He stopped for a while savoring some more of Laphroaic seemingly cherishing the recollections of those past moments.
“What a solace it was for me to sink into her lap to feel the depth of her love for me,” he said on resumption, “how fulfilling those small pleasures had been for both of us, it’s as if the mother in her that granted me what the lover in her had denied me. Oh, in those moments of pure love, how we used to feel the fusion of our souls; who knows an illicit affair would have fouled our platonic union; anyway true to the oneness of our being, while on her deathbed she had communicated her longing for our togetherness, and given that she had conveyed it telepathically, you could imagine the intensity of her feeling; she fell ill suddenly and being in Cal at that time, I wasn’t in the know of it, but that midnight I woke up to her thoughts from my deep sleep, and stayed awake disturbed for long; the next day when the telegram carried the news of her midnight end, I knew that she lived her last moments thinking about me; oh how she kept her vow even as death snatched her away from my thoughts.”
“What a poignant end to a platonic love; maybe had your No.1 remained in touch, surely your first love wouldn’t have seen such a cold end.”
“It’s one of those ifs and buts of life,” he said. “But when alive, how my soul-mate looked forward for my marriage; why she wanted to stay with me for a couple of months as and when I settled down with my wife; how she developed ideas of her own about my wife; well, for her I was the perfect man there ever was, and no prospective match ever satisfied her. Sadly she was not around when Rama came into my life, but surely they would’ve loved each other for their natures matched; what an unusual love triangle it would’ve been; maybe, we can divine the limitations of relationships through unfulfilled expectations but it’s the incompleteness of life that gives us the complete understanding of it.”
“What a poetic idea it is.”
“But as the women I loved afforded me only emotional satisfaction, the physical fulfillment of love was still a far cry,” he continued. “It was then that a girl in her pre-puberty was enamored of me, and I used her body as it could afford, to satiate my newfound urges; you can’t brand me a pedophile for both of us were juveniles then; well it was possible that the innocence of her infatuation combined with the curiosity of her sexuality made her a willing mate in our incomplete unions. But when she matured, I took stock of our affair; even as I visualized the hazards of our continued escapades, it was clear that I had no emotional urge to make her my woman; so I told her not to give in, even if I persisted because our marriage was not on the cards. Oh, how shocked she was at that the poor thing; she was too young to accuse me of betrayal and I was not old enough to grasp my folly; whatever, there was no bad blood between us. Why, she continued to adore me but I kept a healthy distance from her, and even after marrying a worthy though she remained fond of me; I never thought of exploiting her weakness for me to curry her favors with sentimental trespasses. Maybe, I loved her more than I had lusted for her.”