Magic

They sat in the dark at 4 AM looking at the vast sea in-front of them. After an hour of playing the blame game, silence prevailed. The only sound that endured was that made by the waves hitting the shore and moving back as though attempting to make amends for the ‘mistake’.

This wasn’t the first event of silence that they had come upon. In 21 years of togetherness, they had encountered numerous moments of silence – holding hands and walking speechless along the Juhu beach, having candle light dinners on the ‘monthly’ anniversaries (the date Vishal asked her out), without exchange of a word. Silence occurred when Prerna was out working at the call centre in Sydney while Vishal would be turning sides on the double bed at midnight. The opportunity of Vishal’s career growth led them to shift to Sydney when Prerna could not manage to get a better job than an overnight call centre. It offering attractive remunerations was more of an incentive to take it up.

Today, they were engulfed in silence again. But this silence was different. It was an uneasy silence that happened face to face for the first time. None of the two wanted to break it, even though the noise of it breaking would’ve helped calm down the upheaval in their relationship.

It had been different when they met two decades ago. Although they used to work in adjacent cubicles in the office, these two fresh graduates, like the others in the company preferred to talk while staring at the desktop. Their friendship bloomed into love. They had come a long way from the tube-lighted cubicles of their office to the candle-light dinners on weekends to the moonlit evenings.

It was Day 5 of the realization that something had started disrupting the magic that had existed for almost two decades. The visit to the marriage counsellor did not help much. It worsened the situation by making them feel that both of them were mentally ill. They decided to sort it by themselves and reason why they had stuck with each other for so long when they weren’t happy with each other anymore.

Another hour of silence was broken by Prerna’s sweet voice singing “Every night in my dreams...” Vishal held his mobile with the flickering lights and chose not to turn off the alarm. This was the voice he still wanted to hear every morning before opening his eyes. She looked at his face, while a tear rolled down his right cheek. Her lips touched the tear without a sound. The first kiss that had brought them closer years ago managed to restore the magic yet again.