Goose-bumps

Wrote this story on Sunday, October 02, 2011

The epiphany in Ramadan

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Mohammed was driving merrily, humming the Hindi song playing on FM when a loud, irritating honking from some mad fellow behind him drew his attention over the melody. He looked from the rear view mirror. A black Dodge Charger was behind him. 

Mohammed realized that it was the same car he honked at two minutes back as it tried to enter the main road from a service lane barely a couple of meters ahead of him. Mohammed had to swerve slightly even as he honked to draw the attention of the driver. Mohammed knew it was not his fault for he had the right of way by virtue of being on the main road. Mohammed was relieved that no damage was done. The matter was forgotten. He moved on. 

Apparently, Mohammed was wrong. On closer observation he found that the driver was wearing a white headscarf. In Dubai, this meant only one thing: Mohammed –and he prayed hard that the honking was not for him - had brushed a UAE national the wrong way. It was a bad state to be in as it is but Mohammed couldn’t have chosen a worse time: Ramadan, the month of fasting and 4 pm in the august heat – a perfect recipe for road rage. An Indian expat has a better chance at winning a bullfight in Spain than an argument with a starving , crossed UAE national. 

Mohammed had heard stories of plain-clothed CIDs roaming around Dubai catching law breakers. He pulled over fearing that if he had bumped into one of them then any further delay in complying would only make matters worse. Mohammed switched off the radio. The charger stopped parallel to him. Mohammed heard angry outburst as the window rolled down and the face behind the tinted glass revealed itself from top to bottom like a photo materializing on a slow internet connection. A black rope called ‘aqal’ securing a white headscarf called ‘gotra’, a tuft of white hair hanging lazily, lines marking the forehead, eyebrows kissing each other in livid frenzy portending of a soon to be materialized fountainhead of abuses, dark eyes glowering on its prey, a nose that was flushed red, cheeks hanging loosely over his face like an appendage and vibrating forcefully with every sound he produced, his mouth alternating between gnarling canines and spitting invectives - a fuming octogenarian hurling abuses in broken Hindi. 

“What do you bloody think of yourself, you mother**%$er? You think this is your dad’s road, you sister**%$er? Who gave you the license?” 

Mohammed’s heart sank. He couldn’t have chosen a worse luck – Ramadan, a hungry, angry UAE national and to top it all, an 80 something old man. The last factor increased manifold the odds against Mohammed who had occasionally seen impatient, temperamental, aged UAE nationals breaking in the queues at various government offices and forcing their way through. The authorities would give in meekly with those in the queue seeking consolation in exchange of frustrated glances. As the damage was done, Mohammed realized that the only way to prevent further murkiness was by surrendering. This was a battle he could not win, so he had to lose – in that loss was his pyrrhic victory. 

The old man jumped out of his car, repeating the same questions and abuses in the same order as if rehearsing a dialogue with the intensity of a maniacal actor. He placed his hands at the car door, tried shaking it violently. He yanked Mohammed’s seat belt, pushed the head cushion to startle him, all the while continuing to abuse. Mohammed was calm and non-reactive. That seemed to have angered the old man a lot more. 

“How dare you honk at me?” The old man revealed his real problem for the first time, “You bloody mother**%$er, not knowing how to drive and honking at me. How dare you? I will show you now.” 

“But you were in the service lane –” Mohammed couldn’t resist justifying, in-spite of having decided on surrender.

“Shut up you bastard,” the old man interrupted him thumping his frail, shaking hands on the car door and then in one frustrated motion punched Mohammed on his cheek.  

Mohammed’s heart stopped, his fists clenched, hair on his body stood up, the calmness on his face flushed out and was replaced by seething indignation. Although the old man’s mild punch did not hurt him, Mohammed could not stand being punched for something that was not his fault. He immediately transported himself into a virtual reality where he punched the old man and broke his jaw, punched him again causing him to bleed profusely, shoved him to the ground, crushed his head between the tar road and his hands and pulverized him to dust. 

Mohammed didn’t hear anything after that. He was shaking internally with a revenge he could not take, a rage he could not release, an insult he could not pay back – simply because he was stuck against a mad man in his own backyard. 

