Was I 18? Or 19 perhaps? Yes, I
remember, I was 18.5 years of age when the white envelope arrived at my home. The summer holidays after the first year in
college. I was then too young to have
mature vices but too old to have none at all. By that time, I had picked two from among a
basket of vices – cigarettes and occasional beer. It is another matter that the vices of yore
now have a vice-like grip on me but let me not deviate any further and return
to the white envelope.
At about two, the usual postman
arrived and threw a bunch of letters and envelopes from outside the green
gate. The building where I lived also
housed 14 other families. Yes, 15 families in all but don’t hasten to conjure
up images of some Raheja Residency type dwelling complex. In one of the narrowest streets of
Triplicane, the first house on the left as you enter from Pycrofts Road was my
abode then. Aromas of Rava & Masala wafting from the hotel kitchen that shared a
common wall with our building. Three
floors of godown like abominations masquerading as human dwellings, with at
least a 100 finding a roof over their heads in that building. I believe it still stands….…Oh, no, again I
am going astray, let me return to the white envelope.
Just inside of the green gate is a narrow verandah or passage
or whatever, running along the entire width of the building. One end adorned
with 15 EB meters but enough space for four or five to sit and play rummy.
(without money inside the house but with money outside, don’t tell anyone..)
And that was what I was doing religiously that hot afternoon at two, when the
white envelope fell on my lap. Momentarily it shook me and made me forget
about the worry of not having a true sequence at hand and running the risk of
80 and rejoining.
The beautiful handwriting on it
was a give-away. Could have been written
only by a woman. A girl. A beautiful girl. An unmarried, beautiful
girl. But my name printed on the envelope with such handwriting was perplexing
and not amenable to logic or reason as I could have been as far away from a
beautiful unmarried girl as North Pole is from South Pole. At
18.50 years of age, I never used to get a good supply of letters, save for the occasional TNPSC or
BSRB exam call letter, let alone hand-written messages from a girl, a fair girl at that (unless she worked with BSRB). You know, the
typical stuff typical lower middle class folks get…..
The ‘From’ address rang a faint
bell. Girija Menon? Wait, where did I
come across that? Wait. Ah, suddenly I remembered. Everything fell in place. That bloody letter I shot off to Indian
Express a week back and which bloody got published. Age makes you do funny
things which a normal sane person would think thrice before doing. Age, before
20 and age, after 60. I, falling under
the first bracket then, did several funny things which are too embarrassing to
be revealed. They will go along with me to the grave, along with several other
funny things which I hope to do after 60.
Again, I am digressing. Let us go back to that white envelope.
There was this newspaper ‘Indian
Express’ those days, in Chennai. One of
the leading dailies, when there were
only two in the market. I took a liking to that paper. It was pretty
anti-establishment and it felt great to be a squeaking rebel. At 18.5, you did all
things you thought a rebel did. Such as liking one upcoming black, rustic composer called
Ilayaraja over an established veteran MSV. Or liking to have a daily morning dose
of tea and dhum at Ashique Tea shop just across the road clandestinely, sponsored
by relatively more moneyed friends. Or
venturing to Casino theatre looking for palana scenes from the recent English
movie all wrongly advertised and misleadingly reviewed and coming back
disappointed and Rs.5 poorer in the bargain. (The review said movie full of
toplesses and bare-bottoms, it forgot to tell there was a thing called Censor
Board). Yes, rebellious things, I did. As much rebellious as a hopeless
Triplicanite could get…. Well, now let me come back to that white envelope.
There was a weekly column, on
Wednesdays, called ‘YouThink’ in that paper.
I being an Agmark Youth at 18.5,
used to try my hand at some articles, letters and stuff like that and post them
to that column. All neatly handwritten,
double space, on foolscap paper. One
fine Wednesday, I spotted a column by Girija Menon about some eminently
forgettable stuff. Next fine Wednesday,
I spotted a letter by one Tanuja Baskaran deriding that stuff. I being youth, and a rebellious youth at
that, somehow contrived to like the original Girija piece. Tanuja’s rather
nasty rejoinder led my 'O positive' fluid to
boil for some foolish reason. I shot off
a letter to YouThink, praising Girija’s original article, [managing to find
several positives in that piece which, even she would not have thought existed] and
blasting Tanuja’s rejoinder. And then
forgot about the entire thing.
This 2 p.m. of a hot subsequent
Wednesday was the culmination of all that posting, praising and blasting. Gingerly I ripped open the envelope (my deck
was handed over to a proxy who still managed to lose) and unfolded the
letter. Still more beautiful handwriting
in blank ink inside. It started, ‘Dear Mohan…..’ and immediately I felt a
hottish sweaty warmth at my nape. I went to the bottom of the letter to find the
same signed off by ‘Girija Menon’.
I was dazed. Here I am, a Hindu
High School studying, monthly bus-pass buying, Tamil films going, empty
pocketed wimp receiving a letter from a rich, WCC going, high-society type
beautiful girl! Oh my God. Oh my luck! Oh my fate! I just could not believe it. Suddenly the Bharathiraja lasses clad in
white, in slow motion, started singing
la,la la….inside my head. I had not even
finished reading the letter in full than I started imagining weird, strange,
out-of-the-world possibilities and the various probable impediments lurking in
our love-path!!! This human brain, the two pound mass inside our head, is
capable of making possible, perfect impossibilities. I was in that state of mind. The letter was hardly finished but I was
already in love. Already smitten.
