Short Story #006: Sol

Sol

I set out for Kodaikanal on Friday. The morning was a hot bright one.

The drive over the plains was tiring and when the Western Ghats drew near I felt a deep sense of release. It would be over soon.

The trip had to be made. To become the owner of my father’s sea-facing Mumbai apartment I had to endure the two hour journey up hill and back.

The apartment belonged to my late father. The old geezer had, in his will, made it out in Lizzie’s name and died without bothering to change it. It just so happened that I was lucky that Lizzie had graciously relinquished her rights to the apartment. So that’s what made the trip necessary. I was going to Kodaikanal to get the necessary documents in order.

Lizzie is my ex-wife.

I haven’t seen Lizzie in about three years. We divorced in twenty seventeen after a marriage of nearly five and a half years. Our marriage had been a disaster from the start. Both of us regretted jumping the gun and it was Lizzie who filed for divorce first.

In all these three years I have never once stopped loving my ex-wife and I hoped that our impending meeting might get her to see our relationship in a new light.

Lizzie had moved to K. to teach music at a school there.

On the way up I admired the dark forests surrounding the winding road. The sun was pouring down on the valley and the emerald green forest cover sparkled in the morning mist.

A shaft of sunlight broke through the grey cover of clouds. Arrested by its boldness in piercing through the thick swathe, a vision I’d had months ago came to my mind.

My vision had a similar display of light. A brazen ray of sunlight broke through storm clouds to strike the crown of the wisest man in the world.

The man was Solomon, my namesake and favourite philosopher. He had just hit upon his conclusion that everything in the world was meaningless and I caught his gloomy gaze. He looked up from his contemplation and laughed a bitter hollow laugh. It was a moment of solidarity.

Warm sunlight was pouring down a boulevard in his grand palace…

I saw Solomon, last king over a united Israel, sitting on his kingly throne. He was a tall, dark-haired, and handsome young man. Dressed in purple robes with a golden crown on his head, he got up and walked down a long colonnade.

At the end of the colonnade there were steps leading to a pool. Then Solomon, King of Israel, stepped into the pool.

Feet went in first, legs, torso, shoulders, chin and face followed, until the crown of his head was submerged.

When he came up for air I heard him whisper, “All is vanity…”

Then I, Sol echoed him. “Meaningless meaningless…”

*

The only book in the Bible I’ve read with any relish is Solomon’s Ecclesiastes. The book answers a profound question everyone eventually asks in their lifetime: what are we all doing here on this planet?

The wisest man who ever lived, King Solomon, came to the conclusion that it was all meaningless. Hard work, effort, striving, marrying, begetting, all came to the same sad dismal end—Death. There was no escaping Death, and that made the sum of human existence meaningless.

At the end of it all if man is turned to dust, what good is it for him to have laboured through life?

While still at college I too had come to the same conclusion. I saw the world as inherently meaningless, yet I lived hoping to snatch some moments of significance that might reverse my conclusion.

I drove up the Old Observatory Road to Lizzie’s school. She said she would be waiting for me at the gate.

I put my thoughts aside for a while, I was excited to meet Lizzie again and i wanted my first glimpse of her after a gap of three years to be untampered by serious thinking.

When I reached, I spotted her right away in her yellow summer frock. She waved at me and came near. I rolled down the car window.

“Hi,” she said and immediately her familiar scent washed over me.

“It’s lovely to see you,” I replied truthfully.

Lizzie had lost none of her old charm. Her face has stayed exactly the same as if it had been carved into a rock. She had cut her hair in a new style which looked very fetching.

“How have you been, Sol? It’s so nice to see you!” she beamed at me.

“Hop in,” I said.

“All right.” And she opened the car door and got in.

”Is school over?” I asked when she is seated comfortably next to me.

“Yes,” she said, “let’s go to my house and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

I agreed to her suggestion. Lizzie happily directed me to her house cheerily supplying me with information of what she’d been up to since our last meeting. I felt she was happy to see me as one would be happy to see an old friend or acquaintance. The thought that once we were lovers was as far back in her mind as it was foremost in mine.

“I’m sorry your father forgot to change his will,” she said, “It puts you in a bother to come all this way, doesn’t it?”

“Oh the old man didn’t forget,” I hastened to correct, “He positively did it on purpose. To teach me a lesson, I think, on letting a girl like you get away.”

Lizzie threw her head back and laughed. I remember this laugh. There is the slightest hint of mockery mingled in with the mirth. She seems to agree with my father that I’m an idiot to have let her go.

“You’re very considerate to let me have it, Lizzie.”

“Oh well,” she said with a sigh as if to say why should she be holding onto something that isn’t even legitimately hers? I take that to mean that Lizzie has well and truly purged me from her system. It’s with a dash of strong pain that I can face her again.

We reached her house and I parked my car outside.

Her house was a small two room affair. Everything was arranged in a way that suggested that this was a home for one and the single person was very keen to keep it that way.

I waited at the dining table while Lizzie prepared tea at the kitchenette.

“Aren’t you lonesome here?” I asked. Kodaikanal is a small town. It survives mainly off the tourists. What I really wanted to know is if Lizzie is seeing someone.  

“Not really. I have a set of friends and the children from the school keep me occupied. Some kids come to learn the piano and guitar, otherwise I’m mostly free. On my days off I help out with the music at church. I go walking. There are a lot of pleasant views to be had here. What about you?”

I’ve been very lonely without Lizzie but I don’t tell her that.

“I get along. Have some friends from work. Don’t have much time to kill, not with my job.”

