Yeats

* If you are not going to read it full, dont even start, I mean it *

On monday evening, a wooden bagghi carried by horses stopped in front of that white mansion, and out she stepped, to their new home. She was awestruck. Oh what a home it was !  In the coming week she indulged herself with books and solitude in her room. Her cousin Anuradha left her to herself. Anuradha had known her for long enough to know when she wants to be left alone. 

On friday evening, the same week, when Anuradha answered the hesitant knocking on her door, the last thing she expected to see was an endearing white lad on her threshold, his hands behind his back. He introduced himself as their neighbour, and explained that a kite that he had been flying high into the sky was now, embarrassingly enough, stuck in the branches of a tree in their backyard. Could he, he requested, rescue it from their balcony. Anuradha smiled, and hollered for her cousin. 

Upstairs, in her room, as she layed sprawled out on her back in the bed, the depth of her concentration in a play by Ibsen shattered like pottery shards: Now what? Is there no solitude in this world ? She rose from her bed, stuck her thumb in between the pages of the Ibsen and arrived down the whorled stairwell. That was the first time he saw her, an Ibsen drama betwixt her hands, arms all bony and head at an annoyed tilt.

When explained everything by Anuradha, she reluctantly took him up, wishing for him to vanish away. 

"Wont stay a minute", he said to her hesitantly, and she replied at once "Are you Irish ?".

"Only when asked." He chuckled shyly.

Although she had been keen to write him off as only another pedestrian kite-flyer, she was, admittedly, quite riveted by his looks.Was it his tanned skin, its divinely polished brown lustre? Or the imminent muscles in his arms, such as one might associate with a gondolier? Those blue eyes, dreamy pools to wade inside, to never emerge out of. She leaned forward and corrected that errant slip of his dusty hair;her touch unleashed a 

tremble down his back.

"There!" She said with a smug smile. "I've restored you into a human being."

They talked their for sometime, he told her he was eighteen, and when he asked her her age, she frowned "Me?I'm timeless, I am the beedi smoking beloved of the art world. The darling of darlings, and soon I will be in paris, after ofcourse winning the whole world"  and she laughed at her own histrionics, and confessed she is just sixteen.

Then she asked him pointing to a little cottage,
"That is where you live !?" 
"Yes, with my mother.",he replied hesitantly

"What does she do ?"

"She is... She is... " Now he was really stumped.

"She is quiet after my father left. Very quiet." 

"Ah!"

"She is quiet and sad and broken," he blurted."Actually it runs in her family.Her mother had it and her mother had it."

"What're you on about?" she asked with a puzzled look on her face.

"Cian incurabilis "

She thought over the phrase, translating it, Incurable sadness, and asked him, "Do enlighten me my darling,  what is Cian incurabilis?" teasing him.

"A condition of the heart.They say the heart can break.That someone can dent it, or gouge it.And then, it is never the same. Some of us recover.And some, like my mother,never do.But that is what I want to change.",he said with a zest flashed into his blue, blue eyes. "I'll train to be a doctor and then I'll study Cian incurabilis .... and then.. I'll find a cure for it."

She started laughing at him, she fell into her bed, and continued to laugh. She didnt try to stop herself from laughing at him in his face. He kept looking at her. Silent. After few minutes, she stopped. She looked at him, and her laugh vanished, he was standing their, just looking at her- her laughing at him.

"What do you do here all day ?"  He asked her, in a different tone this time.

"I read. I think, and Miss God put me down here to bring joy and sunshine into the lives of millions, and I paint, So i may become the artist I am." she tried to smile while saying this.

"Can i swing by sometime ?" he asked hesitantly again. 

She asked him whether he would get her books, he put his hand on his heart and promised he would. 

"And do you know any verses of Yeats?" She asked

"No, only sissies knew poems, right ?

"You vulgar, schoolboy, she ticked him off." The warmth on her face made way for frustration. "Let me be, then, and no, I'll never let you in here."

How could he not know Yeats, she thought, and it that were the case,why was he even alive ?

Knowing there is nothing left ot say, he turned and left for home. Now it was certain he would never get to be with her.Just then at the door, he remembered the few lines he had heard once.

Wine come in at the mouth,

And love comes in at the eye

She swung around, gripped by his voice. 

And that is all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die

I life my glass to my mouth,

I look at you and i sigh

"Come back on monday," she waved, "After school, I need some subject. To paint. And get some more Yeats, please. "