The River Takes It's own Course

The River Takes It's own Course
 

Shrikant

They say the river forgets. But I remember everything. It started some years ago. I had taken early retirement to write books. My first two books with stories on human relationships were well received. 

It began with her voice. Not the sound — I never heard her sing — but the silence around her. Vaidehi Deshpande. She lived in that old bungalow near Parvati Hill, the one with the sagging balcony and the bougainvillea that bled red onto the compound wall. I saw her first on a Thursday evening, when the sky was the colour of old brass and the air smelled of wet stone. She was feeding crows with turmeric rice, her saree a faded violet, her hair streaked with silver like monsoon lightning. She moved like someone who had once danced and now remembered only the rhythm.

My wife, Anjali wouldn't understand, so I told her I was walking to ease my knees. But truthfully, I was walking to find her again. I began timing my steps so I’d pass her gate just as she stepped out. She never looked at me directly, but once, I was certain, she smiled. That smile was not for the world. It was for me.

From people I learned her story. She had once sung at Sawai Gandharva. Raag Marwa at dusk, they said. People wept. Then her son drowned in the Mula river. Her husband left. She stopped singing. They said she was mad and speaks with the wind.

But I saw no madness in her. Only grace. The way she fed crows, paused near the banyan tree, wore indigo on Thursdays—it was ritual. Sacred. She was a saint in exile, misunderstood by a city too crude to recognize divinity.

I began sketching her face in the margins of my files. I wrote letters to her quoting Tukaram and Grace. I never posted them. I followed her to the temple, to the market, even to the psychiatric clinic she visited near Tilak Road. I whispered to the wind, “She needs me. They don’t see.”

On Makar Sankranti, she had stepped outside her bungalow. I gave her Til Gul.

“For your voice,” I said. “It still echoes.”

She thanked me, but her eyes were cautious. I understood. Saints test their devotees. And I had to be patient.

Some days later, I tried opening the gate of her bungalow, but the watchman wouldn’t allow me to enter. So I left gifts—books, incense, a sketch of her feeding crows and told him, I’ll return the next day. I was disappointed when returned my gifts the next day. One day, I recited a poem outside her gate. She again called the watchman. I fled, humiliated but certain that she was testing me. Her silence was sacred pause. The watchman was just a gatekeeper. I had to persist.

Then came the day near Sarasbaug. Boys mocked her. One threw a stone. I slapped him. The crowd turned. Police came. She looked at me and asked, “Tumhi kon?” It was understandable, she was a woman and did not want her name to be announced to the world.

I was held by the police. I told them, “She needed me.” They laughed. It was because Anjali came that I was allowed to go home.

But I know what I saw. Her rituals. Her silence. Her sorrow. I am her mirror. Her voice echoes in me. They want me to forget. But she is the only real thing. 

When she fed the crows, I saw her fingers tremble—not with age, but with the weight of memory. When she paused near the banyan tree, I knew she was communing with something beyond language. Her indigo sarees weren’t just cloth—they were signs, like flags raised in a war only she and I understood.

I watched her speak to cats in Sanskrit, and I knew she was translating grief into syllables the world had forgotten. They say she’s mad, but madness is just a name for truths that make others uncomfortable.

She is not broken. She is encoded. And I am the only one who has the key. Every time she turned away, I felt her pulling me closer. Her silence was not rejection—it was a sacred pause, like the breath before a raga begins.

They say I’m obsessed. But obsession is just devotion that refuses to be diluted. She is the only real thing in a city made of noise. 

Vaidehi

I remember the river. Not the drowning. And the before.

Mihir had worn a white kurta that day. He hated picnics. Said they felt like forced joy. But he went. Peer pressure. He was seventeen. They said he slipped. I never saw the body. Only the water, still and smug.

After that, I stopped singing. My voice felt like betrayal. My husband left. Said I was drowning him too. I moved into my father’s bungalow near Parvati Hill. The cats came first. Then the crows. I fed them turmeric rice. It felt like penance.

