The Pun

I had met him first when I had moved into a different school while in eighth standard. Being the class leader, when he came forward to ask my name, I had blushed pathetically. In my previous school, a boy talking to a girl was considered scandalous and we avoided the boys like plague. In this uptown school, the boys mingled with girls freely. Soon, I too shed all my inhibitions and made so many new friends, half of them boys.

I don’t know when I fell in love with him. When I realized that I was in love, I was already drowning in a madness, which the love I felt for him, showered on me. I didn’t bother to think whether he loved me or not. Secretly, I let my love for him bloom like thousand sunflowers that followed single mindedly the radiant sun.

During some rare moments, I felt he returned my love. When his eyes wandered to meet mine while our English teacher was teaching us a love story, I wondered whether he was thinking about us as the couple in the story, the way I was visualizing it. When he usually sat near me in the library, which was always near empty, I assured myself, he wanted to be near me in the same way I craved for his presence. When we met on the road to our school regularly, I thought he loved me. He never stopped but passed slowly by on his bicycle addressing me with a whisper of my name and a smile. In those moments, there was that same twinkle in his eyes, which I often found reflected in mine, when my thoughts wandered to him while I sat in front of the mirror. It made me believe that he was falling in love with me.

In those moments, it was as if time had frozen. Even all my senses would freeze then. The only thing that I remembered was the overwhelming awareness of his presence. We hardly exchanged any words other than a smile in those moments. Never in those years did I manage to speak more than a few words to him. When he saw me, he would say my name in a whisper, and that was it. I chose to believe that it was because he used it as a pun. My name meant love. I wished to believe that he used that single word to say that I was his love.

Time flew after school and six years later when we met again at our school campus for a get together, he was a changed person and so was I. His once cute face had acquired a serious look with the presence of stubble. I found it hard to believe that once upon a time, I had loved him so madly that my every breath sang his name. I was searching for the boy I had fallen in love with. The one who still lingered in the depths of my heart and had never allowed anyone else to enter.

When he came near me and whispered my name in the same way that he used to do years ago, I realized I had never stopped loving him. We spent hours talking and he told me his postgraduate examinations had just got over.

“Does my look scare you? I didn’t even have time to shave if I had to reach here on time. My last exam was yesterday,” he said, while he ran his fingers nervously over his stubble.

I sighed in relief that it was not his regular look.

Next day, when he arrived to pick me up for the dinner date I had agreed to, he looked dashing in a white T-shirt and blue jeans. His unsightly stubble was gone. His boyish charm together with his athletic looks almost took my breath away then and there. I was in danger of becoming the stammering teen once again.

When during the unusually long dinner he confessed that he had fallen in love with me on the day that I had joined school, I felt tears burning at the back of my eyes. I managed to avow my feelings using words that were threatening to fade away from my memory. After a long walk home, he gathered me in his arms vowing that he would never allow me to go away again.

After I agreed to be his forever love, when he whispered my name , he confessed that he had always meant it as a pun.





Tina Basu tagged me to write this post for the #WillYouShave activity by Gillette.

I wish to tag Garima Behal
                        Aayesha Hakkim 
Prerna Maynil, Paresh Godhwani and Ashutosh to take up the challenge.

This post is a part of #WillYouShave activity at BlogAdda in association with Gillette.