Mailing...

Then another train of thought came to my mind, perhaps I should tell her my feelings after all. Since it was more of a safe preposition, as I already knew that her reaction would be a flat no, with some ‘please…’ etc thrown in for good measure. There was no more of the unsure factor; I believed I had nothing to worry about. There was this squabbling in my brain that getting this information out of my system would be something very necessary to do in the near future. Then I returned to the familiar grounds of ‘how-to…’ but there was a notable difference this time. I was in another city some hundreds of kilometers away and that this time I’d planned to the needful by the means of electronic mail. Due to certain physical restriction it was impossible for me to tell her my feelings face to face.

And I decided to tell her as a passing fact, something like hello, I love you. And thus there were various unsent mails in which I tried to pour my heart etc to her. Or I tried to hint that I love her. I was thoroughly unsuccessful in being able to compose the perfect mail, so I composed a poem about platonic love and all that and I filled it with words like love, attachment, friendship and something more and although it was quite clear that she was the subject of the said poem, I sent it to her as a poem commissioned to me by a non-existent friend who was in love with some girl. Goddamn lame.

Then sometime during the mid-session vacation which I was spending in Gorakhpur (my father had got posted there by now) I built up the courage to call her up. And I reasoned I had nothing to fear, nothing to lose and all that. So I picked up the phone and dialed her up, not caring about the STD costs etc, and then I had a short conversation with her in which I told her that I knew she was committed to Akshay and she said that she knew that I knew, then I told her about the poem and gave her my excuse for writing it. After which, for want of words I ended the conversation.

I emailed her later and told her that the poem was meant specifically for her and that I had lied to her over the phone and that might have been the first time when I’d been open about my feelings towards her. She replied saying she was fine with it and she was happy that we were friends, I don’t claim to get exactly what she meant but I didn’t try too much deciphering.

Then came along her birthday and I called her up again, this might have been only the second time that I was calling her up. That day I had a much longer conversation with her and I mentally recorded every word of it. Before keeping the receiver down I told her that I loved her. She laughed it off, but damn that felt good.

When I returned to my room, I felt like writing the whole conversation down, to preserve it, to make it last forever, to freeze those few minutes in time and replay them over and over.

I also went along and wrote her the email which I had tried to write on numerous other occasions, but never had the courage to do so. It was one of those mails which when you look back at, you’d be amazed at your own ability to write anything as corny as that. (Or am I blaming myself for writing that mail…no, that mail was true.)

So I started off with general topics and everything, and continued to a point where I began to write an appreciation for her voice. I told her that anyone can fall in love with her voice because it was so melodic, and then I laid on everything on the plate and served it by telling her that I couldn’t pass things as a joke now, and that I loved her. Then I continued on this general theme of love for about five hundred more words and made it quite clear to her that I was hopelessly in love with her, of course I added that this mail didn’t have anything to do with Akshay and that it was only incidental that she was committed to him. It did matter though, I said, because I knew that she’d not be able to reciprocate the feelings I had for her and that I did not expect her to, but I hoped that even after this mail she’d continue to be in touch with me, and not break off from my life. Although I knew quite well that adding the last bit was only a ploy from me to make her emotional, perhaps this whole email was a ploy by me to play with her sentiments. After a certain amount of time it becomes really hard to tell.

There were tense moments when I waited for her reply or reaction to the aforesaid mail, since I believed I had done something else apart from writing just a simple mail. After months of deliberation I had told her point blank how I felt about her. The thing with me then was I was just curious as to what her reaction would be to my love for her. Then I became worried, I called Sanshit up and told him to take care of stuff if anything goes wrong, that is if she gets angry or something like it. You know, pass the whole written email thing as a joke.

Something funny happened then, Nishant, my friend from Kota who was also an old schoolmate of Akshay got a mail from him in which he forwarded the whole of the mail that I’d sent to her. Akshay had given a header to the mail and he’d asked Nishant not to tell me about it. The funny thing was that I was with him in the cyber café where he’d gone to check his mail. So he couldn’t help but tell me about what Akshay had written, I was sitting next to him and although I am a dreamy sort of guy, I do not pass such things up. It was quite ironical, however since Nishant would have told me about this mail in any case. And I’d forewarned him that I’d sent a rather controversial mail to her, and that I was feeling tense.

