He woke up from his bed at the middle of the night and looked at what he held in his hands with a look of utter incomprehension and horror. His wife lay by his side, sleeping peacefully and for a moment he wanted to shake her up into life and show her what he was holding in his hands. But first, he has to understand how it happened. It was probably his obsession with it that finally led to its downfall, quite literally. Had someone told him about it, he would have laughed at the suggestion, for its ridiculousness but now that it has happened to him, he was unwilling to see the funnier side of it. 

He took it in his hands, trembling with the fear of unknown, which for a large part of his life was very much known to him. He didn’t know what to do with it suddenly. He didn’t know if he loved it anymore. He missed it, once he was fully awake, when he was unable to indulge himself with it. A drop of tear started to well in his eye, as his wife knocked over the bathroom. He put it quickly in his pocket and acted as if nothing happened. 

“What were you doing in there, Love?” Her voice was as husky as when he heard it for the first time.

“Come back to bed. It’s 3 AM for Heaven’s sake.”

“You go to bed, Darling. I’ll sit here for a while.” He mumbled to himself.

“In the bathroom? Are you insane?”

She whispered her love into his ears along with a couple of words of admonition, before going back to the bed and he was left all alone to himself again. 

He made sure that she covered herself with the blanket, and then took it out from his pocket. It looked lifeless in his hands. He wanted to fix it, but he was scared of ruining it for life. It was a long agonizing night for him, which he spent entirely in the bathroom. He has to ensure that his wife does not look for it early in the morning, so once the clock struck six times, he came out, dressed himself quickly, planted a kiss on her forehead and started his car towards his family doctor.

The doctor heard him out and burst out laughing at the utter hilarity of the situation. He couldn’t blame the doctor, but he came to him for solutions. So, he shook him up violently and asked him for a solution. The doctor took a look at it again, trying to act sober, so as to not hurt his patient, but after a while he again burst into delirious laughter. He didn’t have a solution and told that he would refer to his books, consult his seniors and get back, and later suppressed his smile.

The wife observed a change in the evening, which he anticipated. She asked him what’s wrong with him and he had to tell her that he loved her, but he was not capable of loving her. She looked as if she was not sure who has gone crazy, her or him. The wife and husband spent the night again in bedroom and bathroom respectively. 

His obsession with safeguarding it was making him miserable and depressed and he stopped going home altogether, and sat looking at it all day and night long. Against, his own better judgment, he went to meet a certain Baba, his doctor recommended. He couldn’t believe that a doctor can advocate such silliness, but in view of the extra ordinarily unusual predicament, he found himself in, he chose to take a chance. 

Baba sat by a lake with a huge group of his followers, who all had a content look on their faces. The Baba listened his story out patiently with an annoyingly beatific smile and asked him to show it to him. When he took it out carefully from the protective container he carried it in, the Baba took it in his hands, examined it for a while, feigning a thought and threw it into the lake, and told him that he will now love with a renewed vigor and an eye for the Nirvana. He turned psychotic with rage and kicked the Baba, where it hurt the most but that did not erase the smile off his face. He jumped into the lake, as the Baba called after him to meet him again after a month. 

The water in the lake was cutting through his muscles with a fiercely cold determination, but he swam into it, with the determination of a man possessed to find his love. He got to the bottom of the lake, but was unable to find it exactly in the mountain of similar things. He had to be careful enough not to mistake it with others. The water was choking him and he gasped for breath and swam towards the shore. There was no sign of Baba.

He went back to his office, dejected having lost the most precious thing in his life. He looked at his desk where the divorce notice from his wife lay, mocking him for his efforts. He signed it without much thought. It seemed the best thing to do, when he was unable to bring himself to love. He sang paeans for it through the entire night. 

The doctor wanted to meet him and ask him what happened, but he didn’t want to meet anyone. It felt as if he lost the sense of purpose of his existence and the world has somehow conspired to make his life miserable. He quickly typed a letter of resignation, mailed it to his manager, threw away his mobile phone and checked himself into a dingy hotel where he spent the next month. 

When he finally came out of his room, he felt weak and exhausted with only one place on earth to go. Baba sat there all alone now, almost waiting for his arrival, and when he saw him, ordered him to go into the lake and find it. 

He jumped into the lake without much hope, but found it at the bottom of the lake. He took it in his hands, and saw it come back to life. He threw it into the lake again and swam up, where he saw other followers of the Baba coming in slowly. He joined them.

*** 
Written for Indispire Edition 41: Love. Weave a story.