Life is full of precipices. Just now, I am standing at the edge of honesty, afraid to keep talking for what I might say. I have a story to tell, and, though I write and write about the girl, I haven’t told it yet. To imagine doing so makes me feel exposed. And if I keep talking, I’ll tell you things I never intended, which may, for just that very reason, seem like the only truth.
She was the sort of girl that boys would take to immediately. She was tall and quiet and had an air of elegance around her. They craved her attention. She had a way of making them feel things, and — in an odd way, would never talk about it, yet you would know. You could tell by her frozen demeanor, almost distant, that boys didn’t know what to do with her. Some tried to approach her romantically, some made sexual comments about her from afar. All of them, without exception, were intimidated by her.
With the passing of months, we suddenly had a college group, mostly boys, mostly related to one another from our middle school days, mostly trying to outdo one another in antics, in order to claim the attention of some cuter versions in our group. But, inexplicably to me, the cool distant girl, the enigma, was somehow always standing around me. At first, I didn’t understand that she found me better than the smarter boys, the ones who wore branded clothes, straddling their bikes, wearing their shades. I was one of those terrible boys who craved attention but had no understanding of how to go about it.
But that’s not the end of the story, at least not what I want to tell. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. So I’ll try again.
When she didn’t come back after that summer, I went looking for her. I felt slightly bolder and sent a message through one of her friends — a sort of presumptuous — Where did you go call. In the days that predated the cell phone and internet era in India, same-sex friends were the white pigeons carrying messages back and forth. I was not, as you can imagine, versed in the proper etiquette of performing these gestures, having never done that before. I had no sense that she might have a life of her own, that I might be intruding, or that at worse, I would hold no interest to her.
And then one day I got a letter.
It was dated Oct 23rd, and it was stamped and mailed to me even though she lived not ten miles away. She said that she was lying in bed, in the middle of the night, writing the letter. She was unwell and skipped college since it didn’t interest her anyway. She said she didn’t know where to start with me, so she was writing this letter, telling me she wanted to go to the beach someday when she is back. In the part of the letter that said the most, though, she wrote about the week-long trip to Rajasthan, a remote town slightly up north in Gujrat that she was about to take with her aunt and cousins the next day. In one of her last paragraphs, she wrote that we will meet up someday soon when she is back. The word — someday, seemed to loom over our lives.
She went to Rajasthan and when she returned a couple of weeks later, we started to hang out. I went with her to a fair; we used to walk by down the pond and loved to watch the sun go down. She’d come down to play cards with the boys and they started to look less in awe of her as she laughed; we argued about music; We sat next to each other by the pond behind our college and later rolled around a bit on the grass soaking the afternoon sun, our fingers barely touching — and talked in slight whispers to each other. . I’d never lain with a girl next to me before. She told me about her childhood and how she wrote in her journal when she was feeling lonely. I turned my head to look at her and she was already looking at me, her big brown eyes locked in. She smiled.
But then something unexpected changed the trajectory of that life plan. With a month of winter left, she stopped coming to see me. She just dropped out of my life. The first time I knew something was wrong was when she didn’t show up to walk with me home after my classes. I was shaking from my sugar high of extra sweetened tea from the local stall. I sat in the parking lot, swatting bees and nursing my wounds, but she never came, and it seemed to me that growing up was merely the process of becoming more and more damaged.
I did nothing. I had nothing more left in me — my soul was not generous. The disappointment towards the world, in general, wasn’t logical. There didn’t seem to be any reason why it had started in the first place, and losing her didn’t escalate it. I began every once in a while to walk back to the pond behind our college, deep in the fields to sit under that tree where we spent hours talking. And perhaps, even though I was deeply ridiculous a character — for the first time in my life I was working without any hope of impressing anyone. I hoped, in fact, that I was invisible. Audience-less. I would sit under the big tree and toss flat stones in the pond because that was all I could think to do with myself. The area around me was left bereft of any small rocks. I guess I was, though I could never admit it, heartbroken. When nothing around me was prolific — not my body, not my family, not my love, I turned to the earth and gathered up its most extravagant bounty and tossed it back into itself. The stones kept showing up with vigor, without shame, calling me back to them.
