Memories of my midnight

Why did she brush my knee under the table with her hand? Her batting eyelids were distinct even on a dark lit terrace. In that crisp Indian November air; my heart went from frigid to a frantic beating in no time. Even now, I have not understood why she did what she did with a boy much too young for her. Just like that, over dinner, when my parents spoke to her parents on moot topics, she jump started puberty. And installed a lifetime fetish for pushy strong women

On the badminton court, my plump 13 yr old body struggled to keep up with my 16 yr old older partner. So at first he screamed and insulted verbally and then moved me off the court using his two piece racket. I walked back home from the clubhouse to my house sobbing. The bully had won. He had taught me reality.

The second class sleeper compartment in the train was marginally sanitary at best. Yet that is not what stood out. A diamond maker told me his story. About his younger brother who was trying hard to make it. About his poverty and the struggle that was adulthood. Meanwhile he heard about how I traveled each year to Bangalore to meet classic friends. We exchanged addresses over standard railway-issue biryanis. And before I got off the train, he had a sincere invite to me to visit his house. Some strangers only stay strangers until the first hello.

I told her about her because I thought it was the right thing to do. And while I did that, she told me about me. It was a too little too late. I cornered her into shedding many tears for fears. In a sunny kitchen nevertheless, sitting on an uncomfortable wooden chair. There is never a good time to do cleansing of a dirty soul. I would pay the price for what I did that day but at that moment, I had learned the dirty price of truth.

I overtook when I shouldn’t have. When swerving back into my lane, my footrest clipped his! We were both inches away from seriously broken bodies. But instead we did not and kept on driving on in opposite directions like nothing happened. Inside his mind, I was terrified and relieved. I thought of my helmet that point which was happily gathering dust in my dorm room and of what could have been! The sheer consequence of recklessness amazed me. The fortitude to escape disaster would eventually become more frequent.

Yes. I am certain. I am not remembering these memories. They are remembering me; nudging me in their special ways, for me to restart, again. Pleading me to learn independent virtues through entire randomness and then link them all in, on a random Saturday night, in a very cold Michigan.