2019 was, as one is expected to say at the end of such a particularly generous year, generous. I turned thirty with unsurprisingly little effort and climbing some nearly snow-clad mountains accompanied by grief and loneliness and an unforgiving cold, mentored some exceptionally brilliant kids at two different design schools and towards the end of the year[1] and in one of those schools surrounded by open fields and hill-ranges carpeted in the prickliest of grass and populated by phantom peacocks and watched over by brutalist architecture and the sweetest of dhaba-made black-tea, fell mundu-over-manbun in love with the kindest, bubbliest, most strong-willed and not-so-strong-stomached (she claims otherwise), breathtakingly beautiful lady I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. In the beginning, it was strictly professional, R having called thisguy to talk Typography with her students (who adored her way before I could start) and demanded a daily course-plan (the audacity!; I’d always made them yet no one had ever asked). Over texts, I assumed R to be a married old-lady with twenty-two kutti-monsters and five cats (or the other way around); she sounded (and texted in a way that sounded) so patient and well-sorted (which she turned out to be despite the confusion with kittens and kids). When I met her for the first time, clad in a bow-tie-polka-dotted dress floating around her luminous self like a loosely defined cloud, my heart skipped a couple of beats despite the obvious, obligatory anxiety at meeting students whose names I had not by-heart-ed over the journey to the course. Over the next three weeks, we talked for longer than I’d ever talked to anyone for (in thirty years’ worth of three-week installments), often from five-thirty in the evening to two-three in the morning when the cafe-folks would throw us out with knowing smiles as they shut shop for the night. Over the next three weeks, R consumed copious amounts of dhaba-black tea because I could not figure out she was downing the liquid just to be around me sans the awkwardness of being around with no intention of drinking anything (she prefers coffee and mint-lime juice; and that we consume volumes of, now). Over the next three weeks, I ran away from her after many late-night dinners fearing having to open up about the skipped heartbeats and the butterfly population that had claimed permanent territory in my stomach. Over the next three weeks, after the prickly-grass trekking incident (sans-R) and many shooting-star-punctuated night skies and conversations under them, we told each other what we had been wanting to tell each other for quite some time, over coffee and exchanged winter-wear and a broken kolusse that I kept insisting I would safekeep for her (totally off-context). Over the next three weeks, R helped fill a cup-shaped void in my life while filling out an R-shaped one less visibly.

It is absurd how unpardonably minimalist, reductiv-ist even, love at first sight as a cliche operates. It is incredible how one notices a person from afar, sleep-starved and polka-dotted and bubbly, and know (just know) somewhere in the long-abandoned-and-vastly-significant vaults of one’s heart (or head, or both; I am confused) that this person (vyakthi, in R’s terms) is meant to be significant in one’s life in ways one has always wished for. Here is to the many years I’ve been waiting for R to waltz (she would prefer to bachata) into my life. Here is to the many years ahead, together.

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1: While the country’s ruling class was falling out of love with democracy and constitutional values and the rest of the country was finding itself defending those values with their sweat, blood and tears; the unrest around us in stark contrast with what we were nourishing.