Him.

Long before I ever met him, I was both infatuated with him and felt like I understood him. One of those para-social one-sided connections you feel, somewhat like for celebrities. And then when I probably first saw him, I felt his eyes on me. Of course I had dreamed of him knowing and loving me. But I knew very well the distinction between dreams and life. In life he was not supposed to notice me. I found myself both star struck and dumb, and indignant. I hadn't prepared this script, I didn't know my lines. I alternated between feeling angry at him noticing me and at his impertinent gaze, and pitying him for staring at me; between freezing and turning tail with fear of being known to be ordinary or worse stupid, and teasing him and feeling my power over him; between being frightened of wanting so much and realizing it was within reach that I would flee, and with time a little bored and just returning the gaze - which is when I realized that at least some of it was as if his eyes couldn't help it, which is when I also started to sympathize. And then when I saw him after more than a year - a year in which I had had a radical haircut - I stared at him, angrily, because he seemed not to recognize me, not to remember me. Till he put two and two together. His reaction to recalling me and to the change in my behavior was to deliberately walk almost right into me, at a moment when I stood in a small static crowd - all of us staring meditatively at snow-capped mountains in the distance. I wonder how he thought that would help. He stunned, scared, and angered me; I cursed "Dude?!" half aloud, wrapped up my body in its ready curtains, and simply walked back and out of that space. But in just the next moment he walked up to me straight and sane, smiling and addressing me, and we chuckled at our madness. 

Its been years since then, we now know each other better, and I have been helplessly documenting our story.

These mornings I wake up with this deep immense sadness that here is yet another day where I will not see him, not yet. He now somewhat understands how hard I find it - approaching him, talking to him, till I am actually doing it - and how his eyes see me and affect me. Its been a while he bumped against my shoulder deliberately while I was laughing and talking to someone else. I now am somewhat able to stop myself from fleeing, or invite him and prepare for his presence. Although even now, after apologizing for it, I will sometimes turn my back on him and turn to talk to others in whispers so he doesn't hear. 

But now I know that even if I were to simply tell him how much I miss him and how much I yearn for his company, there is this insurmountable distance, beyond his or my control. Why does he have to be so much older and so much more successful than the nobody that I am. And why does he have to be known to me through my significant other.

So much of how he and I have learned to know each other has been wordless. 

He has now become like a drug to me. I crave his company, even just sightings of him. And then when I get them, for a brief moment of time I am high and delirious. Till he looks at me with those eyes, really looks into me, and I feel transparent and naked and want desperately to hide, and thus I run away; or till he suddenly asks me to dance with that extended arm of his and his ear coming close to my mouth to better hear my protest, and I shout out at him to get out there and I will join him, (a visible intimacy between us that stuns others around), but then I join the floor later far away from him, playing it cool, when all I want to do is be with him, learn those dance steps with him, teach him teach me. And then after the high has died, I want more and again. I have begun to feel the futility of mustering up my courage: I might do it once or twice, for a moment here or there, but then I will be caught unaware, and I will smile and blush and become blind, and tongue-tied and frozen, and then run.

I have not felt like this about anyone in my long life this far. And I feel like I need to confess; if it isn't already obvious to him. He does read me like a book at times. At other times he observes what I eat, how I eat it, who I know and how I smile at them, how I fumble for words and have others ready when he needs them, finishing his sentences for him, how I think beyond how others do, and what theories I seemed to have formed. 

"how did you learn to hold fruit in your hands" - Laura Marling.

Her. 

Before I ever met her I had heard stories. Other people did not seem to like her much. But I was somewhat enamored by her, by her grace and her saris, by her always quick preoccupied walk that seemed to show she didn't want us, that she didn't care for us mortals. 

And then when I first met her, I did not like her. She looked me and my dress up and down, judgingly or enviously - I couldn't say which - but also kept coming to me, sitting with me, stopping me when we crossed paths, and asking me all these questions. My answers were often repudiated by her as being too simple. She told me I needed to put on a rhino skin and put myself out there, and she asked if I wanted to help her out with some boring paper-desk-work. But there was an honesty about her, a directness, and even when I did not like her I was taken by her.

Update/continuing; date: Dec 10, 2025.

She is afraid, of being stuck in elevators, of riding bicycles, of the depth of oceans, despite being someone who cycled in her youth for exercise (I mean which girl in India did that in the early 80s?!) and despite having learned to swim as a child in another country. She hides herself, in the various roles she plays in life: a wife, a mother, an academic and a professor, a guide to other younger researchers who look up to her, are scared of her, in awe of her, a daughter in law, a somewhat celebrity to all the universities that invite her. I am none of those to her, I have none of those relationships with her. I wanted to get to know the deeper her, the person beneath all these roles she plays, the person who is tired of wildlife safaris because she accompanied her husband to so many; the person who somewhere through life developed a distaste for physical movement and realized it only after it was done, but who still stings when her husband points it out somewhat dismissing her comment about joining me on my morning runs in the park between our homes; the person who didn't remember the last time she had some Fenni and whose husband still tries to sneak some alcohol into her glass hoping to relax her but the person who is genuinely annoyed by this; the person who understood deeply the pain the character of Kate Winslet felt and fought with, in Mare of Eastown; the person who confesses her fears but gets offended when I point out its irrationality and thus the need to conquer it; the person who barely eats out and knows nothing of the world that exists and is changing right around her, but who travels the academic world; the person who laughs at my persistent invites and assures me she wants to get to know me too, but then doesn't answer her texts, and calls only to thank me for silly irrelevant things; the person who warms up to me because I get her son a chair to add him to our post-dinner dinner table, who doesn't quite get my quizzical look in response because I am not a mother and it was just a chair. I still cannot forget the many ways she has looked at me, when I said something poignant about traffic choices and constraints, when I received her for a conference and she tried to thank me for the chocolates but I wanted to keep friendship at home and not mix it with work, when I talked freely into the mic and introduced her as not needing an introduction, when I teased her husband, even when I cooked for her but dismissed her comments coming from across a generation gap as being ridiculous or missing the point, when she was telling me how she hadn't been able to work much that year and suggested a housewarming at my new home and how I had to cut our conversation short and open her car door for her to leave because I didn't have more time to give her. 

Every time I asked to take her to lunch (she likes the kind of food I do but does not eat out) she would try to turn it into a coffee meet, like the ones she does with her PhD students. And then she possibly got offended because I didn't gratefully take whatever crumbs of her time she was willing to give me. How she was struck awkward when after that I turned up for a memorial for someone in her family. How earlier she had once called to thank me for acting courier to her tupper-ware, and how in response to my concerned "Is everything okay?" (because there was no need for a thanks call for something so irrelevant) she replied openly "yeah, yeah, all is okay". 

Damn, as I write this ode to her, I realize how in love I am. Two days ago, I met a friend who brought her up and told me that she was possibly going through a tough time at work, where she didn't seem to have much support for what she was trying to do. Both of us concluded that other people didn't understand her. That conversation brought her back on top in my mind, where all these months I was trying to move on from her. I felt all over again like she needed me, like I alone could give her something in this life in this world.