The old man blabbered a lot more, noted Mohammed’s car number and silently drove off. Mohammed stared blankly at the Charger that went off silently, quite a contrast from how it approached him. He sat there, livid, shivering and yet motionless as if the whole body had gone numb. The old man, having vented his anger and gratified his vanity, passed his state of being to Mohammed with that one touch – a game of passing the parcel. 

After what seemed like an eternity, Mohammed returned to his senses and blinked. He rolled up his window and drove off slowly. He didn’t bother to switch on the FM. 

At home, he tossed his office bag, sank into the sofa and kept staring blankly at the floor. His mind still replaying the punch and what he could’ve done in reciprocation, but didn’t. The shivering subsided but the suffering seemed to be growing with every passing moment. 

Mohammed thought that the spirit of the fast was broken in the way the old man acted. If a fasting man cannot take in the right sense a cautionary honk that ensures his own safety then who else will? Ego was at its peak when it should have been seeing the bottom. Whatever happened to compassion and forgiveness? Mohammed was drowning under a deluge of fundamental questions. He was tired and wanted to run away and stop the thoughts. 

He switched on the television to divert his mind. A monk with a divine peace on his face was addressing a small gathering. But Mohammed wasn’t interested. He tried to change the channel but the TV stopped responding. Having just had the most anti-spiritual experience, he was in no mood to listen to a spiritual discourse. He cursed his room-mate Kapil for watching this stupid babble and worsening his misery. Mohammed tried to ignore the proceedings but he was not at peace, the disturbing thoughts stalked him all the time. Reluctantly, he resigned to listening to the monk.

“Have you heard of the parable of the soul?” asked the monk with a simple, unadulterated smile. 

Mohammed sighed as he realized that the monk was about to give some moral science lecture. The camera showed some of his disciples shaking their head in response to the monk’s question. 

“There was once a soul who wanted to experience forgiveness.” said the monk, “The soul asks God to help it experience forgiveness as an aspect of Godliness. Another soul comes forward and offers itself for helping the first soul fulfill its wishes. But why will you do that asked the first soul. Because I love you said the second.”

Mohammed chuckled, not being able to gather what was going on. But in spite of himself, he started getting curious. 

“But what will you do to make me experience forgiveness asked the first soul." the monk continued, “We both will go to the physical universe, to the planet earth, and I will cause to hurt you in some way said the second. But if you love me, why will you hurt me, asked the first soul, confused. How else will you experience forgiveness my beloved if I do nothing that you perceive as hurt, asked the second soul rhetorically. 

I just ask one thing in return, the second soul added. Anything, said the first, overjoyed at getting the opportunity to gratify its desire.

When I do the worst possible harm to you, when I’m unkind to you, when I insult you for none of your fault, please remember who we both are, don’t forget the promise you made me. Don’t curse me for hurting you or you will not experience forgiveness, the very purpose of our interaction.

Oh, I will always remember you and my promise - my dearest one, promised the first soul.” 

The monk closed his eyes for a while and asked the gathering, “Do you remember your promises now?” 

The monk now opened his eyes and looked straight at the camera, “Whenever you have been hurt, have you remembered the promise you made to your beloved soul? Do you now recollect that any harm done to you is an opportunity for you to grow through forgiveness? Do you now realize that a hurt in the physical world is an act of highest love in the astral world?” 

The monk’s loving eyes pierced and startled Mohammed who instantly realized that the question was meant for him. Tears rolled down his eyes as he grasped the lesson behind the disturbing incident. He cried profusely at the revelation, at the feeling of true love and compassion, and for this most amazing remembrance. The tears washed away his anger, indignation, hurt and the feeling of revenge.  

The octogenarian was no longer a thorn of a memory. Mohammed had now remembered his true self and the promise he made to God through this old man. Mohammed not only forgave the old man but he also felt he could give him the biggest loving hug of his life if they ever met again. He even thanked his roommate for watching this channel, which gave him the biggest leap of faith during one of the toughest trials in his life. 

Mohammed now realized that life at every moment gave us a choice between modesty and pride, love and hatred, forgiveness and revenge, joy and suffering, compassion and anger, faith and doubt. The one we choose will define the quality of our lives. We may get where we want to be in any case, but choosing the first will make the journey much more enjoyable. 

