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.