love story ??

I don't think I can ever forget that particular day when I fell of my bicycle, it was the first time I brought down some one else with me. She still does not know why she wanted to accompany me to the shop that day. I think I was 14 and she was probably 10 and I was taking a vacation at her place. Once we fell all I wanted to do was ask her not to tell her parents or her sisters; she promised me she wouldn't.

She walked in to her house crying.

I rarely saw her or talked to her again for probably the next 8 years, mostly because I was always away studying from hostels and partly for a while because I was angry she complained. The next time I spoke to her I had already started to work. She was with her parents at my apartment that I shared with my friend. We never spoke to each other then I think. She still remembers that poster of 'Aishwariya Rai' that decorated my closet then.

She very recently told me why she was laughing all the while that day.

It must have been at least an year before I spoke to her again, we actually spoke a few times and one fine day she was crying to me for some reason she did not want to tell me. I was happy not because she was crying but because I thought she took me in to confidence. I gave her a few books and a Clint Eastwood movie collection a few days afterward.

Again very recently she told me she was already crying when I called her over a petty quarrel with her best friend and it had nothing to do with taking me in to confidence or what ever.

Girls (women?) came and left my life all the while; good friends, very good friends, silent admirers, very vocal haters, one girl I loved and one girl who loved me, to cut a very long story short.
Two more years passed before I talked to her again, this time I was at her house for something about her sister's marriage.

She suggested me to get a haircut and a good shave.

Two years of my mother asking me to get married, her parents pushing me a little, and some weird things had me almost getting married to her elder sister; at least that was what I thought for a whole night. To my own disbelief I attended her elder sister's marriage, though a little flustered. That was when I saw her standing a little away from her elder sister, obviously uncomfortable with the crowd, the cameras and lighting. For a moment it was like one of those 80s movies, everything else was blurry, and she was at the centre of the blur, bright and beautiful in a flowery yellow salwar.

For no reason I suddenly walked up to her to say something and all I could muster was the courage to say 'goodbye Maha', damn. That was probably the first time I called her by her name and probably the 10th time I had ever spoken to her and possibly my first word to her in 3 years.

That evening I told my mother I wanted to get married.

Everyone thinks I was always in love with her, stupid but it helps cover my weird story..