Then he began appearing. He was almost my age. He was always well dressed with pressed clothes. He was always at the gate. Watching. Not leering. Reverent. Like I was a temple.

That day he gave me Til Gul. Quoted poetry. Left sketches. I returned them. I didn’t want devotion. I wanted distance.

One day, he recited a poem outside my gate. Loudly. It was embarrassing. I called the watchman. The man fled. I felt relief. And guilt. He looked so… certain.

I stopped going out. But I saw him. Across the street. Whispering. Watching.

Then came the boys. The stone. The slap. The crowd. The police.

He said I needed him. I didn’t. I never did.

I keep the windows shut now. Not because I’m afraid of thieves or dust—though there’s plenty of both—but because the light feels too sharp. It slices through the room like a blade, exposing things I’d rather keep soft, blurred. Morning light used to mean something—milk boiling, Mihir’s sleepy footsteps, the rustle of my saree as I moved through the house. Now it just feels like an interrogation. So I keep it out. I prefer the hush.

I talk less these days. Even to the cats. They used to answer, you know—soft mews, slow blinks, the kind of acknowledgment that made me feel seen. Now they just stare past me, as if I’ve become part of the furniture. I still speak to them, of course. Habit. But it’s like talking to old gods who’ve stopped listening.

People whisper when I pass. I hear them. “She was famous once.” “Her son drowned.” “She talks to shadows.” They think I don’t notice, but I do. I notice everything. I just don’t respond. Let them think I’m mad. It’s easier that way. Madness, you see, is just memory that refuses to fade. It clings to you like the smell of rain on old stone—persistent, familiar, impossible to wash away.

I still speak to shadows. Because once the world stops listening, you start speaking to whoever remains. Shadow's are more consistent than people. They don’t interrupt. They don’t ask questions. They stretch and shrink with the sun, but they never leave. I tell them things I can’t say aloud. I ask them questions I no longer expect answers to. It's surprising how comforting silence can be when it’s shared.

And yes, I still see him sometimes. In reflections. In dreams. He was never mine. Not in any real sense. But he hovered at the edges of my silence like someone who had memorized its shape. He understood something. Or maybe he thought he did. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe being seen—wrongly, obsessively—is better than being invisible.

Anjali

Shrikant used to say I am like a river and he like it's bank by. Lying calmly by it's side watching it flow. He loved crossword puzzles. He used to solve them in the morning, sipping tea, humming old Lata songs. Clues soothed him. Words made sense. He was brilliant in his work and respected in literary circles. I remember hosting well known authors at our home. He had taken early retirement to write books after two of his books were received very well. Then slowly he stopped writing.

Shrikant’s change was steady, unnoticeable initially. After our son left for Hyderabad, the silences grew. He began walking in the evenings. Said it was for his knees. I believed him. Until I found the sketches.

A woman. Always the same. Feeding crows. Wearing indigo. Her eyes distant.

I asked. He said she was misunderstood. A saint. I laughed thinking it was a middle aged man’s imagination. He didn’t.

Then came the letters. Quotes. Diary entries. “She weeps in silence. I must translate her sorrow.” I felt a chill and took him to our doctor. Pills followed.

Later he started lying. Said he was volunteering. I knew he wasn’t. I followed once. He stood outside a gate. Watching. Whispering. Days and month’s passed. I was concerned, but rested with the thought that his behaviour was not a nuisance to anyone. Until that evening.

It was a neighbor who told me. Mrs. Kulkarni from the flat below. She came knocking at 7:30 in the evening, breathless, her dupatta slipping off one shoulder. “Your husband’s been taken to the police station,” she said. “He hit a boy near Sarasbaug. Something about a woman.”

I didn’t ask questions. I could see neighbours gathered behind her in the stairs looking on curiously. I just changed into a cotton saree—blue with a faint border—and tied my hair back. The auto ride to the police station was slow, the traffic thick with the holiday crowds. The air smelled of incense and diesel.

