“What is love?” I asked.

He let silence linger for a while, ever the bleeding heart humanitarian. It served his purposes, after all, to leave it to occupy a space that would otherwise be empty. A vacant house is never good for one’s reputation. It shows a lack of foresight. He used it to cover up nothing.

His brows rumpled in contemplation, as he distorted his being, like a food processor struggling to be thorough but accustomed to failure. He was being perfunctory.

As always, he took questions with sullenness that mortified, overlooking the relative frivolity of the enquirer. It puzzled him, eluded him, and because it tried to conceal itself, he wanted to have it even more. He chased after it, as a child would a butterfly. It was his.

For a moment, the world looked up, straight at him – the boy dancing in his green dreams.

He felt worthy.

But not for too long, lest his reservation be misconstrued as indecision, or worse, indifference; or worse yet, ignorance.

Pauses, as his teachers had injected into his consciousness, were to be used at just the right moments, lasting just the right time, for maximum results. Two tablets, thrice daily. They prescribed his Gratiano aura, oddly-shaped piece by forced piece. He did not want to be what others wanted him to be, but he was anyway. You can’t always get what you want, they said.

He abruptly evicted silence, the ungrateful tenant.

He would show no mercy to his inconvenience – not because he held this as moral, but because he had once slighted someone for doing just that. He had said something for the sake of it, not meaning it, and now he had to practice what he preached. Or be called a hypocrite, even though he already was one.

There was no choice.

His pursed lips, always cautious, always vigilant, guarded his mouth’s teenage inhabitants like a father worn out by those nights wasted waiting on the coach by the door. His jaw, sharpened by reality checks and learner’s outcomes, sealed the perimeter, for his good and for the common good.

He was patient zero of the newly fashionable contagion. He knew he was infectious, but he spoke anyway, just because he wanted to – the inconsiderate bastard. His social irresponsibility could have hurt the rest of us. He had to be closed off, quarantined, because we are small and weak and vulnerable and we need to survive in this cut-throat merciless world to which we must belong and must thrive in regardless of what it throws at us and how much we despise its guts.

Exhibit A.

But now he had been invited, and to be a decent landlord with a general concern for welfare was to be an indecent conversationalist. He was fine with being the contemplative one, but not the quiet, reserved one.

The gates creaked, and his mouth opened. He poised his tongue like a famished python, a benevolent Queen, potent but benign.

“Love,” he commenced authoritatively, like a judge delivering a sentence. Sparks of fake Oxford cascaded off his intellectual armour, chinking. He was the erudite elder, the sententious sage, banishing silence to haunt the unassuming by using assertive linguistic structure.

He continued, slowly, “Love is limitless, unconditional kindness.”

The words fell from grace, hitting the ground with a thud, fracturing. Heaven did not deserve their supremacy. But they did not shatter – not yet. They were just traumatized, confused. They were little children who had seen their parents die. They melted, and drained into the earth, tainting wells and springs and lives.

Time heals all wounds, but he had already run out of time. Time ran out on him, leaving him with many mouths to feed.

He had felt the need to qualify kindness, twice. He had learnt this the hard way. Never have an absolute view, because absolute views are irrational. Nothing can ever be fully justified. Don’t be silly. Don’t be naïve. But his qualifications were not qualifications at all. They were a policy of nuclear ambiguity: subversively, covertly absolute.

But no one seemed to realize. Nor care.

He wanted to say more. I gave him more than a line to fill, and to give any less than that would look incomplete, no matter how redundant the excess was. He wanted a better mark.

“And,” he started, as if jumping up and down, like that godforsaken odd child (we all know one, don’t we?) who never really fit in and no one really understood, throwing a tantrum just to get my attention. He paused, forcing me to anticipate the next word. I refused, and gazed at the floor. He needed to learn.

The conjunction, without engines, stalled in mid-air, staving off gravity for a just a while, suspending time, lingering in my mind. I waited impatiently.

“And devotion,” he proclaimed, confident that he had requisitioned my interest sufficiently, “without expecting anything…”

He trailed off abruptly, as his words and his eyes swirled round and round away into oblivion. He seemed to flicker, like a disobedient lamp, and with each flash he fell further into the chasm he once resolutely stood over and tried to reclaim.

The small boy wet his pants and now waddled with his thighs conjoined, but to no avail, for everyone saw his ignominy, and frowned at his carelessness. Their stares riddled his soul.

He was not pausing, not resting. He was stopping. He was giving up.

His cheeks quivered as his own words passed through his soul, riddling it as much as their stares did. His soft brown eyes looked at themselves, and got lost in their own depth, losing focus, blurring, as his astigmatism got the better of him. It was all clear now.

He stared up, as if begging for something. Anything.

He was here, but he was long gone. He was so haggard, so old.

“In return.” I could barely hear him.

He could not return. Not anymore.