Then I checked my mail account, in which I got two mails, one was from Akshay. He had expressed his sympathies over my unrequited love, and had hoped that by that mail I hadn’t hoped of bringing their relationship to an end. There was some other stuff too; he wanted me to tell him that she was the one I loved most in the world. My reply to this mail was kept short and cryptic.

After replying to Akshay I opened the mail sent by her, in which she had said that it was nice that I’d expressed my feelings for her, but it would have better had I told her about this some time ago. Ah well, easy to say, not easy to do, isn’t it? Then she said that she respected me (I really do not understand what girls mean when they say this) and she hoped that by this mail I’d given a fresh lease to our friendship.

Sure, why not. And then I wonder (and continue to wonder) what exactly is the right time to express your feelings, I have a close friend of mine who told the girl he loved the instant he fell head over heels and she immediately negated him. And he suffers even today, so I think aloud what might have been the right time for me to tell her my feelings. Or would there have been any right time at all. I mean, the real reason that I chose this time to tell her my feelings was because this time she had a real reason to refuse me, and it would have hurt more if she’d refused me without any rhyme behind it. I was more or less afraid, that’s it.

She said in her mail that I shouldn’t hide anything from her anymore; I thought what the use is now anyway. Still our relationship moved to another level that day, and continued more or less the same way for about a year or so. In the meanwhile I went to Baroda once for a day, mainly to meet her, also to meet my friends. I made sure to take a still camera with me and then I clicked photos of her like some Japanese tourist. That whole day I searched for moments where I could get some time to talk to her but all through she remained terribly silent. She did make a point to sit next to me or near to me at whatever cafes and restaurants we visited. Like all my trips to Baroda I was treating this as the final one. The day was like those days which have the habit of getting over too early, and I left back for Kota with a gift from her, it was a simple gift, couple of porcelain doves and all that. We maintained regular contact for the next few months.

Wondering...

While returning from the fete the only thought in my mind was how nice she looked that day, along with me were Shubhankar and Akshay. They discussed the girls that they found to be attractive that day, I mentioned her name and waited for their responses, Shubhankar claimed not seeing her that evening and Akshay offered a small rebuttal telling me that she looked average and compared her to a few other girls for effect.

I didn’t mind their not having anything positive to say about how she looked that day, because my mind was set. I definitely knew that I was attracted towards her.

Then comes the phase when the mind works on ways to convey the feelings of attraction, it cooks up situations where it can catch the other person somewhat unawares and give away itself. Or is it the heart thinking it all up. There are times when a person let’s the heart decide before the mind, and these situations become dangerous.

School was closed after the pre-boards for the preparatory leave and thus I had no opportunity to ‘tell her’ how I felt. In the mean time I kept myself busy drawing, eliminating and redrawing scenarios where I’d tell her how I felt, and I fixed up our valedictory function for the day I’d tell her that I am attracted to her. And I didn’t have a contingency plan or an aftermath plan, which is I didn’t know what I’d do after she would agree to or refuse to my proposal.

The tradition of our school to say fare-well to the passing out batch and give a party to the present class 10^th was somewhat rooted in the fact that many of the students left for want of (what they thought were) better schools. And the seniors made it a point to hold it as close to valentine’s day as possible. Just to juice up the situation a bit. It was supposed to be a formal sort of affair, with tie and all that. We all had to say something on the stage for a couple of minutes, reflecting thoughtfully on the past years spent in school. However, what the students were generally faced with were minutes of awkward silences and stammered thank-yous. Shubhankar, Sanshit and Akshay had all written down ‘speeches’ on bits of papers, because there was also some sort of competition where a Mr. and Miss Personality was chosen on the basis of their on stage ramblings. I on my part was contemplating the possibility of going on stage and declaring my love for her in front of the millions and millions…. It seemed like the perfect plan and I had seen so many goddamn movies that perhaps for some half fraction of a second I’d almost thought of carrying it out. It was after all, a farewell function, and I was pretty much sure I was going to leave the school after 10^th because my father had an impending transfer coming towards him. So I had this safety catch with me. I even practiced my self a couple of times in front of the mirror. I was waiting for the valedictory function for weeks, or to be exact I was waiting for this function ever since I fell for her.

