Love Story - of the youngistan, Meri jaan :)
Those days, love was in the air.
A strange wave had swept through the city and everyone seemed infected by it. Every other person was falling in love with someone or something. Even that fellow with the crooked nose had somehow found a lovely girl to adore. Markets and parks were overflowing with dreamy faces. Girls borrowed and exchanged Mills & Boon novels while boys walked around carrying Erich Segal’s Love Story as though it were a sacred text. People wandered endlessly through the streets with their beloveds, reciting verses, smiling mysteriously, and behaving as if life itself had suddenly become poetry.
Those were dreamy days.
The whole city appeared to live inside one enormous romance. Love walked the roads, sat in tea stalls, leaned from balconies, and waited at bus stops.
How then could I possibly escape such an epidemic?
I too fell in love.
Imagine the misery of a sixteen-year-old overtaken by a passion so forceful and absurd.
I became a dreamer of the worst kind. Day and night I wove impossible fantasies until I could almost see myself holding the delicate hands of my beloved and asking her to remain mine forever. I tried keeping the affair secret, but my sudden loss of sleep quickly betrayed me before my mother.
Naturally, she was alarmed.
A teenage son in love can produce several emotions in a mother simultaneously — surprise, suspicion, concern, amusement, and unnecessary panic.
She sat beside me one evening and began her interrogation. Hoping for sympathy, I poured out my heart before her.
Unfortunately, before I could even complete my confession, she burst into uncontrollable laughter.
My father joined.
My brothers joined.
My sister almost collapsed.
I tried desperately to convince everyone that my feelings were real.
But alas, nobody believed that a sixteen-year-old could fall so deeply in love with a language.
For that was the truth.
I had fallen hopelessly in love with English.
Not a girl.
English.
My suffering was made worse by the fact that English was not my native language. While girls around me continued, quite unfairly, to remain unnoticed, I wandered through life drowned in dictionaries, thesauruses, grammar books, and Rapidex English Speaking Course.
I wanted to read all the literature that existed in the world. I would have jumped from the first floor for Shakespeare. I dreamed of London as though it were some celestial city built entirely out of words.
Every week I bought new books promising miraculous mastery over English in thirty days, sixty days, or at most ninety. Naturally, I fell in love with each of those books too.
I carried them pressed against my chest.
I slept among them.
I spread them across my bed like blankets.
My mother began worrying seriously about my eyesight.
Soon I became a member of every public library I could find.
Those libraries felt to me like temples.
For the first few days I could barely settle on one book. I kept running from shelf to shelf in excitement, pulling out books randomly, touching them, smelling them, admiring their covers with ridiculous devotion before placing them back carefully.
One day I worshipped Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The next day Salman Rushdie.
Then George Eliot.
Then Bernard Shaw.
My beloved language seemed to possess infinite personalities.
Whenever I encountered a new word, I felt both enchanted and wounded.
How many hidden sides did she still possess?
At times I would almost feel like going down on my knees before my beloved language and pleading with her:
“Be mine completely. Hide nothing from me anymore.”
One afternoon a friend of mine advised me very seriously:
“Spend more time with dictionaries. Words are the ornaments of your beloved. The day you learn how to adorn her best with them, she will finally become yours.”
I considered this revelation nothing short of sacred wisdom.
I immediately picked up an Oxford Dictionary with a glorious red cover. While carrying it toward a table, I accidentally noticed a Merriam-Webster nearby and instantly fell in love again.
Unable to abandon either beauty, I somehow carried both to my chair.
For nearly an hour I did almost no studying.
I simply opened random pages and stared at words admiringly.
Occasionally I touched the pages lightly as if they might respond emotionally.
At last I began testing myself.
I selected a word randomly and tried explaining its meaning before checking the dictionary.
Disaster.
Word after word exposed my ignorance.
Oddly enough, there were many words whose meanings I somehow felt without being able to explain them clearly. I knew where they belonged emotionally. I knew the situations in which they should appear. Yet the precise meaning escaped me.
This disturbed me deeply.
I sat with my head bent over the dictionary wondering what exactly separated feeling a word from understanding it.
And then suddenly the answer arrived:
Expression.
Of course.
The problem was not love.
The problem was expression.
The discovery thrilled me.
Immediately my mind connected this revelation with everything else in life.
