Why is it that all good things come in small packages? Because smaller packages run out of their goodness sooner than larger ones. What M and A1 had was not just good, it was more than that for the two of them, it was addictive yet serene at the same time, it was young and genuine yet boldly mature and risky! M kept questioning her Creator how long she would have to go through the torment of hiding her feelings for A1 from A, her mother, her other friends and keep meeting him in secrecy. Secrets always leaked somehow eventually. But this would be no ordinary secret, it would be a scandal. South asian societies resembled orthodox British societies in that manner even in the early 2000s. Where girls and boys did not openly hang out with one another and courtship was always conducted very quietly or in the presence of parental supervision.
What me and A1 did in privacy was not in the wildest dreams of our adults and could therefore certainly wouldn't be permitted with parental supervision. Therefore in order to quench our physical desires we needed assistance, of the neighbourhood friends he had, and eventually of his own sister. We all lived in close vicinity. She banged one afternoon angrily at my apartment. Upon entering she curtly told me she wanted to see me privately. I knew what that meant, A1 must have spilled the beans to her. She was out for blood. Not only had I broken the solemn oath not to date , but guess who had I chosen to fall in love with, or rather, who had persuaded me to fall in love with him, A's own elder brother! I told her politely my mom was napping and I couldn't leave the house. Out of no warning, she slapped me hard in my cheek, right there in my hallway! I could not believe it! The humiliation I felt was so unreal, tears welled up in my eyes and I opened my mouth to start explaining, but she cut me off right there. ''You could have made love relations with absolutely anyone in this entire neighbourhood, in the whole wide world and I would have cared less. But you decided to mock our oath, by not only breaking it, but also breaking it with MY brother!''
''Listen A, I swear to God it was unintentional, I didn't even realise when it began! We were just talking to each other on the landline and that's it, I had absolutely no idea when it escalated into something so much more, I promise!'' By now I was openly crying, trying to clear the insecurity she felt. For the weirdest reason, I sensed A felt insecure, more than angry, that I would stop being a friend to her or tell her secrets to her brother. I kept feeling that her lashing out was only a merger attempt to cloud her insecurity within. '' Well you can forget i will ever be friends with you now, you have a boyfriend so what good can we offer you? There's absolutely no need for us, nor do you deserve to be in companionship with us!'' exclaimed haughtily. She could be nasty if she wanted to be. After all, one's best friends know exactly what pains us and the pain of abandonment was one of my panic points. It was always important for me to see my loved ones happy and content with me or they might not continue to love me, I had some serious abandonment fears.
So I did what anyone should do in a storm, lie low and stay quiet, until it passes. Everyday I would visit her place to try and get her to see me or make routine calls at her landline, kept apologising but she ignored me for a good whole week. My despair turned into anger. I turned to A1 for assistance. I began blaming him for the whole fiasco in the first place and pushed him to urge to use his elder sibling privilege to get A to resume talking to me. Which he did, he liked being the saviour for my friendship and finally A started to see me. But at first we would hang out with other friends and stuff, but she wasn't relenting as I had hoped. Soon our friends began to notice her curtiness with me and asked about it in good faith. Hence the cat was out of the bag!
My other friends were overjoyed to know about it. But I did not receive the same love and affection when one night during my late phone call with A1, my elder sister walked into my room. She was the first and most furious one in the family to have discovered my dirty little secret so far and she had every intention of turning me in, to my parents. I tried to speak to her and convince her and in the end even plead with her, but all in vain. She zoomed out of the room to wake up my peacefully slumbering parents, but I literally grabbed her arm and tried to pull her back. She found that so disbelievingly unnerving that she pushed me away from her and slammed her bedroom door into my face. The next day I went to school with a sulky mood and a sword swinging at my neck, thinking that as soon as I would return back home I would be chopped into pieces if my family learnt what I had been upto since the past six months or so.I struggled with anxiety as I mounted the stairs to our apartment, that familiar knot tightening in my stomach. My mom opened the door, we greeted, I freshened up, had lunch with her and kept….waiting! I felt like I was sitting on a ticking bomb that would explode any moment. Maybe she was being kind enough to give me food and drink before she would throw me out of the house, or ground me forever! By evening I realised my sister had kept her mouth shut, which was SO surprising! I kept pondering, '' Is she being nice? Or is she waiting for my dad to get back home? Or worse, my elder brother? That would be brutal in the truest fashion! '' My sister knew I had a very formal relationship with my brother. Him and I seldom talked. We lived under the same roof, ate meals on the same table, shared the same DNA, yet we were not a single fibre alike, neither in looks nor in habits. It was an openly known fact within my friends' circle too. Infact, quite a number of times they teased me that I had not one, but two father figures for me in the house. Hence the A and A1's casual and easy sibling bond was naturally attractive. But little did I know, A1 was not interested in having me as a sister, he had had other plans and I had trudged along without ever thinking for a mere second what impact it would make on my life if any of my family members learned about it. My sister's anger and then her quietness did not make anything easy for me, rather it was more unsettling all the same.