However, on the final day when we all walked on stage accompanied by cheesy James Bond theme music, I forgot everything cause all I could see was the cheering and smiling faces of my class-mates, I cracked a lame joke about James Bond and an obscure communist country, sang a couple of lines from a linkin park song and then proceeded to walk down from the stage.

There was one precise moment which could be termed as slightly god-send. She was standing near the drinking water stall, waiting for someone (or something), and she was all alone, sipping water from a plastic cup. I thought that IF there was a moment, then this was it. So I darted towards her, clearing the crowds with my hands, I distinctly heard a couple of my friends call up my name but I paid no heed. I ran words through my mind, trying to pick up a suitable phrase. However I was beaten to her by her friends, God how I hated that gaggle of girls at that instant of time. They’d robbed me of the chance of a lifetime. Bless them.

After my board exams my father got shifted to Agra, and I went to Kota with the aim of preparing for IITJEE. I met her one last time when we were finally leaving Baroda, and that last meeting didn’t exactly result in a long and fruitful conversation in which lots of unsaid things were cleared out. Instead, it was just a few words from either side, so you are going? Yes I am going. Take care. I will. Bye. Bye. (I love you.)

For the next one year in Kota, I wasted my life away academically, and continued to do so through out my stay. My thoughts did turn to her now and then, and I found solace in the annual class photograph, which was the only photo that I had of her. Sometime in November I received a mail from her, usual stuff, how are you and all that. I fully suspected the mail account to be a dummy, made by perhaps Sanshit with the intent on playing a prank on me. So I quickly headed for the nearest PCO and called him up to give him an earful, but he told me that the account was genuine and she had indeed asked him for my e-mail address, which thankfully he had remembered and given to her right. I headed back to the cyber café from where I had checked my mail and quickly replied to her. This was with the hope of starting something, as always.

Then in January I got another mail, this time from Shubhankar, and it contained the news that the single status of two of my friends viz. Sanshit and Akshay had recently expired. And the fucker decided to keep the names of their respective girls as a national secret. So I repeated my running-to-nearest-PCO exercise, and called Shubhankar up. He kept me guessing on the names of the girls, and without remorse he told me that she had hooked up with Akshay. Oh, I said.

Akshay?

Yes.

Sure?

I had a pivotal hand in it!

Goddamn you.

What?

Nothing, Akshay?

Yes.

So it was Akshay, who got the girl. And in many cases there the story would have met with an end, and the guy who didn’t get the girl would say Oh well, or words to the effect and go out whistling in to the sunset.

However, I do not know how to whistle, and I had called up Shubhankar at a time when there was not even a hint of a sunset. So I persisted, at that time I tried to convince myself that I was a perfectly normal phenomenon for two persons to get into a relationship, and that it had not much to do with me. Because I reasoned that she was a friend, but perhaps not too close a friend. Hence, I played down the hooking up incident and continued existing normally.

The Prodding...

She confided in me, her infatuations, her sadness, even some amount of girlie gossip, and with me not being a very fluent speaker I turned out to be a very good listener. Although I admit that I didn’t pay deep heed to her, or tried to remember what she had said, I often offered her suggestions which she did take into considerations. Be it a spat with a friend or anything of life in general.

She used to surprise me, with the questions she asked me during class, ranging to the downright earthly to the forwardly whimsical, but I liked to bear the brunt of her trivial pursuit.

Our school had a fund raising fun-fair each year which was not fun and hardly fair with the overpriced food stalls. She asked me what would be the reason for coming to the fete, this time she supplied me the motive behind the question as her friends had simply said that the fete would interesting. She wanted to ask me what exactly people mean when they go to a fete and their excuse of going there is that it would be interesting. I had no explanation to offer for this basic human tendency.

‘Sleight of hand and twist of fate

On a bed of nails she makes me wait

And I wait without you’

There is also the presence of the prodder, the poker or the pusher in these stories. The role with the above occupation is played by the closest friends to the principal character. He constantly reminds the person about to fall in love his exact reasons for doing so. In my case they were my friends Shubhankar and Sanshit, the former in particular was quick to point out incidences where he thought he saw signs from her that were possibly directed towards me. The latter suggested that I was already in love with her and that I should convey my feelings to her in ASAP. Although I tried to push away the thoughts that were put inside my mind by the prodders, the thought mechanism is more complex than I thought. The thoughts that you try to push away are the ones that return without remorse etc. These thoughts are the most uncontrolled of all and are almost impossible to banish from the mind.

