Towards Perfection

One afternoon, as I was lazily going t h r o u g h t h e newspapers, I saw the postman coming to me. He had a parcel for me. I signed and tookit.

It was from my old time friend, Shiva. It was so long since I heard anything about Shivnarayan; that was his full name. I gazed at the parcel in front of me and tried to guess what could be inside, must be something perfect...

Shiva was a man who sought perfection, or say he was always keen on the compromised parts that made things and persons less than ‘perfect’. He was immensely talented in finding errors
with almost anything and everything that he came across! He always tried to do things in a perfect way, and expected others to follow him by being perfect. He expected everything that came to him, to be perfect; because of this only I used to put a deliberate distance between us, for I knew that I could match everything but the ‘perfect’ search of Shiva. Still we remained friends, though not the very best.

I still remember how I first met him. We all were in first year. To escape hostelragging, all of us were put in a separate hostel, far from our senior batch hostels.All of us were new to each other and the place. Slowly everyone was getting closer, and was making friends, first the room-mate, then neighbours and so on.....

One day some of us were watching TV. It was an English movie; Shiva was sitting near me. As the movie started, he also started, talking of the ‘stupid things’ shown on movie and how far they were from truth, errors in screenplay and so on. I felt annoyed by his talk, but then ignored his talks, as everyone was doing. He was continuing despite our lack of attention.
I was glued on to the movie, but at some point he got me distracted. He was telling,
“see this is what they show in English movies. Think about the same things done in our movies, we’ll tell its all impossible; those flying fights, risky gun shots all are simply impossible. But now it is done by them, we clap for it! How stupid....”
I thought of all such stuff in our movies and then I knew he was pointing to the truth. Now I wondered if all his talks were really worth being heard. I had never listened to them before. I told him,
“ya, you are right! We won’t acept it here”.
He paused his talk on movies and turned to me, “see this is it, we all take time to admit truth. We never try to admit them outright....”.
Now it was my fault that I shared his thought a bit late, though I felt irritated I didn’t answer him. I went back to the movie and ignored his talk as before.

However, after that incident Shiva thought I too had some ‘sense’ and he could share his thoughts with me too. I think there were a handful of other guys in that list of people with ‘sense’, including my then room-mate Amith. So he used to come to our room once in a while. In college we all could hardly talk as seniors were all around us, waiting for a chance and we were getting the taste of what ragging was all about. Slowly the ‘ragging fear’ ended but by then it was the turn of the lecture classes to kill all our spare time at college.

One day, as I was sitting in my room Shiva came inside in a pensive mood. Without telling anything he laid on my bed, buried his face into my pillow and began to weep. Amith, my room-mate and I slowly walked to him and asked, what the problem was. He had no answer but increased his weeping. On insisting he told us what happened. In short: he had revealed his love to a girl of our batch, which she plainly turned down!. Amith tried to console him,
“Shiva, it is ok. You leave it now. There is always, there must be some one for everyone....”.

He raised his face, wiped away the tears and replied, “No, I am not sad for the reason you think. I feel sorry for myself; for thinking her a ‘perfect girl’, at least for a while. If she can’t see my heart full of care, she is not perfect; she can’t be!”
As we continued to tell him to forget all these stuff, he told in a firm voice,
“I’ll show her who I am. I’ll search out a perfect girl and walk in front of her along with that girl. Then she’ll come to know what she had missed!”
“Man, that’s fighting spirit, come on!” Amith cheered Shiva as he walked out of our room.
“Bit different one, right?” As I asked Amith replied, “No, just showing that he’s not hurt, that’s all.”
Hardly a week after that, as we were standing on the corridor, we saw Shiva walking across with a bunch of roses.

He was smiling. He told us, “I found her! See these all are from her!” He waved the roses and a card at us as he went.
I looked at Amith and he told, “ya, definitely a different one, you are right.
I change my opinion!”
But that change of opinion was not to be the final one. The very next day evening Shiva came to talk with us.
This time he looked upset and told us outright, “She’s also not that good!”
Who else?, his new girl friend!
As we were about to ask he told, “she’s leaving all those love from her family and parents just for mine. That’s not right. She’s hurting many. So she’s not really that good at heart!”
“So?” I asked. “So what?” I told her that I’m leaving her. See I’ve been fooled twice by these girls. There seem to be no perfect girl.” He stopped and looked at us for a moment.
I hoped, he was going to ask, “How’s my joke?”
But no, he was serious. He sighed and left our room.

Amith and I looked at each other in disbelief. Now Amith corrected his change in opinion
“He’s different. Not a bit, but entirely different!”
Though we downplayed the incident and kept it away from most of our batch mates, all were slowly making out his differences. As he walked into our rooms we all pretended to be too busy for him. Though, at times we felt it was wrong, we didn’t have a better solution to keep away from all these troubles. Still he used to talk to all of us and we tried to stop those talks before he started showing us the ‘problems’, or ways to become perfect. All those who tried to talk and change his attitude fell out from his list of people with ‘sense’; but still was kept in list of friends. Soon Amith and I had lost our places in the list of people with ‘sense’. He hardly came to us after that.

One day we heard that Shiva had decided to leave the course. He was packing his things and then he told us in a tone of advice, “see this course is not a complete one. We learn only here and there. It is very hard to adjust with this. I’ll think and join a good course later on.”

We didn’t tell anything as we knew that he won’t listen to us. He used to keep contact with us after that also. But later as all our numbers changed many times and as we hardly informed him about it our contact was lost except for his greeting cards that came to a few of us, including me and Amith, once in a while. I never replied him as by then I had lost his address.

Now this is a parcel. I untied it and saw what was inside. Inside was a shell. We used to buy shells for our friends, from the beaches, back in college days. I took out the shell, my name was engraved on it. Now I knew that Shiva had been to our old places, where we all friends roamed a thousand times. He used to tell then, “The protection given to the organism by nature, its shell, is the cause of its kill at the hands of humans, strange!” We used to murmur,
“but not stranger than you!”

There was a letter also, inside the parcel. It read,

“Dear friend,
I know you’ll be amazed to hear from me.
Now I am at the tip of our country, where we all once spent great times together. Of late I have come across something strange, the world out here is not perfect. But still stranger, thing is that I find that even I lack perfection. I have always renounced things which were not exactly the very best. Now that I have found myself not exactly the way I expected me to be, I find no point in being myself.
The world out here is imperfect but somewhere it must be perfect....
Beyond the sky above or beneath the ocean that lies in front of me, the world must be perfect.... There I must also be perfect. I will be! I go in search of it, towards perfection....
Wish me luck.
With love,
Shiva”

I was shocked! I didn’t know what to do. Then I began searching all those obituary columns of newspapers. I searched in vain. No news of such a man was anywhere in the papers. I went and phoned Amith. He told that he too had got a similar parcel, like many others. He had checked out with police. Shiva is recorded as only a man missing case, so far. He again told me,
“see if it was done by Shiva, then it’ll remain a perfect ‘man missing’, for ever.” I cut the phone and stared at those words,
“towards perfection......”.