“I fell in and out of love with every girl in my village during my late teenage years. But those days a boy and girl never spoke to each other. “
The above lines are by the hero from one of RKNarayanan’ s short stories, if my memory serves me right.
So, can it not be true for a girl to be in and out of love with boys in various stages of her life?
I Reena(name changed) can say that I was one of the above. Today being a mature 25 and married to Mr. Handsome, I can be classified as “happily married”. My loving companion is on a tour, so for want of anything else to do, I go on a nostalgic journey of my little loves. My first romance was during the ‘primary school’ years. This means till you are 11 or 12 years old. Although not much remains in the form of memory, I remember this boy with dimples and a cute mop of hair. He was my little hero. I felt we suited each other on two issues, both of us short in height and both skinny. It left me in tears each time the teachers changed our places in class but never made him sit next to me. I hoped each year that the next class I go to, I would sit next to him. But it was not to be. So my admiration for him was from a distance. To tell the truth, I don't remember him looking at me even once. I know I agonised over that. Then one day I noticed his palms. He had skin peeling off them in round white patches. On top of that, they were very sweaty too. If I remember right, there ended my romance during primary school. All my years were wasted I thought. I should have looked at his hands earlier, wherein I could have transferred my attention to the next cute boy there was.
Well after this sad story, I moved on to ‘high school’. This is where you spend the first half of your teenage life. All of us girls, maybe the boys too were proud that we were all grown up to go alone by public transport or bicycles to school. No more being shepherded into school buses I thought. Some of us had younger siblings, who were forced to put up with our pride that we were now different and superior to them. The environment, classmates, teachers were totally new but it took me a very short time to fix the love of my life. Actually I think there were two handsome boys and I would switch my affections from one to the other. This depended on who was in the line of my ‘sideways vision’. I will explain this. The class was divided into two rows. Girls were seated in one and boys in the other. The side glances could only bring a few bodies into one's sight. So when we changed places which was mandatory, only one of them would remain in my sideways vision. Another very important point was that girls were too shy to even look directly at 'that row’. In my heart I hoped they would sense my silent affection although I didn't think what I would do if someone told me something in the nature of “I like you”.The mills & boon romantic novels fuelled our imagination that there will be romance one day. Then one day I caught one of my hero glancing secretly again and again at a beautiful classmate of mine. His betrayal made me curse him and I told him to go to hell, mentally of course. My high school years gradually ended and the tragedy of my primary school continued.
Now the next stage was set. We 15 and 16 year olds were stepping out of school and entering undergraduate “college”. I was finally rid of my uniforms. But faltered & blundered with my dressing, although this realization is an afterthought, 10 years late. My assumption that I was glamorous enough to hook a line of boys turned out to be too far-fetched. I managed to catch the eye of a mad fellow who followed and frightened half the girls in class. Finally we heard that after he had turned his attention to an influential father's daughter, he was put in jail.
There were such a large number of boys and girls in class and in the entire college that it was like a confusing kaleidoscope. Suddenly the boys were all so tall that even if I courageously looked, it would be at the flared bottom of their bell-bottom pants. Moreover we girls were advised of the ‘keep boys at arm's length rule’. This was also an age when the boys looked their ugliest, to me. But we girls thought that we were very attractive as we were in our sweet teens. Maybe it was only in our homes we were regarded so. According to many of us,there was thus only one way, the girl would have to be wooed by a love struck boy. But ‘arms length’ turned out to be a very great distance and difficult to cross for them that they only resorted to staring (they had become brave enough and crossed the glance line). So then, the two years turned out to be uneventful and overdressed except for some stray cases of a brave boy approaching a ‘mod’ girl only to be told off. Girls turned their attention to the new entrant, a box in our lives. The television programs where we got to see men too courageously in the proximity of our homes but at a safe distance too. My line of thought is cut short as my dutiful husband checks to see if everything is fine with me. He was not satisfied with the dreamy response but said bye. I shall stop at this juncture to maybe continue the remaining 7 or 8 years of romance.
