The girl from the local drugstore was put out of our minds and forgotten. After all, it was just a short-lived romance. But despite how briefly it lasted, it was a sweet, fleeting, heart-to-heart connection that Sunil was to remember his love for her for the rest of his life. It was a courtship that undoubtedly shaped the two of them and will—as it happened—live on in Sunil's memory everlastingly, but we're not so sure about her.
As our lives changed, coming to terms with the new realities of the post-2000 world, none of us spoke of Sunil's love story anymore: it had been all but forgotten for the past twenty-six years, disappearing into the mists of time and distance, with our lives unexpectedly changing around the beginning of the new century as the radical new started taking the place of the old.
Like many twenty-year-olds, we were still trying to plan our careers and other things coming our way, and by the time we realized something was amiss with Sunil, he seemed to have gone on, not having (or deferring) to engage with the kind of inner struggle he had been going through. Even though his love story fizzled out, we worried about him. A further factor that may have contributed to his treating this as something very personal and a challenge to overcome was the constant absence of the object of his adoration. That piece of bad luck of the special someone not being present, we believed, was reason enough to put aside his one-sided, unreciprocated, and jinxed "love" whatsoever for the girl from the medical supply store whom he had been unsuccessfully trying to woo.
Years have passed, Sunil, and to some extent, all of us friends, have come to learn better that love is our true nature and that there is no such thing as real success or failure. If that doesn't ring true, then I'm not sure it's reasonable enough for (hopeless) romantics of the world who failed in their one-sided enchanted relationships to learn from such patronizing sermons.
Unlucky in Love
Sunil fell head over heels in love with a ‘suitable girl’ who—to put it bluntly—never really had the hots for him. Sad that he never got a chance to express his love to her: to a, hypothetically, 'patthar ke sanam' — a stone heart. Or a heart of stone. Guess she was not so suitable after all.
Sunil's college years were a period of exploration and growth. Post those years, Sunil went on to earn himself a great spot in his life. With a degree in Science, he developed a keen interest in the pharmaceutical industry, which soon translated into a career at Micro Labs, one of the growing pharmaceutical companies that produced "Dolo" paracetamol tablets — which gained, though much later in the 2020s, prominence as the COVID-19 pandemic's widely used magic pill for curing infectious fever and pain. At Micro Labs, Sunil worked as a Medical Rep, pushing the company's main product into the market, and that's how Sunil came in contact with the girl at one of the pharmacies. He was a man of integrity and character whose life was guided by a strong moral compass as he made a good impression on those around him. Though he spoke with a great deal of attention and nuance, he was known to be a sarcastic genius whose comments often put a new spin on conversations, as also he was known for his quick wit and sense of humour in his brief but contented life.
A sweet-natured guy, he read books voraciously, listened to great music, socialized with family and friends, among whom we were in the same age bracket, of course, and frequently travelled to Bangalore and other distant cities and villages like Nanded in the neighbouring state, wherever his job took him. A post he would keep for over a decade. He lived a charmed life, to be sure. Yet the only thing that fell through in his life was his transitory, romantic love for the shop girl who had little to no clue of how Sunil felt about her. Poor thing, that's just how it was.
‘tell me, how am I supposed to live without you?But—all cards on the table—the hardest bit to accept about this little-known, low-key love story about two medically-related souls: One had a shop of medicines to sell, and the other was a medical representative who checked in from time to time to see if his company-supplied prescription drugs (especially Dolo tablets) were selling well in her store, was the fast culminating outcome of his love affair with the girl — which is no sure future for them together. As it was, his lady love (who wasn’t even a friend in the true sense) hardly gave any importance to the fact that it was plain enough for anybody to see that our very decent, handsome, and holding a good job, love-smitten friend, was prospectively interested—captivated even, almost to the brink of, if you ask me, catatonic despondency—in being her friend and would like to make good with the first and only significant but largely non-reciprocating sweetheart of his life. There were days when he looked longingly from his house, across the road and diagonally opposite, at the store where she sat with her mum in tow, hoping his feelings be acknowledged sooner than later if she could glance in the direction of Sunil's house, unable to tear himself away from his just one chance at, for all practical purposes, professing true love for her. But it was never to be; nothing of that sort happened. Had she only expressed interest in Sunil back then, one would have thought that history might have taken a somewhat different turn; probably, it would have been best if it had; who knew what fate had in store for them both had they come together for the sake of each other? Unfortunately, that's all too often the reality we face: we become painfully aware of the heartache and suffering these untoward situations can cause — only after they have occurred in our lives. We can only imagine that Sunil was painfully aware of his unenviable position and the difficulties he faced while in love, just as so many people instinctively had done before him. When it comes to love—whether it's true or just flirting-infatuation—no amount of rationality or logical reasoning seems to work in your head when the power of your heart begins to rule you through and through. Appreciatively, however, his languid determination to make her feel the same way he did was quite laudable, but sadly it did not work out the way he thought it would. All the time, she, the only daughter of the pharmacy store, remained, as luck would have it, unconcerned and sternly cold to Sunil’s constant leap of faith to gain her affection, his first love: the one that was never to be his. Despite his best efforts, his first love (and last) was left unfulfilled.
