Winner all the way...

Through the rush of hysteric relatives, reporters, photographers, policemen and their awful, unfriendly dogs sniffing the place with a frenzied ferocity, I fought my way, to catch a final glimpse of her. They were taking her away....... "Joyee... that's the Bengali word for Winner. That's me... a winner all the time!" I suddenly recalled the first time I met her in the corridoors of my first year at college. I felt as though I was affronted by an indomitable beam of sunlight. Her self-control, her grit and confidence almost blinded me. She was definitely a winner and made sure everyone recognised her that way. We did. There was something so intimidating about her and although she appeared interesting, I always found her very distant....very unreal, very far away from the world we inhabited. I loved her, loved the way she whistled boisterously, the way she threw all care to the winds, loved the way she showed me her tongue...loved the child in the woman, the woman in the child. Many did. There was something about her easy, careless attitude that made so many men want to love her. There was a fierce, forbidden charm about her out-of-place world view. Everyone viewed her as an exotic creature....just like every distant thing appears. And there was something so awfully sad about those glittering, large eyes of hers. Anyone who had ever been with her had always found her laughing,always chirping,always radiating sunshine....she was a winner.....she was sunshine!

They were taking her away..... I could finally succeed in pushing through the crowd of wailing relatives, her shocked mother, a man who claimed to have loved her very much, some photographers looking for juicy gossip...pushed through them all. Not that it really mattered...or perhaps it did. I wanted a final glimpse of the winner...on her final journey..... And there she lay...wrapped in an immaculate white shroud. She was asleep, forever now. I could not bring myself to utter the word' dead'. A winner never dies! There was an inexplicable calm on her face...she had never looked so beautiful. I almost wanted to kiss her alabaster cheeks. It was difficult to believe that she would never look at me with those large,sad eyes , laugh at my stupid jokes or crack one herself. It was difficult to imagine that she wouldn't go dancing again every Saturday night, get drunk and make people hate her. It was difficult to believe that she wouldn't enjoy their spite and let out a gleeful laughter. She was beyond everything now and I know that finally she was HOME....her home....somewhere she always wanted to be. She had shown me the horizon a long time back,saying,"There lies my home...I belong there...." She indeed belonged there. That is why I guess she was always so unloved, unwanted, misunderstood all her life and I knew that such a day was coming. I knew that she would take the first opportunity to go home... to where she belonged. And she finally did. Some reporter was tormenting her already tormented mother,"Madam, can u tell us why someone as established as Joyee Roy would commit suicide? She had almost reached the zenith of her success...why would... what is the cause...who... why...what.........." I lost his voice in the din. The man who claimed to love her was saying something to me...I couldn't understand. It must have been about trying to prevent this..trying to prevent her from leaving this world. What is the point? I thought... she was anyway not wanted here...by nobody...not even the people who brought her here. All who claimed to love her were only trying to capture what was exotic about her...they never really loved her. No one knew how she could be loved. Perhaps even I did not....even though I always thought I did. There was really no point trying to hold her back here. Wonder why her relatives were wailing so distastefully. I touched her face for the last time... it was cold,yet there was an amazing softness in her cheeks. They took her away....

Two days later, I received a parcel. Joyee left me something. A bunch of plastic chrysanthemums. With it a note which said: "Joyee never dies.... Joyee never runs away... Joyee never leaves her friends... She is still with you...always will......." The chrysanthemums never withered,they were not meant to. They never even lost their lustre and everytime I look to the horizon now at sundown, I see Joyee smiling at me from behind the clouds.... her large,sad eyes glittering as they always did. Only, now they were brighter !