We call ourselves childish but we can’t leave our practicality at bay, we love getting drenched in the rain, but we don’t want muddy water on our suits, we want to love like we did at 10 but we have a 100 parameters.
Ever so often I, like every other busy, logical and washed out adult, wish to go back. Just once to see a crush materialize or just to feel that flutter that seems absent from our lives now.
1. Picture worth a thousand words
This picture just lies there like it’s taunting me. These four girls, awkward, conscious, smiling as if their life depends on it, all in the backdrop of a very shady photo studio. At 16 I thought they were my soul sisters. Today, I only talk to one of them.
That’s the one I secretly hated at right from the time I was 10. Looking at all her letters, some funny, some so emotional that they make me cry, I laugh at the memory of this childish jealousy. She had all the boys on her finger tips, while I was the reject, the one people came to, when they wanted her number. I was the comedian. I didn’t care about any of these boys except one. This picture was the day I decided I was worth nothing, no boy, no attention, just exclusion.
Because this was the day, he fell head over heels in love with my best friend.
I just looked at him in horror, like he’d shattered my world. Like he hadn’t seen me smile at him every time he looked at me, like he’d been ignorant of my fumbling speech, each time he asked me ‘What’s up?’, like he’d been blind when I looked right into his eyes with so much emotion, that my insides were screaming to just confess. Like the 2 years of my life had gone unnoticed by the guy who was the only one I’d care to dress for.
I cried a lot that night, I unfriended him, I stopped visiting my grandmother’s society, because that’s where he lived. My best friend didn’t care about him enough to date him, but she cared about me enough to give me closure. She told me everything. About how each time he looked at me, he wasn’t really looking, how he was tuning me out, so he could hear her talk about her day, how he’d ask me ‘What’s up?’, waiting for me to mention her name. She helped me shut him out forever.
I’m 23 now and I’ve replaced my cargo pants with skirts, I’ve removed my glasses to make way for contacts, I’ve traded my Marvels for Cosmopolitan. His messages have filled my inbox to the brim, but today he stands nowhere near my colleage.
2. The letter that made it all
It wasn’t a time where I could confess my love inspired by ‘Chupke Chupke’. There were rules and traditions and I couldn’t walk up to my neighbour’s house, knock on the door and take her for a matinee show.
So instead, I’d stare at her from the window, I’d see braiding her hair, on some days I’d see her playing cards with her cousins, I’d cycle behind her, hoping she’d stop and talk. But she never did. Her dad was really strict, no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get him to like me. So I’d settled to listening her sing the Gayatri Mantra every morning, I loved her voice, it was sweet, clear, confident and it drew me in every single time.
That voice haunted me every day after she moved away.
Her dad got posted in Delhi and he took the only love I knew away. I strolled down one evening, almost a week after she left and I noticed her cycle. I walked to it knowing that it’s teh only thing I might have of her in my future. I found a note on it.
It read,
‘Dear Sudhanshu,
I’m moving to Delhi tomorrow and I hope you find this before I leave. I just wanted to tell you that I feel the same way about you. I came out everyday to the balcony and sang the Gayatri Mantra, so that you’d notice me, I stayed longer in the balcony than I did in my own house. My dad doesn’t know I like you, because he thinks you can’t ever give me a good life. I don’t care about this anymore and I want you to prove him wrong.
Please meet me before I leave on the terrace at 11pm tonight.
Love,
Suneeta
It’s been 25 years and I’ve still kept that letter, it shows me what I used to be and what I’ve become. As I fold this letter and keep it back in my briefcase, I hear the sweet, haunting lyrics to the Gayatri Mantra. Yes, I proved myself after all.
3. Best left locked, sealed and boarded
It’s the room I hate to enter, the room that’s been locked up for a long time. But this time, I have no excuses, I have to go, I have to relive every memory I’ve been dreading for so long. It’s been 5 years since I’ve seen this room and as soon as I unlock the door, I also unlock a small box I’d left tightly shut in the back of my mind.
The memories start flooding in and there is no turning back. I walked into this room for the first time when I was 10. He was perched on a black beanbag in the corner and I awkwardly introduced myself. He smiled like he’d known me all along. Right from the time I was 10 till I was 20, he was the only guy who’d do anything for me. He’d punched someone for me, he’d yelled at me when I tried my first smoke, he was ecstatic when I got admission in my dream college.
He was my personal fairy god mother, as I foundly called my best friend and my boyfriend.
We’d been together since we discovered it was okay not to hate the opposite gender, we’d fallen in love and everyone saw that, the gossiping aunties in our colony, our parents and our friends. So it obvious that I was completely shattered when he decided to move across the country. But he convinced me that we’d be okay, like he always does, and I believed him.
I was excitedly waiting for his 9 hour flight to land with his favourite candy and a huge card that read ‘Will you be my valentine?’. I was so eager that I got there an hour early!
 I was looking for him in the crowd, when my phone rang.
It was his mother, crying hysterically.
His plane had crashed and they were trying to figure out if there were any survivors. That’s the day I stopped feeling anything. I was numb. I don’t remember my mother coming to pick me up, I don’t remember sitting through a funeral and I don’t remember how I landed up shifting to London.
But what I do remember is his mom, asking me to clear his room, to pack his things, to decide what I wanted to keep and what I wanted to give away. But I didn’t want to give any of him away, not his bean bag, not his guitar and not him.
I couldn’t do it.
5 years later I find myself staring at a picture framed on his bedside, it was me, smiling with a Valentine’s greeting he’d got me one year before he passed away. I saw the guitar where he’d taught me to play Happy Birthday for my mom, I saw the calendar where he’d marked our anniversary. It would have been 9 years this 14th Feb.
Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.
Young love is easy but keeping it is hard
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