She nodded. It was one of her complaints during our time of marriage.

“Where are the papers?” she asked abruptly, “I’ll sign them for you.”  

I gave her the folder and she went through the papers while I sipped her warm tea. She’s made it the way she likes—with less sugar.

“Done,” she said when she was finished with the signing and I’m surprised that it hasn’t even taken her five minutes.

“Already?”

“Yes, already. You’re not in a hurry to get back are you? Do you want to take a walk down to Bryant Park? It’s all the attraction we’ve got here.”

This was an invitation and I looked into Lizzie’s eyes. I am disappointed to find that there is nothing but an offer of honest friendship in them.

“No,” I said, “I’m not in a hurry to get back.”

So after tea Lizzie and I walked down to Bryant Park.

I told her about my vision of Solomon and asked for her input.

“You mean life has no meaning and all of this struggling to live is in vain? What a Godless thought! It might lead you to lose respect for yourself. It will cause you to disvalue everything in life. And the irony is you found this Godless thought elaborated in the Bible,” she said. Then later she added, “I know an intellectual like you would love to jump on the absurdist bandwagon and write off any meaning artists like me try to find, but really Sol, I thought you’d have better sense.”

Better sense? My ex-wife held an opinion different from mine. I wonder how it is that she could be so intellectually naïve.

“I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon, Lizzie,” I said quite seriously. “Life really is meaningless and all intellectual inquiry no matter how superior will result in a dead end, because there’s no escaping Death with a capital D. There is no implicit meaning hidden in life! Do you know what it is? What is it? Tell me!”

Lizzie smiled at me. Her eyebrows arched in a manner I associate with a mother telling off her naughty little child. “And yet we breed, eat, struggle, strive, persevere, hope, push on as if it’s but our second nature, rejoice at all the little things, even though we die? We marry out of our free wills and create new life. What will you say—Life is a capitalist scheme initiated by Death, since Death is, according to you, the biggest gainer?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the allusion of Death as a podgy capitalist. “No. Life can be hardly called a capitalist scheme initiated by Death…”

“Sol,” said Lizzie gently, “Lovers don’t look for meaning.”

I was struck dumb by this seemingly innocuous observation.

“They are the meaning. What meaning can lovers find except in simply being?”

It took a while for the hue of her words to colour my understanding.

When we were younger and I used to get burdened by my thoughts, Lizzie was the one I used to go see to find some relief and as soon as my eyes clapped on her, all my questions evaporated as quickly as they had come. Lizzie was the light. Her face, her laugh, her thoughts, her look of welcome, they were enough to dispel the gloom which inevitably came over me. Being with her made so much sense, I forgot to question it.

But then even Lizzie’s love let me down. That’s when I stopped believing in the curative power of Love.

“How come it never worked out for us, Lizzie?”

She sighed and shrugged. “We were unlucky. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It probably exists for you with someone else, just as it exists for me with someone else.”

“You can’t disbelieve the power of Love just because you haven’t found it,” she mumbled, and I could tell that Lizzie too felt let down by the hope ‘true love’ offers this world.

We reached Bryant Park.

*

“Rather than the Ecclesiastes, why not look to the Song of Songs?” Lizzie asked.

 “The Song of Songs?”

“You should’ve progressed further in your reading of Solomon and read the Song of Songs. It describes the fulfilment the Lover finds with his Beloved. You can find that kind of fulfilment. It’s all the hope we have.”

I’d forgotten Solomon ever wrote that little gem of a love poem concealed in the Bible.

“A Lover who asks no questions because simply being with His beloved is His goal…?”

“It happens to be my favourite book in the Bible, why not convert to my opinion?”

I laughed. I’d been outsmarted by Lizzie. The poem describes Solomon and a Shulamite woman in love. It’s surprising that the same man who wrote the bleak analysis of Ecclesiastes also wrote the vivid pulsating love poem of the Songs of Songs. Lizzie has opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking.

“Lizzie,” I asked, “why can’t we get back together?”

“Sol,” she said and paused, “I’m sorry.”

I looked in those lovely eyes for a while. The whole of spring and summer seemed to shine through them. How could someone so beautiful and tender strike such a crushing blow?

“I know that,” I said truthfully. Lizzie is the kind of soul who loathes causing hurt but when the disagreeable thing needs to be said, she doesn’t shy away from it.

“What am I supposed to do Lizzie? You offer me the solution yet you won’t be part of the answer.”

My ex-wife stopped walking to answer me.

“It isn’t love if it breaks up. We haven’t got that between us, the love of Solomon and his Shulamite, ours is a broken down fence, a tower that has crumbled. Why do you want to go about rebuilding it when the foundation can’t hold it up?”

“I’m lonely without you Lizzie. And I’m afraid of being lonely much longer.”

She looked at me and said, “Your father was right about you. You only look out for yourself.”

*

On the drive back home I pondered over my ex-wife’s words. Her words cut to my very soul. Was I selfish to want Lizzie simply to cover up this gaping hole of loneliness?

Yes, I admit I was.

I think back to the joy Solomon and the Shulamite woman experienced in each other. They were united by bonds of mutual love, a love so beautiful it made redundant all the questions of the world. And that is what I’ve found is at the foundation of the world—the love of a man for a woman and the reciprocal love of a woman for a man.

The setting sun lights up for a moment the sky in shades of pink.

I have another vision.

This time it is of another king.

Heavenly light pours down on Him at His baptism. The dove lands on His head and God speaks. He has come to find His Bride and love her with an everlasting love. A love which will never end in meaningless frenzy.