When I had a girlfriend

Subhash C Sharma

IN my mundane world of a science student bent over a microscope in a cold, dreary lab bereft of romance, a lucky chance came my way. 

On the way to my department one day, I bumped into a girl who had been my school mate a few years back in my home state. Recovering from disbelief and surprise, when subsequently I did make bold and ask her, she recognised me and said she  had taken admission in college but had been allotted a room in a university hostel owing to the paucity of rooms in the college hostel. After this brief and shy tete-a-tete, I parted, with my heart astir with hope, excitement and dreams. 

Expertly timing my morning jaunts to the department with her own long walk to the college, I met her a few more times to exchange pleasantries and to cement the bond. Besides being beautiful, she was a pleasant-mannered, city-bred girl, neither inhibited nor insular like most girls from rural background that peopled the campus. Therefore, getting along with her wasn’t difficult, my own complexes and blushing shyness of a rural lad being the only stumbling block. But these odds notwithstanding, I plodded on and struck up a good understanding with her. 

In due course of time, I even started visiting her hostel — the prestigious and glamorous Sarojini Hall. To have a girlfriend, and that too an inmate of this hostel — an abiding and dearly-held fancy of every campus Romeo — was nothing less than a miracle. I could now legitimately boast of this great feat to my friends and claim due recognition and respect, I so richly deserved. Although visiting the hostel and meeting the ‘girlfriend’ was no easy task. You needed a lion’s heart to enter that forbidding building, basking in the name and fame of housing the best and the ‘creamiest’ girls from India and abroad. The next ordeal was facing the dour, formidable-looking lady attendant and mumbling a dry-mouthed request to call the girl you wanted to meet, not to speak of the nagging nervousness that descended on you during the slow moments of wait for your friend to materialise before you. Further, finding yourself amidst burly Sardars with their buxom girlfriends, making bold statements of love, was neither cosy nor comforting.

Be that as it may, I plodded on steadily as her good friend and reached a high mark by watching together a matinee show at the newly opened cinema hall. Her pristine charm, a good, simple, guileless heart and an easy manner of relating to me made me forget any ‘secret’ desires and fancies that I might have harboured initially. Time went by and after our respective annual exams and the summer break, we lost contact. Though I kept looking for her on the campus or at the city’s public places and shopping zones in the following year and beyond, she was not to be seen anywhere. 

Now, 40-odd years later, in moments of idle reverie, she often comes in my thoughts as a kind, benevolent, friendly soul who illumined my little world with her open spontaneity and intrinsic warmth and made me feel so special, exalted and self-confident. And then, like a sweet, fleeting, fairy-tale dream, quietly vanished from my life without a trace.

Wherever she may be, I salute her and send her my good wishes.