In the year 1985…

I have been grumbling in my writings for quite some time now and it seems to have made me look cynical towards life, towards what I write. Changing the course of letters this time, I hope I won’t sound judgmental. Time and again, the best chapters of bygone days, nostalgia has attacked me hauling me to a period of time when all the hoof marks of memory appear vague. Even the chronicles of those periods have been flushed out of my head but this is one of that can never be over and done, this is my story of first love. Having passed the entry exam, I had just been admitted to Montessori One in Holy Cross School. It was back in 1985 and I was just three years old. Her name was Sushmita Mukherjee, a beautiful Bengali girl and I was her proud class mate. I don’t remember so much of other things, but the break time was when our love would take its deeper roots. It was the time when she always used to share her tiffin with me and many times, my parents had caught her feeding me with her hand. Our love bloomed in a childish innocence; her love, true like a dream and my falling for her as natural as a breeze. It was more of an acquaintance in the clear which my family making fun of me later had translated as love. Love it was indeed and intimacy but of our purity, of our simplicity, and of our juvenile affinity. I don’t have any idea of where and what she must be doing now. After completing our Montessori, she left for some other part of India and I joined St. Thomas. We have never seen or talked to each other since. Of an age that nothing can be recalled, I still remember her chubby face smiling at me and her handful of morsel moving towards me. Years have gone by and life has put us to different edges; many things have changed and many forgotten but still when I have to think of her, a blur image clearly shines on my mind and I hear Tim McGraw singing-

“I worked so hard for that first kiss

And a heart don’t forget something like that

Like an old photograph

Time can make a feeling fade

But the memory of a first love

Never fades away.”