Of loving and longing

Every Valentine's Day takes me down the memory lane. As you know, millions of lovers look forward to this day and plan in advance in their personal and often imaginative ways to express their love to their beloved ones and exchange beautiful, expensive, and surprise gifts. But a million dollars' question most people often ask is why love happens and when it happens? Ask lovers this question, and most of them would simply say that 'love happens just like that and we can't blame anyone. Yes,"you can't blame gravity for falling in love,"said Einstein. Even in my life too, love just happened like that, in a filmy style.

When I was in the second year of my degree course at Anantapur in late 70s, a group of five friends went to attend the marriage of a female student in a temple town near Guntakal. The bride happened to be the girlfriend of my friend in the group. There some friends of the bride's sister came from Kurnool town. One woman was of our age, very bubbly and talkative. She befriended all of us in the group and we enjoyed ourselves a lot. After a few days this woman gave us a pleasant surprise when she on her own came to Anantapur to stay a couple of days with us.

Since she belonged to my community and I had four sisters at home, my friends convinced me to keep her at our home. This brought us very close and she started writing letters to me from her college in Kurnool. Sometimes I used to call her from a land line phone at the courtesy of a rich friend of mine. This went on for some time and I was in deep attachment with her, though she was non-committal. One day it became clear that my "friend" was more interested in marrying off one of her sisters to my elder brother than in anything else! Thus, we met at a marriage and were separated at another marriage! Even now I often feel that I was perhaps wrong in misreading her feelings and intentions.

Bouts of depression and disappointment often visited on me, stealing my serenity and sleep.But I never thought of taking any extreme steps as it happens with many jilted lovers.I continued my studies. In later years also I ran into some good women and faced no problems. Perhaps the adage'Once bitten,twice shy' guided me here. I learnt later from my close friends that one good, wise, classmate was really interested in me and in fact what they didn't know was that I deliberately ignored her advances for no specific reasons. In hindsight,I can only say that I do not know how all this love, infatuation, crush and what have you happened in my life.

Eventually,I settled for an arranged marriage and have led a long, happy married life. My strong feeling is that love comes into our life in varied forms and ways. Now my two well read children have happily settled in life with their chosen and loved partners. In other words,they achieved that which I couldn't. And for this boon,for her care and attention,I often want to tell my wife that 'If I know what love is, it is because of you'.

Finally, from experience I want to tell all youngsters that if you succeed in choosing your partner in life, it is well and good. But if you fail, let your life choose your partner and enjoy love in another way.