My First Love

Whatever be the case, don’t let go of your first love. Your first love alone reigns supreme, those memories clasping you forever…in all those hours of solitude, in all those phases of loneliness and longing.

Even at the cost of sounding repetitive, re-stressing: don’t kill that very first love. Clasp it with all your might! I’m well aware of the vital philosophical strain to love — that is, if love has to happen it will happen. Let me add more to it: When your first love happens, never let go of it! No, not even for the sake of so many sakes. Just listen to that ever — beating heart, to that inner voice. After all, that first love is one of those uncomplicated relationships — brimming with raw emotions and sans baggage.

Fight as fiercely as you can to clasp that love. Maybe you find it just once in an entire lifespan. The sad reality is that only a few manage to find love and the sadder aspect is that the first love — which carries with it an abundance of innocence and raw passion — is invariably crushed by the parents or those intruders in the guise of family well-wishers.

That first love, where the two pairs of eyes meet and mate from the depths of the heart and from within the folds of the very soul is the ultimate one! There are little considerations of caste and creed and no emphasis on wants. Simply speaking, it’s an enormous heap of emotions inter-playing with an array of feelings. Yet, the emotions are trampled upon, rather too systematically. Thereafter, after the first love is killed, the following so called ‘love affairs’ could be compromises along a silsila of the contrived giving-in and much more along the strain.

Nah, there’s no guarantee of finding love ever again in your life. Anyway, true intense love just happens… it cannot be found by any of the contrived or manipulative means. After all, the heart has its own ways. Nobody can foretell ‘who’ and ‘why’ and ‘when’ that crucial attraction takes off, with the heart wandering about ever so persistently and freely. It hates compulsions and detests barriers coming in the way. It craves for azaadi!

My first love happened when I was around 16. And sabotaged even before it could move towards some definite direction. I was much too young and naive and more of a simpleton to go rebelling in that fierce full-fledged way.

Mind you, I haven’t been able to find love again! Nah, never found that level of genuine love which held out that vital emotional anchorage for me.

Looking back, though I consider myself to be somewhat shy and more of an introvert, yet I was not just attracted to him but also relayed to him that I was drawn to him and wanted to befriend him. I think what had attracted me to him, rather too spontaneously, was his ‘musical’ laugh and that intense-earnest look in his eyes. He was outspoken and gentle, caring and concerned. That made me feel very, very comfortable in his company.

In the beginning, it seemed rather smooth going because we were residing in the same residential colony in Lucknow, so there seemed no dearth of the so-called  ‘seeing-each-other’ occasions  — on the main road or along the inner lanes and bylanes. But when the phone calls took off (remember, I’m  taking you back to those landline days of the early 70s) my  mother more than sensed that I was talking to a boy! And that made her extra vigilant. And with that there seemed to be an atmosphere of being watched and controlled. It was not just my mother and my younger sister but even the family cook who’d doubled as a chowkidar who’d be hovering around the outer lawns and the main gate to our home.

Meeting him was getting to be very difficult. Full of obstacles. Worries of getting spotted by relatives or family friends added to the stress. To compound the situation, Lucknow in the early 1970s was hopeless, at least where meeting points were concerned.  

I tried rebelling, defying all those constant don’ts but there seemed so much of that emotional pressure and restrictions put forth by my mother that love got crushed. Technically, yes, but then not really. The fact that after all these years and decades I remember him, recall every single detail of our friendship and crave for his company is enough to relay that intense love cannot ever be crushed.

Though our friendship continued for almost over three years after the initial takeoff, stressful build-ups at my home were getting a bit too much for me, for my nerves, for my very survival. Almost impossible to handle. I was left with little choice but to end it, for the sake of so many sakes!

I was later married to a bureaucrat. An arranged marriage, mismatched and miserable, leaving me so very hopelessly sad and sullen that I decided to end it after long years of incompatibility.

And though I was training myself to cope with loneliness, the emotional vacuum more than lurked. Yes, loneliness more than lurked. Nah, no constant companion. The supposed who’s who of this capital city, New Delhi, had never really impressed me; drawn that I’m  towards the uncomplicated creatures: the small-town wallahs! 

On the suggestion of friends, I decided to try locating my first love! Though years or decades had passed by, yet I started that search, trying to locate this man I’d loved as a teenager in Lucknow. This, when after all these 36 years, I hadn’t kept in touch with him, and also hadn’t the slightest clue to his whereabouts, whether he was even around!

After several weeks, I did manage to get his telephone number. Heard his voice after a gap of over 36 years. I was more than thrilled but he sounded curt. Though he recognized my voice almost immediately, seconds after the initial ‘hello’, but didn’t talk much, nothing beyond the formality-ridden sentences. He did take down my telephone number and called after a fortnight. We spoke for what seemed hours as though time had stopped just about then and there.

Each time we spoke he’d sounded pained and hurt. He hadn’t recovered from that trauma…the way I’d moved away from him. For him, that pain, that hurt had been ongoing, lingering on all these years. He hadn’t forgotten a single detail, not a single sentence I had uttered 36 years back. Even the exact parting sentences. Though I seemed to have pushed back into some little corner of my head the exact parting words and sentences, but he hadn’t. Kept detailing every single sentence, word by word! He also told me that he was upset with me to such an extent that he didn’t want to meet him till his hurt subsided.

Here also only tragedy awaited: though I did manage to trace him, I couldn’t get to meet him. It is only through telephonic conversations that I could connect to him; then not even that. He passed away within months… succumbing to cancer.

One Spring evening, when he’d called to say he’d  been diagnosed with cancer, I  felt not just shaken and jolted by the destined turns, but  more than determined to meet him. But there seemed to be a firm ‘no’ from him. After that he sent me one message after  another; detailing the intensive treatment he was undergoing and the upcoming surgeries for removal of the cancerous tumors. 

I pleaded… continued pleading if I could visit him at the hospital. He didn’t want me to. Why? Didn’t want to be seen in that dying condition; said it would compound the pain.

He sounded weak and breathless. Nah, couldn’t talk much; just about managing to convey the intensity of his love for me.

That was the last time we had spoken.

He passed away days after that.

Leaving me shattered. I couldn’t get to meet him even after managing to locate him after 36 years. This, when he and I happened to reside in the same city — Delhi!

Perhaps, destined not to meet.