Mohammed got goose-bumps as he realized that this learning was like an epiphany straight from Allah. A divine blessing that helped him live the spirit of Ramadan through forgiveness. 

Lost in deep thoughts, he inadvertently pressed the remote buttons and lo! The channel changed. Mohammed chuckled and looked up at the ceiling. He smiled, for he knew the secret now – the whole universe conspired to give him this experience. 

Life comes a full circle

This night is different from all my previous nights. Tonight I’m unable to sleep; I’m forced to ponder over my life.

It didn't take long for my mother to realize I was a different kid. Barring the physicality, I didn't have anything in common with the girls of my age. I was born a tomboy.

At an age when girls loved decorating their dolls and dressing them up, I took sadistic joy in crushing and dismantling them. While the other girls would raise their hands and ask parents to lift them while crossing a puddle in our street, I would slap any hand outstretched to help, and jump and cross it myself. That would give my ‘boyish’ ego, a smug boost.

But I wasn't different from the girls only; I was a rebellious kid even by boys' standards. I felt that every societal rule was there to curb my freedom. So I would break them at the drop of a hat. At times, I would even search for societal conventions to commit my faux pass.

I have always been a nightmare for my mom. My antics never allowed her to sleep peacefully, more so after she discovered the real me. I found archaic, every word of caution that came out of her mouth and every rule of discipline she laid for me. No amount of chastening would ever work on me. I was an undisputed apotheosis of a spoilt brat.

“Don’t sit that way”, “Behave yourself”, “Don’t stay out after 7”, “Learn to cook”, “Don’t wear shorts; wear frocks”, “Don’t play with the boys”, “Why can’t you play with other girls of the society?”, “Why can’t you behave like a normal girl?” and so on. My life was a constant questionnaire I preferred to tear apart with my actions.

The only time I behaved like a girl was when my mother was seriously ill. I took to doing the chores and taking her care, something totally unexpected of me. That was the only time I patiently listened to what she said.

“You’re a little girl, so gullible. You don’t realize that the outside world is very bad. You’ve to be very careful with the company you keep. The bad people will use you and throw you away. Why don’t you obey me my child?”

But soon after she recovered, I returned to my old ways.

Life went on, punctuated by altercations with my mom. I was tired of cold stares and loud rebukes that had become an almost daily phenomenon. So, after my schooling, I chose to go abroad for graduation. The move was more to move away from the prying eyes of my mom than for my love of foreign universities. The thought of freedom from having to justify my every action was too mouth-watering for me to feel the pain of separation from my spying but caring mom.

College life, away from home, was fun to say the least. I could mingle with friends of my choice without any botheration. Even here, my coterie had few girls. With my group, I was party to all kinds of outings; even to places considered to be guys’ bastions. I had gone crazy with my newfound freedom and enjoyed it to the hilt.

One such day, feeling groggy after the previous night’s drinking binge, I went to meet my friend. That day, he had not gone for lunch with the rest of our gang. We were not doing anything in particular: watching TV, gossiping and pulling each other’s legs. Suddenly I picked up a magazine with no particular intention of reading it. He snatched it immediately from my hands saying he wanted to read it first.

“Why should he read it first?” I thought.
“How could I let him snatch something from ‘my’ hands?” my alter-ego was too bruised to let him win the physical challenge, even though I was no match for him.

That gave me an instant kick and I snatched it back, for I saw, in his snatching of the magazine, a rule I had to break.

He jumped to grab the book but missed it. I ran and he followed. After a few missed chances he grabbed me from behind. He held my arms and turned me around with such power that I couldn’t do anything but face him. He held my elbows tightly; so I turned my hands with elbows as hinges and secured the magazine behind my back, holding it as tightly as I could. His hands, groping for the book, ran through my forearms, then wrists and reached the magazine. In the ensuing duel, I found myself kicking and pushing him, but in vain. In my efforts to relieve myself from his hold, I tripped and fell on the bed and he - not one to let go off the book - fell on top of me.

We were still fighting for the magazine. During the duel, our eyes met and I chuckled smugly at not letting him take it. Taking this as an insult, he did the unexpected. He planted his lips on mine and my hands that had, until so far, firmly held the magazine released it immediately. My eyes bulged out in shock at the sudden development. I tried to bring my hands out from under me to stop him, but our combined weight was too much for them. He won the book from me; but today that was not enough. He wanted to win me over.