now that I've been loving you so long’
- song sung by Michael Bolton
Sunil, however, deserved praise for being able to move on while being fully aware that first loves never are forgotten, as most of our colony's considerable modern-day Devdases (and Devdasis?) would have us believe, and infallibly, the emotional setback that love can cause you may not make the pain go away ever. And, as it happened, it broke his heart into a million pieces he couldn't avert from it going thwarted. The girl he liked left without saying a word or casting a backward glance, ending their relationship and leaving Alwal forever and ever. In all these years, no one else had brought her up, nor did Sunil himself feel like uttering anything that suggested despair; the last time Sunil spoke of her was in 1999 or 2000, perhaps just for old times' sake, as he never really have forgotten her. Nobody is ever able to forget their first love. Sunil must have thought: All he has now is the memory of her, which he wouldn't let go. In Sunil's mind, however, she was already too far gone into oblivion, never seen or heard from since. But we understood that his matter-of-heart person, which ultimately could only give him—as we say colloquially among our friends—a "big hand," continued to beat for her long after she had vanished from sight, leaving Sunil thinking of her night and day while gazing vacantly out of his compound wall towards the shut shop across the road where his flame once burned so brightly.
With the medical shop sold off due to less revenue churn and no repeat business, thanks to lesser and lesser customer patronage, there was nothing left for the family to stay on, and how much can they live in hopes thinking that things will look up for their business to flourish into the future and success too?
Sometimes things do not get ahead in life, and no matter how much harder you work into professing your love for your fancy little crush you hope one day will pay off, do not work out the way you think it would. That simply means that you fell in love with a girl, and she never felt the need to return your feelings. Following that, it's just a matter of surviving the breakup of your one-sided relationship while still yearning for your special someone who is no longer available, leaving you to deal with agony, loss, and guilt.
Sunil, as a medical representative and her adorer, had finally stopped making rounds at the only medical shop, her shop, by the roadway because she—for whom he had committed the mistake of professing so much love, albeit never could he express his love in person—wasn’t there for him any longer. Love had only been in the air for a few months before her shop closed permanently, and he never saw her again. She had left. Forever. To even catch a glimpse of her was not possible, far less talk to her. After selling off the store, the word was that the family migrated to another town or went off to their village, nobody knew, never to be seen or heard from again. Their leaving shattered Sunil, and he never talked about her again, keeping everything inside him deep within — as though he were dangling by hopes trashed and plummeting into the unknown. Less than 20 years later, Sunil passed away.
‘hello, is it me you're looking for?Our friend Sunil will always be in our memories. His memory will live on, and the bright joy of friendship he brought us all those years ago, in the 1990s, will forever be a part of our close friendship. His memory will endure in all of us who especially look back and cherish the lifestyle and the moments the great decade of the 1990s brought into the lives of our four friends. Never mind, his innocent enthusiasm, his incredible love for the girl so unlucky, who was never heard from nor seen again at Alwal, Sunil—we are sure about this—had gotten over it over the years. He needed to move past his failed or short-lived romance with the one he ever loved. We believe he could set all his thoughts about her free before moving on with his life, with all the natural willingness he had to forge the best path forward for himself and his family. It hurt him. It hurt like hell when she went away without a word, without so much a backward glance, as it were. But Sunil had freed his love from any predicament she might have had.
'cause I wonder where you are and I wonder what you do
are you somewhere feeling lonely or is someone loving you?’
- song sung by Lionel Richie
Love is beautiful, and for some people, the experience of it is sufficient reason to move on from someone they once held in the deepest part of their hearts. He realized this was his time to forgive and forget. After that, time just goes by . . .
****
Now the old has given way to the new, and in this computerized, digital dull age, the new is giving way to pandemically (my emphasis) progressive! For all four of us, our way of life, as we once knew it in the 1990s, was never to be the same again; it was changing forever as if it were changing before our eyes in a painfully short time. Everything changed - it even changed the place where we lived almost all our lives. It changed our homes, cities, people, friendships, the weather, the environment, and everything. The change we see today is reprehensible, every single atom of it.
Isn't it all confusing, so bewildering? That everything is even more hopeless than they seem, if not pointless? Inconsequential? Life may not come back, not even once, for anyone. Even if it's not what we desire from this life, we can't always get what we want. You can't figure out what you really want, but you should always do what you want to do to make it right. That is how this miserable world works, forever caught in the crosshairs of everything.
(To be continued…)
By Arindam Moulick
Thinking of my beloved friends: Armstrong, Satish, and Sunil.
Click on the links below to read the other essays written in the series:
‘Remembering: Going to The Dhabas with Friends - part 1’
‘An Abundance of Tasty Memories - part 2’
‘Memories of the Distant Past - part 3’
‘Sweet Days of Youth, a memoir - part 4’
‘As Time Goes By, a memoir - part 5’
‘The Last Days of Friendship - part 6’
‘The Tide of Change - part 7’