Love-less Love
“My life, so to say, became a stanza of the poem of first love, it’s not that my other affections were any prosaic for they were all penned in passion,” he continued. “Won’t the manifestations of first love and the embodiments of first sex stand apart from the pulsations of heart and the spasms of the body that one might experience in later affairs? And that’s why one should be choosy about the body for the first lay as anyway the reins of love are in the hands of heart. Whatever, with the newfound vision to envision women, I got bogged down by the second sex; the more femininity fascinated me for the contours of womanish curves seemed to outclass the symmetry of geometry, all the more I had a measure of my masculinity. My infatuation for women was such that the inflections of their nuances came to be worth pondering over than the intriguing riders of mathematical theorems. When compared to the feminist ways, which seemed puzzling to my inquisitive mind, the laws of physics appeared commonplace; and so, as I began to grapple with the dynamics of man-women chemistry, the inorganic reactions in the college lab seemed boring. Either compelled by my ardent manner or affected by my sex appeal and/or both, I’m not sure, women tended to respond to my eagerness in their sensual ways, and insensibly, the coyness of feminine demeanor seemed to shape the manliness of my persona. While the desire I discerned in the female espials made me feel desired as a male, their diffident demeanor in my presence afforded me a sense of conquest. Soon women made me realize that I am a ladies’ man.”
“Self-actualization in the arena of attraction, surely it was.”
“Writer-like again,” he said, and continued, “but as luck would’ve it, for all its promise, my first love ended up as a damp squib; it’s another matter that even as duds have girlfriends these days, in our time, the dashing too had to be content with daydreams. Though No.1 and I didn’t take our eyes off each other for the rest of the year, there was no way I could’ve made advances on her without causing a scandal in the college. Moreover, I loved her enough not to have caused any hurt to her orderly life; maybe had not I left for Ranchi to pursue that futile course in engineering, we would’ve come closer the next year. Whatever, the day before I left the town, I waited for her in the college corridor, hoping to bid her adieu; as she neared me, she stopped instinctively and I paced up to her intuitively. How disappointed she seemed at my impending departure and how elated I was when she Okayed my idea that we stayed in touch through correspondence. But in that moment of ecstasy, I failed to shake her hand, and maybe that lack of courtesy to love didn’t go down well with it, and so it seems, it never gave me another chance to embellish my first love with the touch of my beloved. Yet oblivious of my fate but with the accrued empathy of my father’s farewell tears I told you about, the next morning, I boarded the Howrah Mail with bountiful hope. Though she failed to keep her promise to correspond, yet I wrote to her unceasingly, picturing the love my heart bore for her but to no avail; but her indifference to my missives made no difference to my longing for her that began to wane my interest in studies.”