Something like love

A simple time, in a complex country. Where words like love come not as strings attached to relationships, but in a soft unyielding weave of time, tradition, religion, and so much else. Where teenagers fumble with this cloth, and fret, wondering whether this is fabric to be worn with pride, or ripped apart to find that one constant thread that is love.

So lets go back to this simple time. A classroom, like most others in India. February is a pleasant time of the year, in most places. Far from home, twenty or so single boys and girls plan a Valentine's party for themselves. Who needs a boyfriend/ girlfriend, when all this friendly love abounds? A cell phone rings, and one person steps out to answer it.

On to a terrace, sun-warmed cement and brick under bare feet. The smell of dusty earth and neem trees. The conversation is quite typical- how was your day, did you talk to your advisor about that last set of experiments? Yes, and did you get your reports in on time? What plans for the evening? They talk, the boy and the girl, for a little while. Across the warp and weft that separate them, they find the threads that hold them together for the span of this conversation, a few minutes in a late winter evening.

He isn't sure whether to wish her. Will she take it to mean he assumes she's his girlfriend? Should he have sent flowers, or would she get angry if he did? Why hasn't he wished her? Does this mean that he assumes her answer is no? But she really isn't sure. If she wishes him, will he assume its a yes? If you say Happy Valentine's on the phone, isnt that like saying- go enjoy yourself even though you're half a world away from me? So they talk for a while, and hang up. Satisfied with the idea of romance, without the tangles of love.

.. While that's probably not a love story of any kind, it amuses and reassures me to think of it now- A time when love, or something like it, was just as simple as a phone call. No strings attached. And that we were once people like that, who could find and hold the one strand we liked out of that vast, intricate tapestry, even if it was just for a few minutes of a lifetime.