Sharing old memories …

In life’s memory-soaked journey surprises come in myriad ways. While chancing into and then exchanging WhatsApp messages with my classmate-friend at the university decades back, he sent me an old photo of our class. That set the memory ball rolling leading to a flurry of more messages. What came as a revelation was his confession about how he had been deeply in love with a Sikh class-girl and suffered heartbreak when her parents refused to marry her to a Hindu boy. She was indeed a pretty, vivacious girl I recalled and even I had a sneaking tilt towards her buried under thick layers of shyness and fear ingrained in the psyche of a callow, provincial lad. On the other hand, my friend was a handsome city boy with a golden voice singing Bollywood songs and therefore the darling of all the girls. But the lady that I had a really serious crush on was a slim, chirpy, giggling one with a fine patrician nose. As fleet-footed time fled by and we entered the PG class, I had been able to crawl my way into some intimacy with her- my fondness having grown into an obstinate itch. Neglecting my own work in lab which even otherwise I found boring and insipid, I would saunter off to her lab where she sat perched on a stool poring over the microscope, working the knobs to unravel the weird purple, blue blurs on the slide.

Sitting beside her in the lab curtained from sun and light, I spent hours in idle banter, throwing oblique, shy darts to convey what bubbled, nay, boiled in my heart. While busy with her work, at times she giggled, at times she protested - in a friendly, light-hearted way though - but remained enigmatic, never giving herself away. Soon time’s wheel had run full circle. Studies completed, we had to leave the grand portals of our university. However, before saying adieu to the campus and the city, I decided to pay her a visit and give my luck a last chance. A day scholar, she lived near the campus. Autumn’s forenoon it was– balmy, beautiful, amorous. Dressed in my (affordable) best, with a pounding heart I gave a knock at her door, and it beat faster on finding none else but her, my heartthrob, who opened the door and ushered me into the living room. There we were– two lone souls. Her father had gone off to the office, sibling to the college and mother to her school. Now any smart Romeo would have seized the opportunity with both hands and using his wits proclaimed his love and won her affections by the lovers’ universal devices of persuasion and appeal. But I had turned into a nervous wreck even though I sensed that she was being receptive to my sly glances and gestures. Finally nothing happened, except blushes. As the old qawwali line goes: honth kaanpe magar baat ho na saki (lips quivered but remained speechless).

So nursing a wistful smirk I parted. Soon I returned to my village: left to philosophize on love and loss.

When I shared this anecdote with my ‘city-friend’, he messaged, “Arrey, wish you’d told me then? I would have acted a go-between and helped your cause.”

I smiled, and WhatsApp-ed him: “Well, thanks my friend. But it is thanks to these ‘hits-and-misses’ of life – yours and mine – that we are sharing such sweet nostalgic moments of bygone time in our twilight years. Isn’t it? He answered back with a ‘smiley’. I followed suit and fell into a reverie.

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