In the hitchhikers' guide to the galaxy, 42 was the answer to the universe's deepest questions. I turned 42 this year and coincidentally felt like I had unraveled everything that truly matters. and now the year is coming to an end, and what an end with us moving again. Its been a year of multiple fallings in love. I'm obsessively crushing over someone who I barely get time with, I've fallen in love with the person I married all over again from scratch despite the early morning sleep-marination smells that I was just last year finding so unbearable, and I keep getting this out-of-body falling in love with myself through the intent gaze of the person I'm crushing over. They say the secret to a successful long term love-sex relationship is that the couple fall in love with each other again and again as they change with time. What they don't say is how sometimes you can be so full of love you could be falling for many people all at once while you re-fall for that one. 

I recently met someone whose existence I had known of for about two decades but had not been introduced to ever before or if we had then neither of us really remember it. I opened the door to him and stared at him a minute because he looked so foreign and then within the next five minutes we were chatting with each other in a half teasing half smiling manner. I blamed his 'reticence' for us not having met or known each other, and he was amused by my choice of word. I was later pondering how and whether he and I could have fallen for each other 20 years ago, or whether the person I and he were then would have made that impossible. 

I wasn't always so full of love and affection and openness, even though I still carry my shell ready and prepared to hide in it. In fact I do the latter quite a bit with my obsessive crush when his eyes seek mine and I stubbornly refuse to meet them, self conscious of other people. I do not take compliments and attention well. Even when he said my chicken curry was delicious, even when one of the reasons I admire him is that I believe he says only what he really means. And now I've been obsessing over how it is unfair to him that he and I share the knowledge of him observing me, but the fact of my awe for him is still my secret.

But I want to talk about other people. We made friends this year. It was the year of us having home dinner parties. I was also hosting my department's seminars and annual conference this year and invited and met and befriended some sweet folks. And in this month's conference season some of those people, men and women, came up to me with warmth and affection and I embraced their companionship. 

These sparks of human connection, such affection and attraction, I feel, is what is precious about life. 

In Accra last year and Nairobi this year I met a person each, while walking somewhere in those cities alone, who took me around showing me things and leading me. Those experiences would never have been memorable without those guides. In Accra I found him in a community center and I paid him for showing me around; in Nairobi he appeared out of thin air on a trail opposite the Giraffe center and claimed to be a ranger. The first showed me some boxing gyms in the Bukom community in Jamestown in Accra. The second showed me tree hyraxes, a viewpoint, his chicken coop and the birds that mysteriously get into them to steal the food despite there being no gaps in the coop net; he was dressed in ranger khakis and never asked for any money, only for my phone number to send me his pics of animals, birds and flowers, in response to which I gave him my email id, and then soon as we were approaching the end of the trail and could hear human voices on the main road again he excused himself as taking a route different from mine and disappeared as into nowhere as he had come from. Looking back now both those people feel like avatars of the same spirit, and remind me of those tales from Indian mythology I grew up on, wherein deities visited mortal folk in avatars to test them, and I feel I failed those tests at the margin cos although I was open and friendly with them I made the Accra guy believe that I would come again and I never did and I stopped responding to the emailed pics sent by the Nairobi ranger. Husband says the ranger was just hitting on me and he in fact got worried for my safety in hindsight on both occasions when I narrated what I had been upto. My response, which came from somewhere deep within surprising even me, was 'what could they take from me that I wouldn't heal from'. I do believe that fear of other people and the fear of how they could hurt us spoils possible beautiful interactions with those who have no such intentions. In fact the ranger mentioned something like this, in the context that I wasn't behaving like other tourists, in a city where tourists are told to beware. That same day I also went to lunch at this beautiful farm-restaurant Cultiva where they put me at the bar cos I was alone, and another lone luncher came and sat next to me, who I chatted up, learning he was a runner and a swimmer and then said bye matter of factly when I was done eating. Later in Masaai Mara though some of our camp staff said some sexist things to me on our last day there which offended me and the friendship I showed toward them; there was not a single woman on their staff either. 

But even I can still be afraid, of getting too close and hurting others, myself, him; of appearing too familiar with someone I am not supposed to have that kind of access to. And this fear of mine can lead to me ignoring or offending the very person I most want to know. His wife has been visiting my dreams and I've been letting her down there.