ON VALENTINES DAY___BRUSHES WITH ROMANTICISM

                                                       It all started in 1957 when I joined St Mary’s Convent, Allahabad in my kindergartens. Back then, the school was co-educational in the nursery classes. There was this girl in my class, Kusum Bhatnagar, whom I had the uncanny knack of calling Kusum Bhattacharya, I do not know for what reason. The relevant fact is that I was then infinitely fond of that girl, and she probably likewise, for we always sat next to each other in class. We always had our tiffin together in the lunch break, and loved to share the food. We always helped each other with the classwork. That time it was customary for the class teacher to reward good work with scrap pictures often with glazes, and we always compared and admired our ‘scraps’. We always chose to partner each other when we were required to team up for craft work. At the end of the school, we invariably went out of the class and school, holding hands together and chatting along. Then, one day, my elder cousin brother saw us, and started teasing me. He laughed and joked about my ‘girlfriend’ all the way home, and for the first time in my life of seven years, I felt I had done something wrong. This small incident had a strong effect on me then, and in subsequent years as well, but for then, I stopped talking to Kusum. She would often look askance at me as to what had happened, but I neither explained nor talked to her ever again. Shortly after, we relocated to Delhi and I lost her forever, but the one thing which has bothered me always is not telling her why I ‘broke off’. I think I owed her an apology, and still do.

                                                                          The year was 1961. It was a Sunday, 12^th February. The occasion was the 5^th Test Match between India and Pakistan at the Ferozeshah Kotla ground in New Delhi. I had gone to see the fourth days play with one of my relatives. We were seated in the general stands. My relative got chatting with a girl sitting next to him. She was a student of Convent of Jesus and Mary, and that got him excited for I was studying in St Columba’s, the school almost conjoined to it . As it turned out, we were just a class apart, so he took it upon himself to strike up a friendship between us. The girl seemed quite inclined, but I was plagued with that sense of guilt about talking to girls. All through that day, he kept oscillating between her and me to get us to converse. He even managed to extract one of those score cards from her, which she was bold enough to inscribe “To Rakesh, with love, from Anita”. The days play, and ours, ended without decision and we both headed home.I held on to that score card till I completed school and left Delhi. It turned out that she lived across the block, from our house, we in Roop Nagar and she in Kamla Nagar. I was even passed on her address. Soon after, one day I ventured up to her flat on the first floor in D block, but couldn’t muster enough courage to knock on the door. Thus the door remained close, but I often wish I was atleast able to tell her why and wherefore I had thwarted her ‘advances’, to atleast say sorry.

                                                              Love on the rebound can be very sudden, swift and intense. She was a postgraduate in the department of Sociology, Rajasthan University, and I was introduced to her by a mutual acquaintance, on the rebound. The fondness seemed so intense that I was rushing to her hostel every so often, even when I was within the throes of my professional exams. I wanted to take her for a visit home. The next I heard was my mutual friend informing me that this had been interpreted as an effort to make her meet my parents, and that we were on course for a marriage. I could feel the ground slip from beneath me. Now, there is nothing more jolting, no greater dampener in a relationship, than the sudden emergence of a marriage proposal when you are least prepared or inclined. It burns out the relationship like the flash in the pan. The worst thing was that I didn’t and couldn’t feel upto telling her the truth. So I did the most dastardly thing possible, of persuading our mutual friend to do the 'honours'. I did realize that it was despicable to have my reluctance conveyed in this manner by a person who was a mutual friend, but then I didn’t have an iota of courage more, and so the relationship ended with the bitterest tastes. The lasting regret is that I did not have the courage or moral turpitude to say sorry face to face. I wish I had, or could. 

                                                My voyeurisms did not end there. There was one last indulgence. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have never had any occasion to regret that rendezvous, for it culminated in marriage, and it is holding on for more than 38 years now, with a daughter and son as the resultant offshoots, our progeny.