The other day, I was discussing with someone dear about how everybody has a movie that characterizes his or her adolescence. For me, it was… ‘Maine Pyar Kiya’. 🙂
……….
Though at the time of its release I was still a few years away from my teens, it is surely the movie that defines that stage for me. I discretely remember how, after watching it, at least one thing had changed overnight – the way I used to see the daughters of my father’s friends. It was the case with all of them, but there was this… one particular one.
She was simply… pretty. We used to play all sorts of games, from dumb charades to antakshari to cards; and before that movie the equation was simple – the ‘bhaiyya’ stuff. After the movie, though the way she addressed me stayed same, something had changed. Incidentally, we both were big fans of MPK, and it only helped that something brew.
Interestingly, we never said anything to each other but that something manifested in all sorts of small gestures and words (the fact that we both remembered MPK’s dialogues word-by-word only helped further). It stayed that way for a few years and as it normally happens in every clichéd story, her father got transferred and they went to another city.
And the life continued…
Years after that, when we were in our early 20s, the two families happened to meet again. We all met with immense affection and connect; and so did the two of us. We were all having a good time, snacking and chatting, and then suddenly, her mother mentioned how two of us were great fans of MPK. In that one precise moment, we both looked at each other. And as our eyes met, we both could see that same something in each other’s eyes.
So what happened next? After all, it was the perfect opportunity to take it further from there. Well! As it turned out, we never met after that. We could. But we didn’t. And the reason was unsaid yet clear.
You know what… even in tender emotion of love, every relationship has a unique texture. It can be romance or passion or friendship or respect or longing or companionship. Whatever it is, it surely is there. Though there can be a mix, there is always one prominent one. And as long as that texture is there, relationship remains alive, and endures.
Well! In our case, that texture was… innocence; that innocence which belonged to the coordinates of ‘time and space’ which we had left behind… in an era that could never come back. So…we both moved on, and went on to experience the other beautiful textures of love in life. But we never tried to reconnect, probably because we both respected that…
……….
…texture. 🙂
