I could never think of coming to this, writing a love story…writing MY love story, publishing it…making it public. And yet here I am, scribbling whatever comes to my mind to this page, imprinting on it my heart, a heart which ironically does not belong to me, anymore.
It was a lazy afternoon when this thing happened for the first time to me…love, a term which has ruled the minds and hearts of thousands of people and animals, perhaps birds and Gods too. Today when I sit here and try to weave words with my fingers, I think I know what this word means; and why not?, I have four years of experience to speak of; but on that lazy afternoon when this thing happened, this concept which is called love since the age of Adam and Eve, I was sitting on grass in a park, one of my parents (mother was it?) had brought me to, to enjoy some moments of peace of a lazy afternoon and I was totally naive of any romantic perspective attached to it. Of course there was ‘love’ in my heart for my parents and aunts and uncles, but the kind of love we talk about in movies, which form the subject matter of most novels: Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Twilight series was still a novel idea to my childish cerebrum.
She was playing there. Some distance off, with chubby pink cheeks, a ribbon cross across one of the ponytails, and a frock, so medieval nowadays. There was something in her hands which she was trying to show to her mother. She was laughing like a princess, a princess my mother had told me stories of before bed. There were words in the eyes of my six year old self which wanted to go to her and ask her to be my little sister.
Yes, a little sister, the only relation he could think of, my little self, was that of a little sister. He had not read any of the theories of Freud and he was not aware of an ongoing phallic development in his body. A thing of beauty was a thing of beauty in his eyes and nothing else. And he was unable to indite verses like Keats for her beauty. I was just a little boy back then, and the image of that smiling face; and the eyes, so bright and happy: were special, because they made me happy, imposed a willing smile on my infant visage.
That was the first time I fell in love. And I was a bolder man back then, my mother told me one day when I was thirteen, an age when the ideas of love and romance had taken strong hold of my heart strings and spinal nerves. Back then when I was six and I did not know that I had just learnt walking and my knees were not used to traveling as long distances as five meters. But I was bold and there was courage in my heart which made me stand up, using the shoulder of my mother, as she told my thirteen year old self on kitchen table seven years from hence; and I fell down, pointing at the angel some distance off with my little index finger and I started crying, tears of love and impatience rolled does my cheeks (as a result of my mother’s melodramatic narration) and I whimpered aloud to be taken to her, that little girl whom I so much wanted to play with and share my newly bought electric car.
Of course there was no one who could understand my feelings, commiserate with the unexpected torrent of emotions. My mother was busy in making me sit quietly as her son had fallen down in his daring and conscious effort of learning to walk. There was no other: not even me, I was too young, too innocent to even invent a way to hose down those fires of first sight.
But then who wanted to burn them down? Those flames of brotherly passion I had developed for that angel sitting under a mild sun on a mild Sunday afternoon in December.
Who wanted to escape from the feeling of euphoria in which there was none other thing: not even his newly bought electric car, which could be allowed to course through his mind, the young infant in young love for that angel, my six year old self?
(to be continued…)
Portrait of an old man 