I said to myself that one friend may be wrong, but two would find it hard to be wrong at the same time and at the same place and on the same topic. So my mind dwelled on her and soon perfected an image I found hard to replace. She was nice, and she would be great. As of now she didn’t officially have a boy friend or any such hanger on, and we were close as friends, though not too close.

Still, there is always the left and the right part of the brain, so there was still a part of the brain which believed that it was just a crazy infatuation and that reality had nothing at all to do with it. And it blamed the prodders for all the prodding that they were doing. The right way was not this, and there was infinite risk.

The prodders (God Bless them) continued with their prodding and (I wouldn’t put all the blame on the prodders) I really did began to think that I was truly attracted to her. The only thing I was waiting for was a proper moment of realization when all the truth would come pouring out.

School continued, but with the approaching exams classes became less frequent and time spent with her became lesser. I had her number, but that was a time before mobile phones, and there was always the possibility that the landline phone would be picked up by an angry ladki ka baap. I did call her up once or twice, and listened to the ‘hullo, hullo’ from the other side, however I never conversed with her on the phone. And there was no school before the pre-boards. So it was after quite some time when I saw her again during the school fete, held in the last week of December.

And here I would make no excuses that on the day of fete I saw an inner light coming from her which lit up my life and that I saw her beauty in the deep sense. Nothing of that sort happened, it was pure physical attraction towards her that day as I was used to seeing her in a mundane pale khaki colored school dress, and that day she was wearing some sort of outfit that would have made any guy love her.

Sanshit rallied around and said that this was a ‘festive’ environment and that I could easily go up to her and tell her that I like her and that it will ‘suit’ the surroundings. Nothing could go wrong, he said, you can always say you were joking later because of the ‘festive’ atmosphere. For a few seconds I considered his idea, then I immediately considered it to be suicidal and instead just went up to her and complimented her on her looks. She thanked me; I turned around and walked back to where I was.

She comes...

We first met in school, when the year on the calendar was the first one of this millennium and it was the ninth year of our school lives. And we didn’t even become friends in this first year of our meeting, although as classmates we acknowledged each others presence and played a couple of keen games of table tennis (where I was thoroughly thrashed by her on numerous occasions) and that was our only point of contact. My perception of her was a decent looking girl, though perhaps debatable as to whether she was the prettiest girl in class or not, that year I had not yet decided to fall in love (or whatever).

Her perception of me could have been zilch, because I concede I was never a person people found striking or to be in the axis of things, I was (and perhaps still am) a day dreamer whose preoccupations deal with matters much smaller to normal human concern than others. So being ‘in flow’ with stuff was not something that I was particularly good at.

I remember asking her for the first impression I had on her, and I also recall that she couldn’t exactly recollect even a vague first impression; apart from the fact that she thought I was a south Indian because of my dark skin. Strange, true.

The Present although does not have a considerable control over The Past, but the one thing The Present does have control over is the human tendency to age. Thus when I was in 10^th, I was fifteen years ago, and today when I look at a fifteen year old, I say to myself that they are just kids. However, while experiencing the curious age of fifteen, one does not experience the same feelings as that of a kid, or that of the kid that he will look back and sigh about after half a decade or so.

That we were kids was a fact the teachers in school never really made us forget, with punishments like seat changes for talkative students and a ‘mixed gender’ seating arrangement to maintain discipline, and it so happened that discipline proved to be an ingredient of chance and she was placed on the same desk as me, with the teachers taking the common view that I was a silent sort, and she was a ‘talkative child’ and thus her exile, her kala-pani might have been sharing a seat with me.

And it so happens that a boy and a girl seating together on a bench (whether in a park, in a railway station or a class room, doesn’t matter) will finally muster words to talk, producing the smaller version of talk by comparing overlapping anecdotes. Our common grounds were few, but not too few. We talked about table tennis, and I reminded her now and then that those were fun days, and that I did beat her once or twice. She hid behind her memory and said that her recollection of losing a table tennis match to me was very dim.