I remembered reading somewhere in Hindu philosophy that the world itself is merely an expression of Brahma. Then suddenly I recalled my destiny number three from numerology, which apparently signified that expression was what I had come into this life to learn.
This discovery overwhelmed me completely.
At once I understood why I had failed to explain my feelings to my parents; why I became speechless before girls I admired; why thoughts inside me always seemed larger than the words available outside.
I was on the verge of kissing the dictionary when the librarian tapped my shoulder and informed me politely that the library was closing for lunch.
I walked outside in a trance.
But before I could fully enjoy my discovery, a horrifying realization struck me.
I still could not properly explain the meaning of the word “expression.”
Panic returned immediately.
To calm myself, I wandered toward the tea stall nearby where I found the fellow with the crooked nose standing proudly beside his beloved.
While drinking tea he casually asked,
“Did you check the notice board?”
“No. Why?”
“Our board exam result is out today. Your name is right at the top. Chronological order.”
Chronological?
Wasn’t that related to dates?
Did he mean alphabetical?
Within seconds I had completely forgotten my examination result.
The two words — expression and chronological — began colliding violently inside my head.
As soon as the library reopened, I rushed back toward my beloved dictionaries.
I opened Merriam-Webster feverishly and searched for “chronology.”
The meaning appeared before me like divine revelation.
I relaxed immediately.
At least I knew more English than that crooked-nosed fellow.
“Order” was the first thing in the meaning of “chronological” that caught hold of my mind, and I immediately decided that from that day onward I must begin leading an orderly life.
The word “dates,” however, I postponed for future investigation.
Now came the dangerous part.
I resumed dictionary study with complete seriousness.
But having newly discovered “order,” I could no longer browse randomly. It would violate the principle.
So with great courage I began from the first page.
“A.”
And there my downfall truly began.
Very soon I discovered that I possessed a terrible attraction toward sinister words.
Words describing misery, fear, humiliation, disease, weakness, despair — these entered my soul with alarming ease.
I read “abandon” and immediately felt abandoned.
I read “abase” and felt humiliated.
I passed through “abattoir” and nearly died.
I feared “abduction.”
I dreaded “abhorrence.”
The dictionary slowly became less a book and more a psychological battlefield.
I tried escaping to later pages.
This proved disastrous too.
“Cauterize” burned me.
“Cavity” reminded me of toothache.
“Depression” finally conquered me entirely.
People around me began staring suspiciously while I sat collapsing internally under the emotional burden of vocabulary.
By evening I dragged myself home feeling abandoned, abased, cauterized, depressed, obscure, and several other conditions simultaneously.
And there, to my astonishment, a celebration awaited me.
I had scored brilliantly in my board examinations.
Relatives flooded the house.
Friends arrived.
Gifts appeared everywhere.
Most astonishingly, nearly everyone gifted me books.
English novels.
Writing guides.
Dictionaries.
Grammar books.
Apparently my madness was now public knowledge.
That night I slept buried among books in all possible combinations until one of them collapsed directly on my nose.
The next morning my mother entered my room carrying tea and immediately called for a family meeting after seeing the catastrophic state of my room.
Everyone gathered anxiously, suspecting some major emotional crisis.
Once again I began explaining the reality of my love.
But this time something strange had changed.
People listened.
Properly.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, I had begun finding words.
Expression had finally arrived.
Encouraged by this miraculous development, I soon began writing.
Unfortunately another problem followed immediately.
No sooner had I discovered expression than I became obsessed with impression.
I noticed that while writing, some hidden part of me constantly wanted admiration.
Wanted effect.
Wanted praise.
Wanted identity.
The innocence of my love affair with language slowly became entangled with ego.
And thus began a strange cycle:
Depression.
Expression.
Impression.
Exasperation.
Then depression again.
Around that time I decided to study English literature seriously.
One of my friends, however, warned me gravely:
“If you study literature academically, you may stop enjoying it.”
This terrified me enough to abandon the idea immediately.
To the immense relief of my parents, I finally took the non-medical stream and disappeared into Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics.
From then onwards, I became so engrossed in the Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics of life that I had to bear separation from my ladylove for many years.
But only with the quiet promise that one day she would be mine again.
That love, I knew, would surely re-blossom and attain new heights — though perhaps much later, on some distant evening, when I would sit alone at my table and slowly recount all these absurd incidents in the form of a story.
A story which, in some strange way, was always waiting to be written.
Perhaps that day is today.
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