It was somewhere in December two years back, I was on the Chennai Mail second class reservation side lower berth .I took a gulp of coke , plugged in my ear phones and started reading some gossip from filmfare. It was ten minutes later that I noticed , there was a girl right in front of me .No, she was not the one with blue eyes and cascading hair and she didn’t have the looks to die for nor did she have those huge physical assets that can drive men crazy; She looked very ordinary and maybe that’s why i did not notice her all the while . Oscar Wilde had said “Indifference is the revenge that the world takes on mediocrities”. And yes she was reading, a book that had an elegantly enticing cover and read “ Sputnik Sweetheart”. I wondered what that could be , Sputnik was the Russian satellite , what has it to do with romance ? A completely metallic object that circles round the earth over a monotonous path, how can it ever be associated with a tumultuous and capricious affection like love I took a step forward , asked her name and introduced myself. I enquired about the book and what it dealt with? She said it’s a novel about complicated relationships. Then i asked what does a metallic thing like sputnik has anything to do with relationships. At this point she kept the book down and started staring at me for a while and it was freaking me out. It was like this innocuous question unleashed the quirky side of her. She suddenly asked "Have u ever been in love?" I said “Ya once!” She then asked “What happened?” I replied “It did not work out” She responded saying “ U were dumped right?!!!” I was offended by this question so I just smiled and said nothing. She followed up with an apology saying she did not mean to hurt , I said it’s fine I don’t mind. Then we were silent for the next half an hour or so .
She broke the silence saying “I never want to be in love!”. I asked “why?” She said “In love we are like satellites!!” I responded saying “Oh , ya please explain!” She smiled and replied “ Once in love our entire world stars revolving round that single person , and he or she defines our day and night, sometimes there is enough force to keep us in the orbit like the gravitational pull for the satellites and sometimes there isn’t. We are like these satellites and love from the other side is our gravity. If that is not adequate we shall be hurled along the tangent, devoured by some blackhole, looted of our identity and our own existence. I do not want to risk that so I don’t wanna be in love!”. I was impressed by this reply. She then added asking “What do u think went wrong with your relationship?” I said” I cannot say a specific reason, it’s something that keeps piling up over time and one day u are unable to ignore it, so u question it, when u already know that there won’t be any answers and that’s when you part ways to find a new person, build a new bond and seek answers for what went wrong with the previous one....” We were distracted by the train coming to a halt. She exclaimed “ I need to get down this is my stop” and started gathering things. I asked for her number she looked at me and said “See i think you were not listening to me i feel that I like u already, i liked u the moment u questioned the metallic and melodramatic side of sputnik , i do not wanna go any further , let’s just leave it here, let’s be strangers all over again....If possible find this book and read it you’ll understand more” I walked her to the door, she smiled again from the platform said bye and vanished.....
Today i read it and i know what she meant . Murakami says “It came to me then, that we are travelling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far they look like beautiful shooting stars but in reality they are nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together, maybe even open our hearts to each other. But it was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant, we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing”.............
