In search of Maya

Then came the third call. Maya, said the voice. Only, it did not soundlike her. Cousin don’t play around, I warned and sighed: where was she, didn’t she have any pity, keeping a guy on the short hook of a line like this? Especially, a guy like me — ungirlfriendly. Meaning: (adj.) someone who does not have a girlfriend. (Derogatory use — a person who is unfriendly to women or vice-versa.) So, I turned to my friends. Look, guys, I said, find me a girlfriend. They smiled. I turned to my relatives. Look, respected guys, I said, find me a girlfriend. They smiled.

The only option was an imaginary girlfriend. I was not alone in this. Plato did something like that. Forced to supply through the imagination something that was lacking in reality, he made his own eternal world, immune to decay, the marauding spoliation of time, but denied the right to birth.

Defined in terms of reality and appearance, the oldest philosophical riddle, ridiculing the world that is as false, chameleon-like and untrustworthy and capping imagination with the crown of truth, Plato, came out of his cave toscorn the world of shadows and light up the world of ideas — finally, his own ideas.

Why couldn’t I do the same? Is a farmer who has a field denied the right to dream up a crop? Is a doctor not allowed to think he can cure if he has pill and scalpel ready to hand? Can’t a flower in a desert be hit by sun-stroke and bedazzled, bloom?

Rhetoric, yes. But isn’t hope too a violation of reality, the imprisoning rhetoric, the systematic puking by society; of the conditions that time sets, of death itself? For if there is no hope of something that lasts beyond life — deeds or dreams — why live? End, cessate, drop out. So, as I said, I decided to make up a girlfriend. I knew the physical attributes this girl had to have. And since I am so liberal, I let the girl be liberally endowed — a two-dimensional extravaganza. Yet, how was I to midwife this girl? But, just when I was stuck with the problem, the phone rang. Will you come, said the voice, at that dash-dash bookshop near the dash-dash street. Ye…wait aminute, I said, how will I recognise you? I will be wearing a red shirt. And what happens if there are other girls around wearing red shirts. Don’t worry, she cooed.

I took the bus. I never saw so many girls wearing red shirts in an hour as I did that day. And each time I thought, she could be Maya. But there was no Maya, just my cousins outside the bookshop. We laughed, had an ice-cream and agreed I was a fool. It didn’t really matter. A dream is bound to turn out to be false at all times but one. And yet it is worth all the diseases it brings — lunacy, megalomania, addled brains, atrophic hearts. For the pursuit of sanity or of peace lies in not sleeping over one.