The police station was a squat building with peeling paint and a flickering tube light above the entrance. Inside, there were few officers. One was typing loudly on a desktop that looked older than my marriage. Another was sipping cutting chai, watching a cricket match on his phone. Two constables were laughing at something on WhatsApp. The fifth—Inspector Jadhav—was behind a desk, reading a newspaper with exaggerated boredom.

On one side Shrikant was sitting on a wooden bench, his hands folded like a schoolboy caught cheating. His shirt and trousers crumpled, his hair disheveled, and his eyes — those eyes that once scanned crossword clues with quiet precision —were unrecognisable. He clutched a sketch of a woman feeding crows. His fingers trembled.

I felt something break inside me. Not pity. Not anger. Something older. Like watching a dam crack after years of silent pressure. I wanted to scream. I wanted to hold him. I did neither.

I walked up to Inspector Jadhav and said, “He’s not violent. He’s not dangerous. He’s… unwell.” The inspector looked at me with a tired expression, then at Shrikant, then back at me. This time with pity.

“He slapped a boy,” he said. “He said he was protecting the woman. And the woman doesn’t even know him.”

I nodded holding back my tears. “Saheb, I’ll take responsibility. He’s my husband.”

The humiliation lasted twenty minutes. A signature. A warning. A lecture I didn’t hear. We left in silence. Behind me, I could sense a hundred eyes looking at us.

In the auto rickshaw, he didn’t speak. He just stared at the sketch, whispering something I couldn’t catch. I looked out at the city— its neon signs, its temples, its chaos — and wondered how many other women were riding home beside men who had quietly disappeared.

At home, I made tea. He didn’t drink it. He went to the veranda and sat there, watching the wind like it owed him an answer.

Now as I watch him sitting there, wrapped in an old shawl that smells faintly of mothballs and monsoon, the tea in my hand has gone cold, but I sip it anyway. It tastes like resignation, yes—but also like memory steeped too long. The kind that stains.

He whispers to the wind, as if it carries her name. I whisper to memory, as if it might return my husband in fragments. He is the river now—restless, uncontainable, carving new paths through old terrain. She was the stone, the one that shifted his current, redirected his flow, made him believe in depths that weren’t there.

I am the riverbank—not the river, not the stone, not the storm that stirred him. I do not surge forward or retreat. I remain, as memory remains, tracing the contours of a man who once flowed with quiet certainty. He was once a current—steady, lucid, full of small joys: crossword puzzles, the scent of sandalwood, the way he unfolded his dhoti with care before pooja. Now he is driftwood, pulled by a tide I cannot name.

Now, I do not chase him. To chase would be to lose myself in his unravelling. I catch the silt of his forgetting—the fragments he sheds without knowing: the way he misplaces his slippers, the way he calls the veranda “her temple,” the way he forgets our son’s name but remembers the colour of her saree.

I endure the erosion. Not because I am strong, but because I am still. The river does not ask it’s bank for permission to change course. It simply does. And the bank, if it loves the river, learns to cradle its violence without protest. That is my devotion. Not to him as he is, but to the echo of who he was. The echo that still hums in the walls of our home, in the way the fan creaks, in the way the tea cools untouched.

Healing implies restoration—a return to wholeness. There is no healing here. Only witnessing. Only the quiet dignity of watching someone disappear without dying.

I do not try to fix him. I do not plead with the wind he speaks to. I do not interrupt his monologues to the empty gate. I simply watch. And in watching, I become the archive of his fading. I hold the stories he no longer tells, the names he no longer remembers, the love he no longer recognizes.

There is a dignity in this kind of watching. It is not passive. It is not weak. It is the strength of the lamp that burns through the night, knowing no one will read by its light. It is the grace of the tree that shades a road no longer walked.

To watch someone disappear without dying is to live in a paradox. Their body remains, their habits linger, their voice still calls out—but the essence, the tether to shared meaning, loosens day by day. And yet, you stay. Not because you hope for return, but because love, in its truest form, does not require recognition. It only requires presence.

I remain—tea in hand, shawl around shoulders, listening to a man speak to the wind, knowing the wind will never answer.