Different. This was how it really was this time around though. The feeling, though fleeting, was refreshing, something very unlike anything that I had experienced before. The person I fell for this time was ideal for me, or at least that was how I felt when it first began.

I met her at a book launch, which she was coordinating. It was serendipitous, the way I simply happened to cross her path. I had decided to attend the event, I could as easily have chosen to skip the event altogether. But I did, eventually, and when I got there she was talking to groups of people who had gotten there before me, engaging in chit chat, politely socialising before the official launch began.

She had looked nice in that black dress of hers. She had duly caught my attention. Our eyes had met in due time, and for a moment, I had been unable to take mine off of hers.

But I am an introvert, and for all my effort, I couldn’t approach her, even for a short conversation, a casual sharing of pleasantries. She had been a stranger to me then.

I had been talking to other people, friends and acquaintances—some of whom I met regularly, others almost never—when I heard her voice. She introduced herself and the role she would be playing at the launch event. That surprised me a bit, and I glanced at her again. This time, I smiled as well. I knew her name.

I introduced myself to her, and she welcomed it with interest. But I left the programme almost immediately after the formal launch was over.

On my way back, I thought about her. I regretted the fact that I had not talked to her more. Days passed while she continued to make brief appearances in my thoughts. I wondered if there might be a away for me to procure her mobile number and solaced myself saying that Kathmandu was a small place and that I would probably meet her again. If I were to meet her, we would surely cross paths again.

The idea of her did not leave me and I logged on to Facebook one day hoping to find her there. I typed her name in the search bar and waited for the right photograph to greet me, and there she was, smiling. Her profile picture showed her receiving a gift from someone. I sent her a friend request. When I saw that she had accepted the request, I leaped for joy. It had not been an entirely unexpected thing, but I rejoiced as if were some sort of victory.

A few days of talking to each other online and we decided to meet. The rapidity with which things were happening sometimes unsettled me, and I am sure she must have felt the same way. But the pleasures of giving into the demands of temptation, of indulgence, were overwhelming, much harder to ignore. Brooding over what was wrong or right, or fast or slow was one thing, feeling giddy with pleasure and anticipation was entirely something else.

The initial anxiety, on both sides, settled down once we sat, side-by-side, at a café and started sipping our respective cups of coffee. It was comfortable, the first meeting, and in no time we found we had grown closer to each other. Our intertwined hands, as we returned from our ‘maiden date’ did not just hint at the physical proximity, but also towards the deeper connections we had both developed. And we both agreed, although not a word was said between us. Every single meeting from this point was full of spark. And these fuelled us for the days that came in between.

Those were beautiful days. We would stroll along alleys surrounding the old palaces; conversations would be interspersed with sporadic silences; glances would be thrown at each other; subdued laughter would follow moments of silent gazing at the little children’s and their antics, while we continued to walk. And she would slip her fingers into mine, accommodate hers in between mine and readjust them without looking at me. I would also not look at her, and would tighten my grip further. By the time, we would both have agreed to enter a café, for a couple of quick cups of coffee.

We did found that it was necessary to profess our love or even speak of it with each other. This would be understood, in our little gestures, in the manner in which talked, avoiding loud decibels and replacing

them with soft whispers. And not once did we feel the need to use words to express our mutual feelings for each other.

These sporadic meetings were soon no longer enough. An overwhelming desire for one to meet took hold, and we longed to see each other each day. When meeting her proved difficult, I resorted to my mobile phone. We held on to our phones, as if for dear life, for hours, asking banal questions like “How was your day” or even “What did you have for lunch?” And the wonderful thing is, even these sounded interesting to us then.

lll

“I have too many problems of my own. I cannot traipse into your life at this state,” she said to me one day, when we finally met after she had been reluctant to see for quite some time. I was shell shocked, quite unable to process what I had just heard. I had never had any inkling that she might have been going through a rough phase at the time.

“What problems do you have?” I had asked anxiously and she had declined to tell.

The fact that she was not feeling comfortable about sharing what thoughts were troubling her was compounding my misery. I gulped it with equal measures of difficulty and reluctance.

The frequency of our conversations and meeting started ebbing. The not so gradual build-up that had resounded in a crescendo a few weeks ago was nowhere to be heard.

I found it very difficult to understand the fact that she was trying to avoid me for the very reasons that were inexplicable to me, about things she would never let me know of. But it wasn’t as easy as I have just made it sound either.

I could not stop myself from drawing analogies; between ‘our thing’ and the change of seasons, between what we had had and the bright, green spring that was giving way to a hot, yellow summer.

Our love wasn’t any different from the flowers which bloomed with all the pomp and glory of spring and then suddenly wilted, for no reason, apparently, when the season gave way to a new one. The spring, in my life, too, was supplanted, by a summer that would be known more by its aridness than its warm bright sun.

She receded from my life as I struggled to reconcile with the bitter truth. I am now hopelessly hoping for the next three seasons to end quickly. I am waiting for nature to welcome spring again, the time when young buds attempt, with all the life in them, to burgeon into bright, beautiful flowers.