2 States, the story of my first love…

Disclaimer: This has nothing to do with Chetan Bhagat or his popular novel with the same name. It’s just that the circumstances of the story warrants the borrowing of the title.

I was 10 years old and I was in Love. Yes, that’s L.O.V.E , Pyaar, Ishq , Mohabbat , Aashiqui or whatever fancy name you call it.

How did I know…?

Well…. I knew because whenever she came in view, my eyes would blur out the background….. my ears kinda switched off and the only audible sound would be my heartbeats(that too in 5.1 digital dolby)….. and the entire ‘Shahrukh falls for a girl’ sequence follows, you know the violins and the whole wind-on-her-hair-in-slow-motion effect.

I had gone to my Grandpa’s house in Karnataka for summer vacation and she was our neighbor,  3 years older than me and a Kannadiga. She didn’t know Malayalam and I didn’t know Kannada. English was the only common ground and I didn’t know much of it either. So I took Kannada lessons from my Grams and when they invited us over for coffee a few days later, I talked to her. It was awkward at the beginning with the language barrier and her parents looking. Then she showed me her room and once we were in it  her dolls, her fairy tale books and all the other ‘cindrella stuff’. It was like entering Barbieland.

With time we learned to communicate without speaking much and soon enough we were best of friends. Every second that I was with her, I was very much aware that I was a boy and she was a girl… the prettiest I had ever seen. Thin, brown eyes, dark hair that reached down to her shoulders curly dangling like small springs at the tip. She used to wear all those girlish pink/red frocks and when she smiled, she owned me. She watched me from the balcony when I played cricket with the other boys and her face would light up every time I hit a boundary. Her lovely lips would curve into a smile and I would hit the next ball harder and higher to see that smile again.

One day she asked me to teach her how to bat. My happiness knew no bounds when I stood close behind her, reaching around her and gripping the bat over her palms showing her how to swing the bat. I made up silly names for the shots I was teaching her. I held onto her hips to show her the correct stance and I kept bowling for her until she was confident of what she had learned. From that day onwards I had to disappoint the boys and play with her for she had to practice her cover drives and square cuts. I did everything that would make her smile.

We spent every waking moment of the summer vacation together but when it was over, it was time for me to come back to Kerala. From the bus, I kept looking back at her waving to me until I could no longer see her. That was the moment it happened. Something snapped inside me and I felt a void in my heart.

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It was only four years later that I could go back to claim my lost love. Walking up the road first thing I did was to look up at her balcony. What I saw stopped me in my tracks… my legs refused to move, my arms went frigid and my breath laboured.

She wasn’t pretty anymore…….. she was more than that, she was sexy. Girlish frocks had given way to womanish Salwar Kameez. Her hair was longer and straight. She was still thin but in a curvaceous sort of way. After the Shahrukh sequence all over again, I stood there waiting for her to look at me… the recognition in her eyes and for that smile on her face. But none of it came. She was looking at something ahead of me. “Look at me”, I was whispering to myself. “What is she looking at..?”, I searched ahead of me.

What the….. Bloody hell!!!

(Background Music changes to horror)

She was looking at my cousin and he was looking at her and they were smiling. The smile stretched on for too long for me to bear and I pulled him with me into our house. It was a terrible idea bringing him along, that bloody son of a………

As the days went by, their smiles led to Hi’s and Hello’s which led to them talking and all I could do was watch from a distance. She never even so much as smiled at me. They were of the same age and clearly they liked each other. My narcissistic mindset caused me pain which was eating me up from inside because there was no one I could talk to about it. The one person I always trusted was the one flirting with my girl.

“What does she see in him…?”, I thought to myself….. the guy didn’t even know how to hold a cricket bat.

Sometimes when he and I went for a walk, she would come along. A few minutes into the walk, they would fall behind walking slowly hand in hand. Then one day they fell too far behind that I had to go back looking…… and……………….. and I saw him kissing her. Whatever was left of the 10 year old me died that day…… I had had enough. I started acting homesick and persuaded my Grandpa to send us back home. My cousin almost begged me not to, but I was adamant. We climbed onto the bus back to home, our vacation cut short by 13 days. She was there waving at him all the time the bus speeded away. He kept looking back till he couldn’t see her anymore and I could feel the void forming inside him. We sat beside each other, brothers…… his heart was set behind, seeking her…… my heart was set ahead, fleeing from her.

The bus took us forward. Mathematically, he was losing and I was winning. But, was I…?