I am Sh sh
sh....Sha Rukh, not my real name but her favorite actor. It was the
sobriquet name she had given to me.
She was 14 and I
was 17. On our new uniforms we crossed each other, met our eyes, looked back, fell
in love and heaven be praised it was the love at first sight. We understood it
because we smiled, to each other.
Nature had it
that I could confess only towards the end of academic session. On a full paged
paper I wrote, "I love you". I had waited a day long to get a similar
note, "I love you too". It was on 12th October. That day I discovered other dates were just envy of it.
I felt insecure
and feared of losing her. I wrote a long letter to forget me, handed over to
her friend and left to another boarding school. However, I could not forget her
and she lived within me in the form of heart beats until I got three-paged
letter from her. I missed my beats, felt a terrible loss and several days later
realized I deserved that.
Two years
through and 2000 kilometer away from home, I heard she was preparing to become
a mid-wife. I imagined she must be enjoying in her new institute but could not
dare to think if she was going out with anyone. A yearn to go back and embrace
her was becoming a distant dream. I lived with my thoughts and imagination
thereafter.
When we met
online 14 years later we did not know where to start from. We felt nervous, sad
and with exuberance of mixed feelings learnt that she had become a mother of two
lovely kids. She learnt that I was also married and recently joined the world
of fatherhood. I had told her everything of how I kept her in my heart and
cherished those memories. I had to tell her before another 14 years or so just slip off.
After many
exchange of mails and telephone calls, we saw ourselves riding again from where
we had left a decade and half ago. We were travelling a beautiful journey to a
destination not truly known. We also went back to those years accusing each other
on why each had taken this or that step, eventually making our hearts burn with
remorse and guilt. We cried a lot and we
were falling in love once again. We realized that it was a tug of war between
the reality and us. We had become the responsibility to our spouses and kids.
We did not want to hurt them. True love must not hurt anyone, we knew this. We
wanted to enrich love and spill happiness to our spouses and kids. We became
the reasons to live not only for ourselves but for the two families.