Shock turned to anger at my inability to be in control. Anger turned to exasperation as I squirmed under him in frantic attempts to release myself. I somehow managed to release my hands and held them against his muscular chest to break the lip-lock. But the bitter-sweet sensation of the kiss had started playing its hormonal games on me by then. For the first time in my life, I didn’t mind being forcibly controlled and subdued. And I decided to go with the flow; force of my hands against his chest reduced and I found myself opening my lips in response to his. The inevitable happened.

I had made a life out of breaking the rules. However, in this quest, I didn’t realize that I made “breaking rules” the rule of my life. But someone, if not I, had to break this rule too for me. The self-imposed rule of my life was that I was to behave like a guy. Someone had to bring out the girl from the façade of a guy.

The next day, I found myself changed in a way that would make my mother proud. The sudden realization of being a woman was too much for me to be the same once again. To my surprise, I drastically reduced the frequency of meeting my ‘boy’ friends, except for him. The two of us had always been the best of buddies; that incident promoted him to a ‘special person’ in my life. I fell for him, head over heels. We met each other quite often and made out occasionally. Those were the best days of my life.

To my shock, I missed a cycle for the first time since puberty. But he, to my obvious consternation, refused to marry me and suggested instead to abort the baby; he then started ignoring me completely. I was staring at the prospect of becoming an unwed Indian mother - a social stigma of the lowest order. I felt that my fate had given me a very crude choice on the same rules that defined my life. Another rule of society was inviting me to break it and yet, I couldn’t find myself amused at the prospect of doing so.

But the recent realization of being a woman and the unexpected, yet pleasant, longing for motherhood made me take the choice of my life. I decided to become a single, unwed mother.

A few months down, I delivered an angelic baby girl. All my worries of societal stigma were drowned in her pleasant countenance and infectious innocence. I wanted to protect her from everything bad on earth. I told myself, ‘I will protect her from bad company, never let her be misguided by people like her father who could use her and throw her away.’

For the first time in my life, I could relate to my mother; I was thinking like her, and I suddenly realized, she wasn’t out of her mind in looking after me the way she did. For the first time I felt, she wasn’t entirely wrong.

My last few years have been wonderful with my little angel around me. She has been the centre of my universe ever since she was born. She has given meaning to my aimless existence.

Last night it rained heavily. This morning was so pleasant that I took my little angel out on a ramble. On the way, we reached a puddle left behind by the overnight showers. I crossed over in one big leap but my angel released my finger just when I was to cross. From the other side, I extended my hand.

She slapped my hand and said, “Mummy, I want to jump and cross it myself.”

No wonder, I can’t sleep tonight.

Love Unbound

Wrote this story on 18th Feb 2006

My Best Friend's Wedding

The wheels squealed lazily at being forced to move after a short but a well deserved halt as the train chugged painfully, fighting the inertial resistance, to take its first 'steps' out of the station I boarded it from. I pushed my handbag up on the top berth, settled quietly in my seat and surveyed my sleeper class co-passengers: A sexagenarian man gazing blankly through the window, a family with two kids; parents too busy teaching their kids how to enjoy and the kids too busy doing what they do best - flouting those norms, and a young lad; unabashedly staring at me as if I was the only existent key to solving the Bermuda Triangle mystery. It didn't take me very long to get talking to them. An enquiry about their destination was all it took to be a part of the group. A couple of hours later we had discussed most of our nation's problems, almost solved them along the way, shared our lunches and had become a family. It was so easy initiating a conversation with sleeper class passengers. Compare and contrast this with a reaction from a co-passenger in an AC compartment. A similar enquiry would fetch a suave verbal reply masking a curt non-verbal expression overtly portending of a cold shoulder of non-reciprocation for any further attempts at initiating a conversation. The puffed up egos actually keep the AC compartment, which is otherwise cold, quite cozy.