She appeared to me as one of those girls defined by the puritans as lively. Her view of life was generally optimistic, and her mood didn’t like swinging and generally remained upbeat. I don’t know what I came across to her as, but soon we became close friends. She liked reading the book ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ during class periods and I made it a point to pick out the pop-cultural references to her, like telling her that ‘All we need is love’ is a quote by John Lennon. My friends said that she had a boy friend named Vishal, but she said that he was not her boy friend; rather he was a very close pal. It didn’t matter to me then, because I hadn’t figured out what mattered to me and what didn’t at that period of time.

The 10^th is a class when teachers really pressurize the students to study because it is a ‘board’ year and the ‘board’ in question is not the chalk-board but rather a Central Board of Secondary Education. The hype behind these exams is created on a tremendous scale by the teachers and by parents in general. They shouldn’t do it, because when the exams turn out to be lame in the end it is a big disappointment to all the build up created over the twelve months or so. The point I am trying to stress is that perhaps the 10^th was the only time in my life when I actually decided to study, and take a shot at trying to score marks.

(I involuntarily pause for a moment and think of the fact that we used to sit together on the same bench and talk for hours at length for months without end, and today…)

Intro...etc

On the twenty sixth of May this year, I called her up. It was her birthday, and I was damn cheerful while wishing her, I talked to her about her vacation plans, about how things were in general and about what she intended to do on her Birthday. Then I kept the receiver down, and vowed to myself to never call her up again, nor contact her through any means. This was supposed to be the final phone call from me to her.

She didn’t know about that, of course. I was careful enough not to give her a hint that this was the final time I would be talking to her on the phone. Or off it, for that matter.

There is no exact point at which this story can be said to have a start. Such stories occur in most peoples’ life, and many a times they are short, can be forgotten easily, or to put it simply, they do not last for around half a decade, and leave a mixed after taste,

So I am at a dilemma, where do I start? Should I start at the beginning? When was the beginning? Or was there a beginning at all?

I have narrated this ‘tale’ of mine to most of my friends, in bits and pieces, scratched together like a drunk rock guitarist trying to piece together a lengthy guitar solo at the best and the last rock concert of his life. Trying to bend all the requisite tones, trying to use the effect pedals to the maximum. He keeps on forgetting the next note, and then he is not quite capable of remembering the previous. In the end, he tries to hurry off to a finish line, when the guitar solo is over and done with, and with that he hopes to break his guitar on the stage, in a brutal but memorable finale. The guitar however turns to be unbreakable, and he leaves the stage where he wants to live hurriedly, hoping to salvage something from this performance. The drunken guitarist is however acutely aware of his failure, and also of the fact that his intoxication has rendered him incapable of sliding up and down the fret board.

Today however, I am not a drunk guitarist. This is me, I have my guitar in my hand, and I am going to play a long, uninterrupted solo.

Unplugged.

What is a cliché? Is it something that happens to everyone? Or is it something that happens to one person repeatedly, to the point of being redundant?

We search for coincidence (or comparable stories), and call it a cliché. And the biggest examples of these so-called Clichés are these ‘so-called’ stories of unrequited love.

To put it in a nutshell, boy loves girl, girl is not interested, boy persists, and girl desists. And it all leads to a somewhat convergent series sort of end to a sad and bad story.

Have I seen a movie with that story?

Have you?

Definitely, maybe.

So we have to start from a point somewhere in the past, since the future seems too far away. And here I proceed to throw a stone across the field of my past and wait for it to land somewhere that can serve as a legit starting position. And from there I might decide to throw a stone at another point or I may emulate the great runners and run across the field to the finish line. (The starting line in this case is heavily blurred, and is not clear; I would need a little help from my friends on that one).

‘See the stone set in your eyes

See the thorn twist in your side

I wait for you’

For starters, and for much of the main course, let’s see…who is she? How did she come into my life? Or, how did I come into her life for that matter (did I ever?).

I have been strumming up too many questions, I believe, and it’s time now to stop being fanciful and start something. There will be a time for everything, first impressions, handshakes, laughter, forgetting, Milan Kundera, you name it and before you want it you will have it in your hands.

(The guitar seems to be tuned properly now, all the strings taut and responding reflexively under my touch.)

And now the first thing I’ll have to curb is my tendency to become the drunken guitarist. No more scratchy pieced together solos, this is final, unplugged.