I didn’t see her again until the end of the summer at the annual college day festival. That night at the show, she walked into the hall with a few of her friends, and as she passed me, she slowed down for a second and looked up with a tight winded smile and said hello — The same one that we used to laugh about, and how she reserved it for those ones that she wanted to avoid. “Ooh, that must zing them.”, I would laugh.
It’s so unfair that we live when we don’t understand, and by the time we understand we can no longer live it. I didn’t hear the fear in her voice, the anger that was fear that was love in the sharp end of her fingertips. I was dizzy with anger and shame myself: She was either mocking me or she really did think I was that invisible. She was cruel, a million miles away, I thought. We didn’t speak the rest of the night, and then I went home.
But that’s not how things ended finally between us either.
My friends and I drove up to the mud island beach one weekend during the cool November days. By then, I had told myself I was long past mourning — I didn’t care about her or the coming end of college. I had a trip to Goa planned for later that autumn with my dad and then go off to study engineering somewhere, hopefully outside Bombay, away from her blast radius.
I was in control again, breezy and unflinching. I wanted people to know I could go anywhere, do anything. And when I saw her at the beach fire on that Saturday night, I was a chiseled ice sculpture of a boy. The light went right through me; I reflected nothing back to her. But I smiled and sparkled at other people I knew until I left proudly alone without looking back.
She caught up with me as we were heading back to take the boat that would take us across the river.
“Hey,” she said, “wait up a minute. Please.”
“I know you probably don’t want to talk to me, but can we, I don’t know, just take the ride together?” She was intense and something had changed.
“I don’t know, — I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”
“Please?.” Was this the old supplicant? I’m ashamed to say I needed this, needed to imagine myself loved more than I loved. I agreed stiffly and we rode for a long time in the back of the boat without speaking.
She stared out over the horizon, her hands holding the deck. The sleeve of her dress had ridden up her hand and I could see her hand, slightly skinnier than before. The woods were absolutely black, and their quiet was on the edge of a scream.
“I’m so sorry about what happened over the summer,” she said.
“Sorry for what? There’s nothing to be sorry about.”
“You know. I’m sorry for acting the way I did. For not coming to see you.”
“Oh, that’s no big deal. We’re all free to do what we want to do. It didn’t matter one way or the other.” I could tell I was hurting her. She could see right through my nonchalance. And I knew that too. I was afraid she might give up. She might let me go and not make me feel things.
She looked at me and then beyond: “You are probably the only one that gets me, actually understands what I say… and I stopped writing in the journal after I met you”. The implication of that last sentence lingered in the air between us.
“I didn’t know what to do”. There was a pause.
“I did not want you to get hurt too….”
For a moment I was a bit beyond myself. I saw a flash of a scene from the previous summer: We were at the pond lying next to each other under the evening sun. I was covered in goosebumps and sand, quiet, sad, unable to hear her for the din of skepticism in my head. I never imagined that these things were this obvious. Could a girl like her really have cared for someone like me?
Then I said, with more honesty and insight than I had thought myself capable of, “But we were friends. We were always good friends. And then, I was alone and needed you. And you ran away. What kind of friend is that?”
“You’re right. I screwed up.” We were both crying now.
“Can I have another chance? Can we try again?”
We were holding each other and I felt that with this talk we had just grown up together even though it lasted all of five minutes and we were still teenagers. And with this gesture — our hands in each other’s hair, foreheads pressed together — we were finally home, balanced precariously — like two playing cards that make up a tent when aligned against each other.
But we had already lost our moment.
Even though we had one more summer together, I was already building moats, knowing I could never shake that jaded feeling that built inside me over those months when we were apart.
And she? She was, already protecting herself, knowing deep down, that she would have to let me go.