I was traveling by train after a long time. The recent nose-diving of flight fares made them affordable to us lesser mortals. That, coupled with the traveling allowance provided by my company, made traveling by train not just unenviable but also unglamourous. And yet, there was something about trains I missed while flying. Although flying has its own share of ecstasy in take-offs, landings and God's eye view of earth, a train journey is about a different romance altogether. The snail-pace of Indian trains affords us the luxury of sliding open the window and enjoying ourselves in the unadulterated countryside breeze in all its glory. Watching the scared cattle fleeing, the confused dogs barking, the kids cheering and the adult males leering has its own beauty when viewed from inside the fortified window of a train. Sooner or later, our quest for speed will introduce faster, new state-of-the-art trains. But then, we won't be able to stick our necks out of the door and experience the gush of wind slapping our faces. In our hurry to reach the destination, we miss out on enjoying ourselves through the journey. Ironically, while technology helps us connect faster to far off places, it disconnects us from our immediate neighbourhood.

The absence of time zones in India sets you up for some really pleasant surprises as you travel eastwards. A normal day in Bhuvaneshwar, located in eastern part of India, dawns at 5 am. I reached there slightly before dawn. To my relief, it had rained the previous night, forcing mother earth to show its more pleasant face in the midst of scorching Indian summer. A pick-up auto was arranged for me. It seemed to glide over the broad, clean roads of Bhuvaneshwar. Being engrossed in the surreal morning experience, I failed to notice when the smooth boulevards segued into potholed bylanes and brought me to my destination.

I stood in front of a big main gate guarding a small bungalow. The gate was high enough to keep peeping toms at bay. An average Indian would not be able to see through its top; its bottom, however, was considerate enough to give enough space to show ankles. I rang the bell and a known voice answered. It ordered me to hold on lest I wake others up; I forgot, out of excitement, it was still early morning. As the voice came closer to the gate, I started drawing her picture. My mind immediately left for dreamland; I thought I heard a barrage of instructions, I had so gotten used to, coming out of her mouth. She reached the gate and started opening a chained lock at the bottom. I saw only her palms and feet, for the miserly gate would let me see no more. Mehendi, a mark of celebrations in an Indian family, adorned her hands and feet. She opened the door and we were face to face after more than three years. That night was her wedding.

We began our professional careers together in Pune. Fresh out of college, we had a mix of childish enthusiasm for life and a queer anxiety about our first job. We clicked almost immediately and have been the best of friends since then. We've shared some of the best days of our professional lives.

Her house was full of guests but it didn’t look congested. As her only friend to attend her marriage from out-of-station, I was accorded celebrity treatment. We chatted for a couple of hours before we got up to move on with the chores. “Could you tell me how you feel?” I asked her, curious to know what a girl feels on the eve of her marriage. “Don’t ask that;” pat came the reply, “I won’t be able to control myself.” The only child of her parents, Amrita, my friend, would not have been able to control her emotions had she let them flow any closer to that thought. The pain of separation from their loving daughter, in spite of the pleasure of her getting married to a worthy individual, was giving her parents a torrid time. Amidst her parents’ frequent breakdowns, she was the only one who composed herself and kept the situation under control.

I went to the terrace of the bungalow where the ladies of the family were performing some rituals. They were chanting some mantras and intermittently making surprisingly loud noise just by oscillating their tongue left-to-right; an act supposed to ward-off evil. Amrita had called her gregarious friend, Debasis Patel, to keep me company. Thanks to his famous second name, he often had to follow his introductory statement with the explanation that he was not a Gujarati. Amit, Amrita’s cute little cousin, took a special liking for me. He would excitedly share with me all the good things he could lay his hands on. Unmindful of his broken Hindi, he would sing all the Hindi songs I taught him. These two companions made my sojourn worth its weight in gold.

Towards the evening, Debasis took me to the marriage venue. A hall was booked in one of the better hotels of Bhuvaneshwar. The route from home to hotel was marked with pot-holed roads devoid of street-lights. But the cool, unpolluted breeze made the journey exhilarating and refreshing. The sigh of untamed breeze of Bhuvaneshwar, a city with less concretized development than in other cities of India, could only have invigorated my spirits. We reached the marriage hall excited and ready to tidy up things, and ourselves. The bride arrived later, looking exquisite in the bridal wear and totally different from what she looked back home. Debasis and I took the job of welcoming the guests at the main entrance. Then we enjoyed the sumptuous dinner, peppered with ‘bird-watching’. The groom, his family and guests arrived much later. There was excitement all around as the groom’s procession arrived in the hotel. We were running around, hankering to catch a glimpse of the man-of-the-moment. Finally, I found him in a hall of the hotel. He was dressed in cream Sherwani with a traditional turban over his head. Amrita had told him about me. So we chatted for a while after I introduced myself. He came across as a simple, shy and a mature person; quite different from the bubbly Amrita but someone who I thought complemented her well.

