A Secret Admirer

It was an hour to midnight. The cold wind flowed in through the open window near Rohan’s desk. For the past fifteen minutes, he had been relying on the light from the study-lamp. He frowned at what was in front of him.

“Rohan, what are you doing?” said Rani.

Rohan quickly tried to put away his work in the drawer of his table. But, the sudden swift movements of his hands were nothing if not noticeable.

“What are you trying to hide from me?”

“Rani, it’s nothing…”

Rani opened the drawer. Rohan frowned as Rani discovered the diary lying in the drawer.

“So, what have you been writing?” said Rani, flipping the pages of the diary to discover its latest contents.

“It’s nothing, I tell you”, insisted Rohan vainly.

“You have met with little success in hiding stuff from me in the five months of our marriage”, Rani said smiling triumphantly with the diary in hand. “I seriously doubt whether things are going to any different in the future. Yes, here it is - today’s entry…”

“I’m in for an embarrassing night”, concluded Rohan as Rani began to read the entry aloud:

“It’s something I say everyday, it’s nothing new.

But, I can never stop telling you that I love you.”

“I love you, too. I feel so very lucky to have a husband as romantic as you. But…”

“What?”

Rani began to laugh and slowly began moving away before she said, “I can’t deny that you write terrible poetry.”

Rohan caught up with his wife quickly as she began to run. He took her in his arms and said, “Well, I deserve more than that for the effort.”

“But, you were trying to hide it from me. Honesty would have a little more rewarding, you know.”

“In that case, I have a little game in mind. Each gets rewarded for being truthful…”

“And I’m supposed to be truthful about exactly what?” said Rani suspiciously.

“About crushes you might have had in school or college.”

“I’ve already told you about mine.”

“Yes, but you never mentioned the name or elaborated.”

“I don’t know his name…”

“Oh, come on, Rani!”

“Honestly, sweetheart, I don’t know his name. He was a secret admirer. You were at the same school and in the same class as I. Had I been especially close to any guy, it would have been in the realm of your knowledge, wouldn’t it?”

“Ok, I believe you. Go on, now”.

“It wasn’t quite a crush. I was very, very curious, though, to find out who he was. I would probably have liked him if he had been more open about his identity. The fact that he did everything secretly made me feel a little uncomfortable.”

“So, how exactly did this secret admirer reveal his admiration, then?”

“He used poetry.”

“He used poetry?”

“Yes, he used to write me love-poems irregularly. I’d find them in my school-bag without a clue as to who might have put them in. I’ve been very lucky that my parents have never caught me with any of them. The contents would have greatly disturbed them.”

“How come you never reported it to the school authorities?”

“I didn’t see any harm coming from it, a little uncomfortable though it made me, sometimes…”

“Ah, so, you secretly admired it, too, eh?”

“In a way, yes…” She smiled and paused for a few moments. She then looked directly at her husband and said, “You haven’t told me about your crushes.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“That isn’t fair. You can’t sleep without telling me!”

“You’ll find out when you open my drawer again.”

“What?”

Rohan didn’t answer. He left for the bedroom. Rani’s eyes drifted to the diary on the desk. She approached the desk with overwhelming curiosity and opened the drawer. She hadn’t noticed anything apart from the diary, earlier. There was a note that read:

“This drawer has a false bottom.”

Not knowing what more surprises were in store for her, she fiddled around with the drawer’s bottom. Nearly a minute later, the false bottom was lifted. Her face registered nothing. She seemed to be beyond emotion for a moment. Underneath was a piece of paper that read:

“I love you, I’ve said in several verses:

A secret it is that your heart still nurses.

My passion has increased greatly in intensity;

Revelation is its consequence. My identity,

Of course, lies amidst this display of affection

Holding the truth behind my whole intention.

And although honest about my love, I may be a liar.

Nothing though can deny that I’m your Secret Admirer.”

The identity of her admirer lay in the first word of each line.

Dürer's Matrix

The Renaissance engraving Melancholia I by the German artist and amateur mathematician Albrecht Dürer. This image is filled with mathematical symbolism, and if you look carefully, you will see a matrix in the upper right corner of the first picture while the second gives an enlarged view. This matrix is known as a magic square and was believed by many in Dürer's time to have genuinely magical properties. It does turn out to have some fascinating characteristics worth exploring.

[Notice that all rows, columns, diagonals add up to the magic number, 34, for a 4x4 matrix]

{The matrix in the image is: 16, 3, 2, 13; 9, 10, 11, 8; 5, 6, 7, 12; 4, 15, 14, 1}

Another fascinating feature of this matrix is that the elements in the second and third columns of the final row are 15 and 14, interestingly. The year in which Dürer came up with the matrix was 1514, too, incidently.

