Cesium 133 - #2

A few hundred kilometres away, in the city of Nashik, lived a fellow named PK. No one knows why he was called PK; even he didn’t know why he was called PK. He just was. Formerly a reporter with a leading newspaper he quit over woman; a woman that both PK and his editor claimed to love.

“It was sheer insanity”, says PK.
“I was so in love with her that I couldn’t think of anything else.”

But that was history. One day he was sitting in the park, smoking a cigarette, inhaling the smoke and vowing that would be his last; after this one he would quit smoking. Did he quit? That is immaterial for the time being. In this state of trance he boarded a train to Pune. No one knew how he managed it, he didn’t know that himself!

A few days in the city, and he was in love, all over again; with the city where the girl lived – the girl for whom he quit his cushy job at the newspaper. He hadn’t met her, but had read enough of her columns to answer a quote-from-memory or fill-in-the-blanks test paper on her columns. He knew every word she wrote, every word she could say. And one day, he finally met her. No one knew how it all happened. Right from the-first-meeting to getting-on-like-a-house-on-fire to she-quitting-her-job-only-to-start-a-publishing-house-with-him and so on. No one knew how it all happened. No one. Not even PK himself. That’s how things always happened with our man PK.

As far as PK was concerned, life was just perfect. He had a business, and he had the woman! The woman he wanted to take home and say, “Look ma, dad. This is the girl I want to marry!” The woman he’d want to take to his editor and say, “Look here, this is my woman!”

But he couldn't do that. There was a catch - he didn’t have parents; he was an orphan, a product of the streets of Nashik. There was another catch - he didn’t have an editor any longer; to refresh your memory, he had quit his job. The next catch was he didn't yet start the business. And so our man knew, that life was not all that perfect, although he believed it was. “No”, he mused. The real catch was that he hadn’t popped the question. “That’s because”, he thought, “I don’t know her that well”. he didn't know where she lived, her likes and dislikes, the colour she liked, none of the basics, never mind the rest. Or something like that. He wasn’t sure. That’s how things were with him, he could never be sure.

However at the risk of letting my plot out, I’ll tell you the real catch. One that even he didn't know. Or probably would never know. She was another cesium 133.