Already thinking about how to convince our parents about our divine love!
Yes, ‘divine love’. Here I should reveal something. The first letter from her led to a series of
exchange of letters between us. What was
written in those letters, I just could not remember. Thinking back, after 30
years, I would say my letters were desperate attempts to impress her with my 'profound wisdom', 'worldly-wise' manners, excellent ‘vocabulary’ and all that,
almost to the point of convincing her that I am the one tailor-made for her in
her life. And her letters were initially
thankful for blasting Tanuja and saving her pride in print, understanding her
point of view, we being of the same wave length and sundry other stupid things.
In one of such letters, she used the word ‘platonic’. That word was immediately succeeded by the
word ‘love’. At age 18.5, I could understand only the latter word. Even though
English medium-going boy then, since my English medium was Big Street Hindu
High School acquired English, hand-delivered by great masters like Gandhi Book
Centre Arunachalam and Tincture Subbarayan, (forgive me, great souls), the word
‘platonic’ was beyond me. Thankfully, I
had that compact Webster dictionary with me then and it defined the word as
divine or something high-sounding. Even
though slightly disappointed at her love for me being diluted with ‘platonic’,
since it was love all the same, I could take it. Yes, Divine Love would suit me
fine, thank you, as long as it is also a variety of love.
And that ‘proficiency in
vocabulary’ certificate also was given to me by her in one of those inane
letters. The poor girl did not then know
how I labored and struggled to present a passable vocabulary those days ( and these days too). Simple straightforward English was okay with
me (sentences like I like coffee, I want to become an engineer, India is a
great country, the sky is blue etc) but flowery, elegant usage of the language
was something I aspired for but just couldn’t get. The Indian Express fad completely took over
me those days. I first had the (mis)
fortune of having a letter or two of mine published and seeing my name in print,
I struggled like mad to write well and try and get my name printed more. Incidentally, there was also a tall, fair guy
in our school called GSV Ramu (wherever you are Ramu, Salam) who used to be the
most English- literate boy in our entire school and I admit to having
entertained a tinge of envy against him. I used to rummage the much-used and much-torn
Webster for strange, not-so-often used words and tried to insert those words
into my simple sentences to sound more knowledgeable and erudite! Same was the case with my epistles to
Girija. Tons of effort went into the
composing of each and every sentence in my letters to her and she grandly
assumed that I was born with a Churchill-like vocabulary!!!
The fun, frolic and platonic love continued for months
together. She even gave me a taste of
bad words like ‘balls’ and all. In her
letters, of course. Chee, chee, those words are not used even now
by middle-class Brahmin family boys of Triplicane. (They use more sophisticated versions of the
same word in their own lingua-franca).
But then she was from the high-end WCC type and I even enjoyed moments
of vicarious pleasure in having got the acquaintance (and love which might end
in marriage???) of such ‘high-society’ girls who used words like ‘balls’. How cool!
Well, all good things must come
to an end. And all absurd things
too. At least one of us, or perhaps both,
one day realized that this charade of letter-following a letter-following a
letter should come to an end and it did.
Perhaps it was me who first stopped responding and she gladly
reciprocated by not trying again.
Recounting the sequence of events, it was perhaps that letter of hers which
mildly suggested that we should meet up, that triggered the end of it all. When she faintly indicated that, I panicked.
Being used all along to shoot off from the comfort of the dark, it takes
courage to come forward into limelight.
I never had that courage and never would ever have. The courage to get naked and present yourself
in all your naked glory! The courage to venture out of that 4 foot gully of Triplicane
and explore Harrington Roads and Poes Gardens. The justification for refusing to venture out
beautifully expressed by Kannadasan – yarum irukkum idathil irundhu kondal
ellam sowkyame…’ The justification is
soothing and calms you down but deep down you see through the veneer of
cowardice to explore. But what the heck, even at that point of time, after the
number of exchanged letters reached 15, I could realize the futility of it all,
the absurdity of it all. The Bharathiraja slow motion dream song was ending and
the next scene was more proximate to reality -
the scene of the elder brother of the female lovebird threatening
murder, the scene of a Triplicane upbringing of the male lovebird cringing and
covering and running out of sight.
Well, what am I laboring about? The
idea, when I started writing this, was to let the world know of my ‘first crush’.
If it can be called that. At some point
of one’s life, everyone has to cast off the clothes and present yourself as you
are. Else, regrets would remain. After 30
further years on this planet of that episode, I laugh at how foolish and
childish one could be in youth. And I would now reveal another dirty habit of
mine – stalking. What with today’s open
cyberspace, no one on earth is untraceable.
To think that the girl I trolled in the first place, Tanuja Baskaran is
a writer of good repute now. The Man Booker type, imagine!!!
And my ‘crush’ was happily coddling a baby when I last spotted her in
FB. I don’t know if she is the same one
that delivered bombshells in white envelopes thirty years back but my hunch
tells me that she is the one. God bless
her and God bless her baby. I am not
sure if she would remember any of this but I would give my right arm to meet up
with her some day and dare to ask about it.
I am sure she would laugh it off too.
As I did!
But I would definitely remember
to ask her what ‘platonic’ meant. It did not make any sense to me then, it
doesn’t now. Like a stately Rose of Titanic, she might just explain the term to
me….
PS : Don’t imagine the
names are for real. Except for the first
alphabets of each name. Except GSV Ramu.
I can always hold my glass!