It is a Sunday morning; overcast, windy and lazy. It’s just that type of the day when you’d curl up on your sofa, sit cross legged with a mug of coffee and stare into abyss. The sun comes and goes intermittently but that doesn’t change the mood I’m in. Mother has plans for the day and that means I’ve the day to myself. I am in no mood to play tennis today and I called my trainer to take the day off. The newspaper has nothing much to say except the wasteful basket of lies, facade and of course the ongoing world cup. I watched the match last night and celebrated the gumption of Indian cricket. That the fans were willing to pray for divine intervention to shift the course of the match in India’s favor was amusing but it showed how deeply entrenched and involved we are as a society. We don’t even spare the divine, if there’s something called divinity but that’s not the reason why I sat down to write today. After enjoying a brief sojourn into solitude, I asked Google to play some music so I can push myself over the ledge and take a leap. I’ve sky dived before and I know how that feels. From out of the blue, Google picked Beautiful Stranger as the first song I must listen to. And I said bring it on.

Falling in love with someone to me is like creating a hand-made envelope. My high school sweetheart would create these beautiful envelopes and send her hand written letters to me in them. And I would always be careful to preserve the envelopes as much as the letters because those envelopes meant more to me than the letters themselves. When we fall in love, the subconscious looks to build meaningful gestures to get closer to the loved one. I have always believed that what’s spoken is overrated. Life around the ones you love are built upon gestures. That lingering look in her eyes, the extra crease that adds to her smile when she sees you, the extra mug of tea you make when she would come home tired or the extra mug of hot chocolate she’d prepare on a Sunday morning when you’d like to be lost in your own world, these are some of the gestures that create life in a relationship. That’s my definition of a beautiful stranger. She’s my angel in disguise, someone who doesn’t let me down, doesn’t let me fall and keeps my spirits up to live another day as gently as I lived the past day. I use the word gently because I have not been gentle to myself in the past. I’ve paid a very high price for getting introspection into my life and it’s like a rare piece of art that I would preserve for as long as live.

After extinguishing my yearn for all the music I wanted to listen to this morning, I switched my attention to movies and the first movie that caught my attention was The Pursuit of Happyness. Autobiographies are sometimes overcooked but not this one. The portrayal of Chris Gardner as the beautiful stranger is riveting. I’ve probably watched the movie a dozen times before but every time I see it, there’s always something new I take away. The confidence with which he explains his paint ragged look at the time of his interview or the manner in which he holds his child close while he locks himself in a public wash room of the BART station speaks volumes of his resolve amidst desperate circumstances. Whether or not desperation wins you the day is debatable, however, to me, it is the purpose behind desperation that matters more. That Will Smith got into the skin of the character and understood what Chris Gardner stood for makes him a beautiful stranger too.

Once the movie ended, I recalled the beautiful stranger in my life. He now lives only in my memories. I see his face every day when I adorn his photo-frame with homegrown jasmine flowers. Growing up, he was my only friend. He was also a competition; strange as it sounds when you compete with your own father but that’s how we were. I challenged his creativity, strength and guidance at every step, which, he sometimes countered tactfully and sometimes admonished. And he would always worry how I would show up in life, knowing my stubbornness to yield to life situations.  Sometimes I wonder if that’s why he left early so he could be a messenger and have a say in how my life shapes from there on. I recall a quote from Maya Angelou that went something like this:

‘I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life’

Sometimes memories of someone are stronger than their physical presence. And that’s true of the beautiful stranger in my life.