We might not, but love finds us

Love, like Winnie the Pooh, and this is one of my favourite quotes, just is. It is out there much before we become aware of it as love. It is out there much before we can define it as love. It is out there much before we dedicate it to someone as love. The moment we have sprung the stages of toddling and taken our first independent strides we walk through it without knowing what it means or what the consequences will be. We are not purloined by this much-abused theme of love as extolled in books. However ancient the theme of love might be, we all discover it once again for the first time, unlike the wheels. So there I was walking blindly into it without knowing what I was walking into, till much later when my mind dug the roots of atavism. From then on I have been chased by love as much as I have been chasing it. But that first time remains hallowed, secret and novel. I was barely out of my toddling days, barely into school, barely into my first arousal when it found me, love. She was barely a few years elder to me, this neigbour of mine, when I felt the first stirrings, as I now realise of that feeling of love. I used to, fascinated by her charms and brownilocks, hold on to her little hands with my littler hands till parents do us part. And from her reciprocation, that I still remember, she held on to mine with as much devotion. This is a recollection of my first love so I presume it would be difficult to tell this tale without flaw. I am sure they are fraught with embellishments and adornments of my adult fantasy, that I believe you will forgive. Back from school done with my chores of undressing and eating and cleaning up under my mother’s hawk-eyed supervision I would hop over to hers. And, then it was bliss. Nothing I remember smelled as good as her. Nothing I remember looked as beautiful as she. In my adult life love has had so many expressions, at times a tribulation, at times bitterness, at times a searing pain, at times an earthly shudder of ejaculation, at times a greed of the flesh (not to be confused with lust). But what could it have been, then, at that age? We hadn’t really discovered the pleasure of sex or poetry. We hadn’t discovered the art of writing or kissing, either. We hadn’t mastered these worldly things that were the essentials in the caravan of love. We hadn’t, but I suspect, our hearts did, our humanness did, our DNA did. So the chemicals must have been produced and ejected into our innocent bloodstreams. Our brains must have processed the information that the synapses sang and undoubtedly it ordered our little minds and bodies to perform on the altar of love. It must have urged our little souls to discover that one thing which is the most precious of human belongings, longing. And, as my memory now prompts, it did. One hot afternoon, after school we ran, our hands clasped tight and our strides matched. We ran into a small hut that stored the red clay for the tennis courts of the club. It was there that we gave in to our heavenly gift with our mortal ministrations. Oh, I know what the books say and what Sigmund Freud said about, penis envy and curiosity and all that. This recollection however faded is not jaded. We did touch each other with our little fingers and learned our first lessons in longing but I remember clearly that it was not mere you show yours I will show mine kind of a thing. It was clearly not just a precursor to sex. It was an act divined to touch the depth of the most beautiful human feeling ever. I don’t remember how many times we had soiled our clothes with the red earth and it is not important either. In my mind it was one big Lila (I am sorry I don’t have an English equivalent of that unique word). Later till time took away our innocence and scattered it amongst the nooks and crannies of life, which we call growing up, we continued to clasp our little hands in tight embraces. Then things started to happen, my voice broke to a croak, her bad hair days started and changes occurred thick and fast and we became strangers. I think we even forgot about it all. No, not out of shame or deliberation but because of the nature of growing up, as other things more immediate caught us in its swirl and lifted us in to the real world where we traded our innocence for guile and paid the cost with this memory. I don’t really know what it was that we must have felt then. Was it love is a question that still begs an answer. I don’t want to speculate or wager because I know that even if we didn’t find love then, I am sure, love found us.