The marriage rituals started around midnight. By that time, Debasis had left and Amit had slept in one of the small sofas, big enough for him. Alone and tired, I followed the rituals with intermittent naps. But I was lucky to be awake at the most important moments of the marriage. I saw the groom tying the mangalsutra around the neck of the bride. I saw them exchanging their ‘Varmalas’ (garlands) and taking the rounds around the holy fire. I got goose-bumps as I watched them doing that. A passing thought came across and got me introspecting at the sanctity of those moments. The Vedic mantras that were being chanted during those actions are known to be powerful enough to celestially bind the couple. The bride and the groom affect each other’s lives much more powerfully, astrologically -- and not just because they live together -- after the mantras bind them. It was an act of giving the other individual the control of your life; the key to your emotions. You then give that person the power to make you happy or sad, to make or break your life. Can such a moment of entrusting your life to someone be anything less than sacrosanct? The modern priests chant those mantras perfunctorily for it’s a daily business for them; the bride and groom can’t be more mechanical about following the instructions for it’s too tiring for them. The couple, however, should stop before these acts, take a moment and talk to themselves; think for a moment about the other life they’re making their own and the responsibilities that come with it. To enjoy the good times of married life, they should be good enough to face bad times.

Real life marriages, unlike those in movies, are directed by actors themselves. So, almost every task is a touch-and-go action. Murphy’s laws work at their best here. Things would go wrong or disappear when you least want them to. We had our share of such anxieties, before and after the marriage, the worst of which was after marriage when the rusty lock at the main door of her house just wouldn’t open, all in the wee hours of the morning when we returned from the marriage hall ready to flake out.

That morning was her Vidai. Knowing Amrita, who, while in Pune, used to cry at the slightest thoughts of missing her parents, I expected the Vidai to be an emotional catharsis. But the brave girl that she was, she defied all expectations and didn’t let a single drop of tear come out of her eyes. Quietly, she sat in the car and didn’t look at anyone for a long time. Our eyes met only once after that; I could see the pain of separation from family waiting to explode but marvelously controlled. The car left, unsettling the dust of the road and leaving everyone’s heart with an emotional void in its wake.

“Why is it that Indian girls leave their families after marriage? Why is it not the other way round?” I asked myself. The answer to this is not simple. An average male has much bigger ego than an average female. Due to this, a girl is much more capable of accepting the new family as her own than her male counterpart is. She can take in her stride the complexities of adapting to differences with less difficulty. Spiritually speaking, the ego is one of the root causes of distancing yourself from God. Being born a woman is hence a mark of spiritual upliftment. And only a spiritually higher being can make bigger sacrifices to keep another family happy. Unfortunately, the feminists, thanks to patriarchal zealots, take this as another form of female discrimination.

Thanks to Amrita, my trip to Bhuvaneshwar was an experience worth living. I came back with quite a few memories to cherish and thoughts that probably made me a bit wiser.

Impervious to Love?

After reading this, you're going to ask me one question. My answer to that is "no".
******************************

I always thought I was a strong person. Not in the physical sense of the word; but from the perspective of heart. Although an emotional person, I never quite understood what actually caused a boy to fall in love with a girl. Yes. True. I think I never really fell in love. Apart from the mild crushes and the childish infatuations, I never really felt the pangs of love for any girl. I always believed I was impervious to love. My conservative Gujarati upbringing, along with my sensitivity towards my parents' feelings and expectations, never really allowed me to water the plant of feelings for girls who did not belong to the Gujarati-Brahmin bracket. And having stayed outside Gujarat for most of my youthful years, I didn't quite meet those girls, with whom, I could've permitted myself to indulge. I almost prided myself on the fact that I can't fall for a girl. That was until recently, when she, out of nowhere, came into my life.