Over the next few days, I stopped calling A1 or responding to any of his specific sounds that he made from his balcony to gesture at me for a quick meeting. He panicked and sent his sister with a letter, which was the start of a postal service, A began to run cordially for the sake of her brother. A1 would bribe her and my other friends with little treats to get them to send me letters or bring his messages to me at my place. This was so, because my oh-so-smart sister had played a smart move. With the growing number or abduction and rape cases in the city, she had convinced my parents to forbid me from leaving the apartment, forbid me from visiting friends who had 'brothers' at their place. So basically I stayed home all day everyday, except when I left for school.
My physical needs kicked in hard and it was getting difficult to suppress them everyday. Some nights I slept clutching a pillow tightly to my chest and other nights I just clutched my shuddering body. I felt hopelessly addicted to his bear hug, meanwhile he grew impatient and angry. He decided something HAD to be done to be able to grab hold of me in privacy.
It is said, needs are mothers of improvisation. That's exactly what his sharp mind did. He improvised his entry into my everyday vigilantly watched route from our community gates to my apartment. He knew I was permitted to stop nowhere and go straight home after dismounting from the school bus. So he noted the time I reached home. He had all the free time in the world after his 12th grade exams ended to make such observations and devise such outlandish ideas. Finally one afternoon as I heavily walked back home, drained emotionally and physically after having very little to no contact with him for almost a month, I noticed there was no one to check on me in my gallery. For a split single second I decided to opportunise the situation and quickly walk to his place. But for some reason I chickened out. I am glad that I did, because as soon as I walked into my staircase, there he was, the love of my life standing with his arms open! I could not believe my eyes. He had taken the risk of stationing himself right within the lion's den to get a chance to embrace me, even for mere minutes. Anyone, absolutely anyone could open the door and catch us red handed in a physical embrace, or worst, liplocked! But I was overcome emotionally and logic was tossed far aside. Our bodies collided and we hugged each other tightly. In moments like these we never talked. Our bodies and our emotions did that, very loudly, but our tongues remained silent always. I felt nurtured, touched, cuddled after so long, it seemed like ages, yet ironically, the feeling was so familiar. I buried my face into his neck planting quick kisses and smelt that scent, the one I concluded made me feel safe, reminded me that I was home.
But I was home only for a few minutes, three precisely, when the door on the floor above us opened and we heard someone walking out. His hands under my uniform quickly pulled back into his pockets while I, completely dishevelled and abruptly thrown back into reality from my moments of fantasy, turned away from him to climb up to my apartment. If we wanted to steal moments for ourselves like this in future, we could NOT afford to be seen together at this time, and certainly not like this!
Last year's December we enjoyed these moments in the sneaky late night hours in my room, the next year, it was reduced to a few minutes in the staircase in the early dark morning hours of winter. He returned from the morning prayer before sunrise and stationed himself within my staircase minutes before I would dismount my apartment to leave for school. In the dark, before 7am, before the sun rose, I would sink all the heat of his body into mine, because soon, this routine started to grab the attention of my vigilantes on the balcony. The nosy aunties in the neighbourhood put two and two together and reached to my mother to launch a series of suspicious happenings between a boy and me in our staircase. Sigh, and hence, all good things last little, all good things end!