Look Of Love

 

At seventeen, it is the norm for love to be at first sight. I joined a new school and she was the first girl I saw in my first class. Tall, slim, fair, with a walk that taught me the physics of the pendulum, and her eyes and smile made my brain, heart and restive soul in baser parts respond with short-circuited synapses, arrhythmic palpitations and violent attention, respectively. If that isn’t lusting loony love, what is? And I spotted a glance from her side which confirmed to my delicate young mind that the feelings were mutual.

A mutual acquaintance was conned to divulge her phone-number and I called her that first weekend. Her choleric mother reluctantly passed the call to her. In terse staccato, without any benefit of doubt, she informed me not to call her at home. I was made of sterner stuff then and pursued her affections with recalcitrant ardor which she rebuffed with careless abandon. When uncertainty crept in, I sulked, pouted and threw chalks at her, as proxy for Cupid’s missiles. Lady Luck frowned on me severely. One of those wild missiles missed the mark and hit the teacher. If my hand was not still in mid-air, and since I was not the studious questioning variety, I was correctly accused and wrongly punished. I was shifted from my back seat to the front benches. But Lady Luck has mischievous ways. That fall from grace made her laugh at me and that proved to be the balm for my aching heart. Our love hate relationship continued with unreciprocated warm smiles and reciprocated cold hatred. In those two final school years, we hardly wasted our communication skills on each other. But, after school, when we were flung to far corners, we clung on to each other with biweekly missives. If distance made us fonder, it was a tenuous link and I lost her to the first tall, dark and handsome guy that came into her still new adult life.

I met her many years later, when I was a depleted shell of my past self. I went to her house. Her mother’s cordial welcome should have put me on guard. My old love greeted me like any well-settled married woman. She took me to a private area where she had been entertaining that same old mutual acquaintance who I had conned many eons ago. We chatted like friends and I was going green in the gills. Then, she went to her study to get something to share with us. When she returned, I recognized the items – my many many-paged letters and cards to her. We laughed about it. I don’t think she noticed any change on my side.

Years went by, as they usually do, and Lady Luck was back in action. My old love contacted me. We talked for long. She and her tall, dark, handsome husband had separated amicably, she told me. We decided to meet at a nice place. I was there on time. She was there too. I introduced her to the companion I had taken along, my fiancée. I saw on her face that look of lost love I must have had when she laughed at my old letters.