IN THE WINTER OF MY LOVE…..

       IN THE WINTER OF MY LOVE…..

        Being the further adventures of Hanuman Murali and friends

There will always be the girl in the shop I will never forget, she sold samosas for a living. Off Ramanujam St, the place our home was a small lane which catered to the domestic needs of the locality, provisions, soaps; chandeliers and internet centers etc.

Ross st, also had a small establishment which sold samosas, Siddhi Vinayak Samosa Shop Est 1996 existed between two cycle repair shops Balu Punctures and Ideal Cycle Repair, that’s how we boys from the local school got to make it a sort of regular haunt.

Just when I had finished school, she arrived. She was Kaka’s daughter, we called him Kaka because somebody before us had done so, typically he was the man with no name who used to cruise around in a cycle which was painted bright orange and on the top of the front light was a sticker which showed his allegiance to Hema Malini, the dream girl of yesteryears and the south Indian representation in a North Indian world of dreams.

Maybe she was younger, maybe she was older I didn’t know. Her name was Abhaya which meant fearless, I later found out using a newly purchased book at the district library called “Do you know what your name really means?” This was many years after Abhaya left and I wasn’t looking for it, so it was sort of a co-incidence when I narrated it to Murali who always read his daily papers at the local libraries.

He claimed that by buying newspapers he was paying to receive bad news, but I knew he bought every issue of Madras Jazz and read word by word of the adventures, then disowning them whenever we met.

“So you still remember her?”

Of course, people really lie when they say they have completely forgotten the existence of another person, names I can understand but entire lives is bullshit, but it was not that I was thinking about her on a daily basis, the exchanges between us were minor, and some might consider it redundant.

The maximum I could say to her “two samosas please”. Abhaya was an irritable girl, I could say now quite comfortably and fearlessly that I have never seen her face as being cheerful, mostly it would be the redness of her pointed nose which a little more sharper could be used to chop onions or the ‘U’ made by the knitting of her eyebrows. Thinking back now, if only she had smiled I could have completed the poem.

“You wrote a poem?”  The startled voice of Hanuman Murali came from between the City and the State pages of the Hindu, the answer being partially a yes. I did try to write a poem but I could never complete it, to say more of the truth I could never get past the first verse.

“Why does everybody write poetry when they are in love?” asked Murali, he then went on to say “why don’t write poems about people in angry mood, about terrorists attacks, elections etc, why is it always above love and lovers?”

“Look” I said quite sternly “I wasn’t in love, it was…”

“An attraction..?” he completed

The words attraction and infatuation are two words thrown at growing teenagers, if these words are thrown at you means that you are actually growing up, I picked up the words myself from the father of one of my friends. My friend tried to run away with his neighbor’s daughter, only to be espied by the dog Jackson (this Jackson was the neighbor’s dog, who had served in the military, I mean the dog). Later my friend was subjected to a three hour long lecture on ‘the perils of falling in love esp. with neighbors’ by his parents and I had gone to give him moral support.

They pooh-poohed his pleas of romance as mere attraction and infatuation and said he had many more years before he could choose a bride, later we used to call him Magnet, because of all this attraction, we never spoke after that. The boy later went on to join IIT Madras and married his research assistant in Mumbai in the years to come, the neighbor’s daughter too got married to a vet doctor who practiced in Botswana, Jackson however died of old age.

“So what was it that you wrote?” Murali asked

I didn’t take much of a minute to come up with the line; it was after all the first line of an unfinished poem.

“In the winter of my love…” I began with a raise in voice like a statesman in wartime and before I knew it was over. Hanuman Murali on the creaking wooden chair that the library provides for its regulars raised his eyebrows in anticipation; it took him a while to realize that the poem had ended.

“That’s it?”

“I couldn’t find many words that rhymed with love, at least at that time , I think wrote it sometime in December so hence the winter and It had quite a nice ring to it” I replied in silent protest, so convincing that Murali never spoke about my poetry or Abhaya ever again.

Feel good stories often have storylines such as the reminiscing of a lost love to instill interest in the audience, the main reason as to why these things are done is so that the audience themselves can look back at their nascent love just for a moment, and for that moment even think that how life would have changed if something had actually happened, it is storylines like these which might make people like my friend in Bombay to think how his life would have changed if they had successfully eloped. The girl in Botswana might also recall these things in secret amidst all those monkeys that her husband was to treat, as for me and as you can clearly see I’m only with a line in the poem.

But feel good stories only work in the theatre, never in real life; there is no such thing, for all I know life might have turned out worst in all the above cases. Everyone has these kinds of stories and one lost love is no different from another,it is only human nature that we tend to glorify the past. That reminds me of the day when Murali bought a cuckoo to introduce some ‘song’ in his life, but then that is a different story altogether.