She works for a client company at Bangalore. We started chatting over some work. Some high-priority work forced us to call each other once in a while. She came across as a friendly girl - a Tamilian, basically from Calicut, brought up in Mumbai. It couldn't have been a more cosmopolitan upbringing. It was a delight to hear a Tamilian dishing out Mumbai's colloquialisms of "haan kya" and "nahi re". Before we knew it, we were constantly chatting to each other. We both would wait impatiently for our chat windows to produce that 'click' sound and then blink, signaling a message for us to open and read, so we could reply... and then wait... for the next reply...and so on... it went on... tirelessly. And before we knew it, we felt depressed and suffocated if no such sound came or if the screen didn't blink for some time. Much before we knew it, we knew a lot about each other. Much before we knew it, we were getting addicted. Within a week of our first chat, she spilt the beans by saying she was getting addicted to me.

I had not as yet thought about this. I was still under the impression that we were nothing but good friends. Years and years of self-imposed restrictions never really allowed me to look at the whole thing beyond the purview of friendship. And yet, I found I was being drawn to her; drawn, like I had never been to any girl before. Knowing her in the week that went by had been the most exhilarating and unexpectedly pleasant experience of my life. We had started talking to each other at night. But, it was not just talking. It was each other's presence at the other end of the phone that mattered. We both just wanted to be on phone, with the surety that we're both speaking a lot; and yet, nothing from the mouth. Her very presence on the phone was reassuring enough; reason enough for me not to hang up. It was as if, hanging up of the phone was suddenly the most difficult thing to do in the world; as if the one to hang up first would end up at the gallows. And still, I was hopelessly preventing myself from believing that I'd fallen for a girl who was a brahmin, but not a Gujarati. I was still trying to give myself an assurance that there was an escape; there was still a way to avoid all the hassles I was going to plunge myself into. And yet, there was a desire to be wanted, to be loved by someone other than your parents and family, by someone really unknown, for whom you could be the world.

During the course of our last late-night conversation, I failed to tell her unequivocally that I had fallen for her. May be I hadn't decided. May be I wasn't sure of its outcome. May be I was overcautious. May be I wasn't ready for a commitment just yet. But I made her say the same thing scores of times. And she did repeat it, without expectations. Each of her statement tingled my skin to discomfort, gave me a kick that could match the addictive trance of cocaine. And yet, I didn't realize how selfish I was in making her profess the affirmation repeatedly. With each statement, I was plunging her into a deep valley, from which I myself would not be able to rescue her. I then told her a whole lot of things about my tastes, talents and female friends. She then realized she was different; different from the kind of girl I was looking for. She realized I would reject her on seeing her; if that day ever came. She developed a fallacy that I was a class apart and deserved a much better girl than her. So, she decided to break it all on her own. She gracefully accepted the fact that it was not necessary for me to fall for her just because she had fallen for me.

She came to my life like a whirlwind. In a matter of a week, she made me realize I was not impervious to love, and these feelings could enter my fortress irrespective of caste, religion and other barriers I had built for myself. She pulverized the castle of my pride to dust with her gentle voice and friendly demeanor. She taught me that the character of a person is not found when the relationships are made, but when broken. It is the grace with which she accepted our differences and loss of the first love of her life that made her a much better person than I was. My being a much more talented person made her feel she was a raw deal for me. How do I tell her that finding your love is not about finding the best person in the world? It is about finding the best fit.

The ways of the world sometimes puzzle me. Everyone keeps scouting for talented people for company. And yet, one's talent can hardly be of any use to others except for public display of the pride of such a possession. It is only one's 'goodness' that could be of any use to others when it matters most. We've scores of yardsticks to measure the success of a person. But the strength of the person lies in how gracefully he accepts the failures. And we've failed to produce yardsticks for that. The discrepancy in the talent between us became the reason for our breakup. And yet, I doubt if my talent makes me any better a person than her. Does my talent really make me good enough to make her undeserving of me?

And yet, I'm jealous of her. She had the courage to accept it all and get to the depth of love without bothering about the consequences. She was debonair enough to go right under the waterfall of love. I stood at the shore and sprinkled my feet with water. I was the loser on both counts. I lost my pride and am bereft of her love as well.