Life - A Pain Factory

“Don’t, Father… Don’t pull the trigger!” they cried as he sat in his chair, his gun pointed at his temple, sweat pouring down his brow, tears welling up in his bloodshot eyes.

The moment he was born, Charlie was told, he had killed the mother who had engendered him. He was brought up in an orphanage. His father had abandoned his mother and consequently, him as well. Any form of luck seemed to have abandoned him, too. He was weak and reticent as a child. A few fellow orphans took advantage of that and pounded on more misery in his already miserable existence.

Burdensome years dragged on and Charlie was too old to remain in an orphanage. He was left alone to struggle in life. Amidst the poorest of the poor, the most heartless of criminals he lived. It was a putrid society that molded what he was to become. His heart was lost, but he discovered his brains. It is needless to mention how he employed the power of his mind considering the kind of company he kept.

He began as a cheap con and with the passage of time, further polluted his soul with bigger jobs. But, he was never caught for his crimes. At least, he hadn’t yet. He met a young girl whom he fell in love with. She was naïve and his lies led to her requiting affection. Love, whose beautiful face Charlie was seeing for the first time in his life, changed him. He found pleasure in honest labor.

He even went as far as telling his love about his past. She was touched by his honesty and accepted him despite initial shock. He, then, expressed his desire to marry her. She said yes. Susan White was prepared to be with him for the rest of his life, but Good Fortune wasn’t.

They were married, but Misfortune crept in between. Charlie found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was never put behind the bars for his crimes, but even Susan didn’t believe him this time when he said, “I didn’t do it, Susan. I’ve never killed anybody. I thought that at least, you would think I was innocent.”

In prison, he, now, felt like he was back in the orphanage, abandoned by all. Here, too, he was at the mercy of bullying fellow convicts. He was repeated beaten up and bruised. He bled. Susan added salt to his wounds by not visiting him. His heart bled. All hope in him was, now, gone. Painful was his burden of existence.

Five years later, Susan finally visited him.

“I want you to know that your husband is not a murderer, Susan.”
“I don’t want my son to know that his father was a murderer.”
“Did you say…?”

Susan left and never visited again. He was left to imagine the face of his son. Though Susan had left him in the dark, she had given birth to what seemed to be the light in his life. Charlie felt new hope. He continued to endure as time painfully dragged on.

Many years later, Charlie was released. Old and uneducated though he was, someone employed him and paid enough for his survival. He hoped one day to see Susan again and his issue through her. And well, he actually he did.

But, he had to see her on her deathbed. Cancer had consumed most of her. He held her hands in his and said, “Susan, I hope you believe that I’m innocent, now…”

She breathed her last after she said, “When I was young, I was naïve. And, now, I wish I could die believing your words, Charlie…”

Her last words never left him after they hit. He was beyond tears when he put his hands to his face. It felt as though the weight of the world and all its pain were pressing down upon him, forcing him to scream aloud. But, his voice, like everything in his whole voice, had abandoned him. He ran to the drawer, pulled it out and drew the gun. He sat in his chair as his painful past flooded into him urging him to pull that trigger.

He heard screams in the background. “Don’t, Father… Don’t pull the trigger!” they cried as he sat in his chair, his gun pointed at his temple, sweat pouring down his brow, tears welling up in his bloodshot eyes. His son and his wife stared at him, helpless, and in horror.

But, just then, he heard those beautiful sounds – those of young feet shuffling across the room. His eyes led up to the innocent, little face of his grandson, “I believe that you’re innocent, Grand Pa… But, why do you have a gun in your hand?”

He dropped the gun and embraced his grandson. Tears flowed down his cheeks. Happiness flooded him. It was pleasure beyond dreams as he felt the warmth of his grandson’s blood. His blood, he reminded himself. There was someone in his life to live for. And he wasn’t going to abandon him.

Minutes later, Charlie was smiling broadly as his eyes ran over the pictures in the photo album in front of him. Susan, younger than in her deathbed, smiled back at him, reminding him of better moments with her. His son was handsome like his mother and he was married to a beautiful woman. There was so much he had missed in life. He wasn’t going to give up his life and miss any more beautiful moments. Nothing, he felt, was worth giving his life for, now, that he was reunited with his family…

The next day, hearing a gunshot, his son and his wife rushed upstairs. They found him lying in a pool of blood and a clean hole through his head. In the background, the television was blaring, “George W Bush has been re-elected as the President of the United States of America…”