Sunday, July 6, 2014

Of Platonic Love, from a Socrates!

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!