"Though I was pained by her indifference, my psyche didn't suffer for her rejection, and I owe that to the girls who buttressed my self-worth with their sensual attentions," he began reviewing his life and times over our drinks. "Back home during holidays, I used to hang around a lot at a friend's place; though I didn't develop any romantic designs on his sisters, I was a hit with his cousins who were wont to visit them often; one girl was so enamored of me that she rarely let me be alone; her praises of me still hum in my ears after all these years and after what had happened. When it was time for me to go back to college, the Vizag Steel agitation took an ugly turn disrupting the train services, but my dad wanted to dispatch me to Berhampur in a goods lorry for my onward train journey to Ranchi. Oh how she begged me to stay back till the train services were resumed and I also wanted to enjoy her attentions
that much longer but there was no way I could've negated my dad's idea though it was 'neither here nor there' for me, as my heart was not in studies anyway; and it turned out to be a double jeopardy for me as she came to shun me whenever we met later. Wonder how she could feel so slighted!"
"Maybe that's why it's called calf-love."
"But I was the object of a durable calf love as well," he continued. "I happened to meet a charming visitor to another friend's place, who was no less charmed by my charms; but the thrill of it was when we met again as she revisited them after three years; the first thing that she did after she landed there was to ask my friend to fetch me forthwith, but then maybe as she was older than me, she didn't deem it fit to build upon our mutual attraction, well that was the last time we ever met. Barring a couple of more adolescent infatuations, what Cheiro said about No. 9 people, didn't he aver that they tend to love the wrong ones and end up without the final favor, sadly for me proved right, oh, how stars foretell?"
He paused for a while, apparently lost in the loss of his lost loves, and then had a couple of sips of his drink as if to uplift his spirits.
"While the flood of my obsession for my first love began to ebb, the tide of my fascination for my cousin turned into a hurricane," he resumed his narrative. "When we first met, she fell head over heels for my boyish looks, and the next time, it was my turn to lose my heart in her womanish curves. What with my accentuated feelings for her, her attentions made me feel a special being; but then leaving me alone, as she went to a movie with another relative, I couldn't bear her neglect; but when she returned home at the interval as my sulking face haunted her, as she put it, and seeing me delighted at her return, she told me that as she left the theatre, she knew that seeing me happy would be far more satisfying to her than watching the rest of the movie. Well, that set the emotional bond of our unbound affection, cemented by the small pleasures we began to steal; but the improbability of our marriage made her resist my desperate attempts for our sexual closeness; but once in frustration, as I tried to break up with her, she cajoled me back into her loving fold without conceding the favors of sex. When I was still in college, she got married and since I came to respect her sensitivity to her chastity, I gave a platonic turn to my passionate love; and as she became a proud mother, believe me, she swore, by placing her hand on her boy's head, that she loves me more than she loves her son, and as if to prove the sincerity of her love, she was wont to grant me the motherly warmth of it."
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."
"Sorry to say, your saga seems to blur the line between love and philandering. Surely I need an explanation for the sake of the prospective readers of your memoir."
"I see that 'one life, one love' is a canard spread by the lunatic poets," he said a little hurt. "Haven't psychologists testified to the fact that one can love more than one at the same time, and that applies no less to the second sex; well, love, like friendship, is a feeling and to say 'one love only' is like averring 'one friend only'. If any of your readers feels that all his friends save the first one are mere acquaintances, then I have no problem even if he takes me as a philanderer. Moreover, an eternal love is an absurd proposition that is if you mean sexual love, for it's in the nature of desire that it wanes with continued fulfillment and dissipates through prolonged longing."
"Be assured that I would solicit my readers' understanding on your behalf."
'Thanks for that,' he said and continued with the remarkable saga of his life. "But as her man's career graph rose and mine never took-off, her interest in me began to wane; why not, as the promise of my life that induced love in her was belied, her love for me would have lost its force; but then, why blame her for that's the reality of love in the realms of life; and falling in and out of love, I too had learned not to let my unrequited loves affect my life. But whenever I recall my journey through the deserts of disappointment, my tryst with a rare stunner in the oasis of sex stands apart; while I was cooling my heels with that scrape-through degree as you called it, I saw her in a mall; I was so overawed by her womanliness that I lost my eyes to her, and as if she appreciated my eye for feminine charms, she conveyed her compliments through her body language. But even before I had a full grasp of her enticing poise as she left the
place in her majestic gait, I followed her in a trance, but even after she left in a rickshaw, I stood transfixed as if she fixed me in a state of pure joy that was until a friend woke me up to the reality of her, Sumitra the common girl; but then the devastating revelation didn't dampen the pristine feelings her angelic persona induced in my enamored heart."
"Love seems to be obstinate in holding on to the first impression, won't Napoleon's love for the unfaithful Joséphine illustrate that."
"But then his divorcing her to sire an heir of royal blood to usher in his dynasty underscores the power of the ambitions of life over the fulfillments of love, well it all depends as Edward VIII renounced his throne to wed the woman he loved," he said (though he didn't name the beloved, his infectious memoir of love and loss impelled me to record her here as Wallis Simpson). "Marking her movements from then on, I began shadowing her during the day, and for my apparent adoration for her, she was wont to bestow me with her coy smiles as and when we crossed our paths. Once, when I followed her right up to her gate to mark her place, her young sibling told me that her sister was expecting me, but then while Cheiro's theory of numbers denied me the favors of those who fancied me; it was my principle not to buy sex with the paternal bucks that distanced me from her sensuous embrace. But in hindsight, I feel that it was nothing but sentimental nonsense for, all along, I wasted my dad's money like nobody's business; any way, my dilemma ended as I left home on a six-month assignment as a graduate trainee, and though I was a spendthrift, I had strived to save enough to savor her in a couple of flings or more. But when I returned home, I learned that she was out of bounds as she became someone's keep; oh what a KLPD it was as they say in the North, and how the development depressed me for days on."
"How life changeth one; the one who was averse to buying sex with his dad's bucks came to build his business empire with his wife's doles! Be gone all principles."
"Why fault life for our own lack of comprehension," he said seemingly taken aback. "Try seeing it through the prism of pragmatism and you will find its fault lines blurring in your vision, any way, what about having one large for both of us."