“Didn’t Ghalib say, if not undone by love, I would’ve been second to none.”
“What a heady mix sher-shairi and unrequited love make,” he said. “I’ve had its brew to the brim to savor to its dregs but in the end it was this celebration of self-deprecation that had put me off from that. But by then much water had flowed to waste under the bridge of my love-less love and my career course too had headed towards the deserts of failure; so sometime later I sent her, so to say, my letter of resignation, in which I wrote that when I sought her hand, I hoped to be her lover at home and a peer at the workplace, but with my fledgling career leading me nowhere, there was no way I could aspire to lead her to the altar. How I beseeched her to hold my hand of friendship as I had burnt the desires of love in the groins of failures; why not she let my boundless affection for her be the balm of her life.”
“Isn’t it an idealistic proposition impracticable in practice?”
“You would know when I tell you about my platonic relationship with that sweet sixteen cousin of mine,” he continued. “But sadly, my first love’s reply was a backdated letter she herself penned in her mother’s name, warning me to leave her daughter alone; what a merciless blow upon a hapless surrender that I couldn’t even gasp ‘Et tu, Brute’; how could I have for she never showed any signs of like devotion towards me to warrant such a lament. But whither went her innocence; or was it merely a figment of mine own imagination; how I came to value her with a skimpy acquaintance; what was left of it, after all that; didn’t someone say that women’s looks were his only books, and what pretty follies they taught him; why it was her loaded looks that goaded me to plunge into the voidness of love-less love. As I turned despondent, I felt that I might forget her in time but I would never forgive her meanness, and that’s what I wrote to her; well, in remorse, she asked our common friend to tell me that some devil might’ve possessed her when she penned that impersonated letter, that she was at a loss as to why she failed to tell me that she felt one of her colleagues was better suited than me to be her man, and that she would pray for a better spouse for me.”