A Continuing Love Story

The first time I set my eyes upon her, my heart skipped a beat. A feeling hitherto unknown to me overwhelmed me. I was engulfed by a tsunami of emotions about which I had only heard but not experienced. Was it what they call the euphoria of the highest order? Was it an affair about which much has been written and little understood? Was it one of the barometers of purest emotions? Was it what would make any loving and caring human being gladly give his heart and soul without batting an eyelid? Was it what made life worth giving up for but living many times over? Was it what made a slave out of a beast? As I confessed right in the beginning, the whole gamut of emotions I underwent at the time when I had my first look at her were unknown to me. I just vaguely remember thinking that here she was and she was mine. She had to be mine. As simple as that!

I madly and unabashedly fell in love with her or rather rose in love with her. An unlikely example of love at first sight. Unlikely because I was the person smitten. That was 27th march 2003.

Plato (isn’t it him?) said that “love transmogrifies people into romantic idiocy”. And how true he was! Here I was. A person known in his peer group to be cynical almost to the extent of being branded an anti-social. A person who was widely known to be averse to display of emotions. A person who used to think it was not worth giving much ‘bhao’ (credence/attention) to girls. A person who thought that his analytical bent of mind made him impervious to any emotions. A person who thought reason alone is supreme and emotion subsidiary. And a person who thought that any relationship is a function of material and quantifiable things. That person was behaving in a sheer brilliance of lunacy just after one glance at her! Indulging in public display of emotions. Giving exaggerated importance to the fairer sex. Acknowledging the influence of love on personality. Plato almost wrote about me when he penned the above lines.

Her arrival in my life was not so much of a landmark in her life as it was in mine. Those first few glances were enough to relegate analyticism to the hinterlands of my mind where no thought processes ever traveled. When my friends ask me what made me jelly-spined and pea-brained after looking at her for the first time, I tell them, almost as a cliché, that it was her eyes and hair. After all, you don’t expect to get those searching looks from someone who has seen you for the first time or whom you are seeing for the first time. But those inquiring eyes pierced my heart through and through. As if she was wanting to get into my heart and see if I was the right sort of guy and if it was the right place to be in for all times to come. To reassure herself before she became mine. And those tufts of hair so carelessly tossed all over her head in some oily-jelly-fluid. ‘Carefully-done-for-the-careless-effect’ kind of a thing, if you know what I mean. I looked at her, she kept looking at me and then she went inside with others. Those few moments redefined my life, my perspectives and my attitudes.

I called up all my friends and relatives. I firmly believed in myself breaking news to my own people before they get to hear about it from other sources. Their reactions ranged from genuine happiness to cultivated circumspection to false euphoria to considered sympathy to abject derision. My social duty over, I set about contemplating the course of action to win my beauty to my side. Completely. Afterall, being the first time, I wasn’t aware of the social mores. And the expectations. My only advantage was that I was willing to goto any extent for her.

My efforts paid rich dividends. She started reciprocating my gestures. She even gave me a friendly smile in just a few weeks of my courtship. Or was it pursuit. May be she played hard to get in the beginning but slowly and slowly she had started liking me to the extent that her eyes used to lit up on seeing me. And mind you, this when I am no great looker! And I knew I was on the winning path when she fidgetedly started waiting for me outside when it was time for me to call it a day in office. And I knew I had done it when she started recognizing my car’s horn and come to the gate to give me that 10000 watt smile which I am sure was reserved only for me and which could have done wonders for the infrastructure sector of even developed countries. I had done it! Voila Pappu pass ho gaya!

All this was also time for me to experience new kinds of feelings and newer kinds of joys. Feelings and joys that for me had hitherto existed only in the poets’ hearts’ or writers’ imagination. A whole new ‘me’ was created which was almost antithetical to the old ‘me’. Here I was ready to worship the earth she walked on in contrast to the earlier ‘me’ who would have wanted to cleanse the earth a girl walked on!

Soulful togetherness and joyous companionship went on even higher pedestal when after fourteen months from that C-day of March the 27th, we bathed together. It was a joy which is beyond my literary skills and I wanted it to continue for eons. That soft and gentle rubbing of soap on her pristine skin and cute bums and her failed effort at trying to extricate herself from me is etched in my heart and mind for ever. The giggle which escaped her mouth whenever I tickled her during bathing and the consequent twinkle in her eyes were worth dying for many times over.

Whenever my friends ask me what made me change my attitude and perspectives so much, I always attribute it to my continuing love affair. Then, like a fool, they ask me if my love affair has given me anything tangible (as if there has to be material manifestations of sublime things)!!?

I reply that whenever I ask her,” Whose darling you are?” she always replies,” I am your darling, daddy.”

Do I or will I ever need anything more in this world or the world beyond?

PrideOfMatchingham