I have been waiting for a girl like you, played softly in the background as I went about looking for my seat in the last flight out of Bangalore, in a rather sweltering April late night. She sat ahead of me, her perfect honey brown mop of lazily curling hair and her quick nervous jabs to keep them in place was all I could see at first. A side glance confirmed my doubts.
That momentary glance itself was enough to throw me back by a lifetime, as if I was back to the days of lying awake in her arms, in the sun drenched brown fields, past where we used to live when we knew each other. The days would turn to dusk and dusk's to night, until we were reminded that nights must part us, and with heavy steps and perhaps heavier hearts we would head back to our homes, with an unsaid promise to meet there again. The serenity of those eyes and the calmness they gave me in just a glance, the unsaid tales they told me of how I owned her heart. All came back to me, as If the intertwining twenty four years had turned to vapor and I was still the dreamer and she still my muse.
Without any hesitation, as if in a trance, I tapped her on the shoulder, and saw the annoyed surprise of her eyes melt into an unrecognizable mix of memories and perhaps anguish. It took her a few moments to realize that she was looking into familiar eyes, eyes she had often kissed and closed with feather light touch of her fingers, as we used to lay entwined, hidden in the tall dry grasses of the yard behind the abandoned railway tracks. Maybe there was a certain dread of seeing those eyes again, but it passed away as she saw maybe the remnants of an unfinished love in my eyes.
I felt tongue-tied, she at loss of words perhaps. How do you speak to someone you knew intimately, after a lifetime of being a stranger. How do you forget love that permeated your soul and made you what you are. How do greet someone you had called so many names in those long dark nights that refused to pass. It made me stiff and rooted. I waited for that awkwardly long moment to pass, then I called her name in what seemed to me a broken croaking voice. That made her smile, a smile much like the one's that used to light up a thousand stars in my sky, every time she had laughed at my apparent nothing's until tears would well up in her eyes. In a voice pretending to sound surprised, I thought, she said hello. Though we both knew, there was no surprise, we had to meet again, else the myth of cruelty of our fate would have remained unproven.
As we sat there, pretending to ask each other all the meaningless things about how the others life had went by during this lifetime that had separated our meeting and parting, I started to realize how the passage of time, perhaps, had meant nothing deep down inside.
I wanted to ask her why she never said goodbye and never let me find her. Perhaps I was imagining, but I saw a slight tremble of a tear at the corner of those soulful eyes. And so it began, the rather unusual sequence of events, which I had no means to imagine then, would change a lot of things I thought I was and also a lot of things I thought I was going to become.
