnormality'. India was her sanity, embassy life were her episodes of insanity.

Just like a person with seizures, chemo or depression.

Only in Maya's case, death was never foretold, forecast or forebode.

She had drifted into a hippy existence in the Parvati Valley, abnormal to most, yet normal compared to her other life. She had died, poisoned. Was it the enemy, her caretakers, herself? Who knows!

I gave up guesswork months ago. Not because I didn't care, I still do, but it is no longer important in the larger sense.

What mattered was - her undoing was none other but... ME. Partly or I do think so. Apparently, she had been warned of this proximity to me or the 'commoner's world' through me. The final instruction to that effect, in front of me, was to leave right as soon as the call ended, that day, on that journey back to Delhi.

As she had asked in a note that I be handed over all her belongings.

That was all that I gathered from her embassy.

I was not so shocked when I learnt that Maya's Kasol home, her purchases, were all done in my name. She had lived as my friend, sister, girlfriend, wife at various times. But this was not important. Now.

I was her every connection to the believable world and yet never connected to her unbelievable world.

There is a weird collection of things in my house. For that, friends and family visiting me (after initial days of curiosity) laugh, ridicule and mock me. So much that I would have cried or hit back, if there had once been a world with no Maya in it.

Her belongings was my consolation prize for associating with a girl I met by chance up in the clouds over the Caspian in front of the air loo on that flight back home.

Not Water, as she had explained, but Maya - the Illusion.

So, I just... !

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Prashant's Solace

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