‘When she was as receptive to my caress at her seat,’ he always thought in puzzlement, ‘why was it that she found my hand on her breast so offensive? Oh, how she should’ve expected me to envisage the borders of her sensitivity in my state of excitation. True, she would have felt that I transgressed; yet she couldn’t have failed to feel the pulse of my love in the nuances of my touch. Didn’t my heart descend on my hand to vent its love on her frame! Oh, how it rushed to my mouth seeing her disjointed! Why did she choose to punish me with banishment for the failings of my love inspired by her own looks? How she thought I deserved the deserts! Why didn’t she pardon me, finding me repentant?’
He racked his brains for an answer that he never got but was sunken whenever he recalled that episode, ‘Had she pardoned me, how rejoicing it would have been for both of us! Seeing me ecstatic, she should’ve been deliriously joyous, and what a triumph of love that could have been! But that wasn’t to be. What should’ve been a fairy tale romance ended as an unmitigated disaster for both of us.’
‘What could be her name?’ he often thought. ‘What a pity that the most ardent love I’d ever experienced should remain a nameless memory!’
That nameless memory presently took his thoughts to that encounter with Jaya, again on a train.
He was going to Guntur, by the Circar Express, after holidaying with his grandfather at Kothalanka. Seeing him reading Walden, a young girl borrowed the book to have a look at it. However, after leafing through a few pages, she said that the stuff was too stiff for her head. At the next halt, she welcomed her friend, whom she was obviously expecting. Her friend had memorable eyes that moved him. He always knew the eyes that speak insensibly drew him to the endowed woman. If the woman were to be dusky as well, with a tinge of sadness attached to her demeanor, well, he would find her all the more bewitching.
‘May I know your name?’ he asked the newcomer, who seemed to find him equally exciting.
‘What for?’ she questioned him spiritedly.
‘Don’t you think,’ he said memorably, ‘I need a name to pin your thoughts on?’
‘Jaya,’ she said coyly.
Though they exchanged many an ardent glance during that long journey besides their addresses, their inclinations went the way all acquaintances made in the travel time go - into memory banks.
Though their mutual liking during the sojourn might enthuse the hearts of the infatuated co-travelers, once they separate, unsupported by the habit that sustains a relationship, their enthusiasm for each other insensibly wanes, pushing the nascent ardor on to the back burner.