Goodbye My Love: Part 1

It was a fine morning in Waterloo. It was snowing lightly and the walkway was covered with enough snow to hide the concrete pathway. I felt exhilarated when I opened the door and stepped out of my house to head to school. The streets were silent except for the steps of other students heading hurriedly to school. I headed to school delighting in the balmy breeze, walking slowly so as not to miss the pleasant outdoors. I hummed my favourite song softly without disturbing the street’s tranquility.

Noticing my slow pace, a girl who was walking behind me, walked by my side and passed me. She had a honey tan, short coal-black hair and an elegant body. “Could she be Tamil?” I asked myself. “Ouch,” I slipped without noticing the ice underneath the snow and fell down. Hearing the noise, the girl walking in front of me stopped, turned back, smiled and walked away at the same pace as before. She looked at the ground while smiling, confirming that she was Tamil.

While in the lecture hall, I had a hard time understanding the concepts the professor was explaining. My leg was hurting. But more than that, I was thinking of the beautiful Tamil girl I saw that morning.

The weekend was a welcome break for me. After a long day of lectures, I went to Toronto to visit my parents. On the next day, my family sat down for dinner. Amma carefully spread out all the spicy dishes on the table. I could see my favourite dish that she had prepared for her eldest son.

Our conversation revolved around the snowstorm in Toronto and the story that fourteen people had died shoveling snow. My younger brother complained that he had been shoveling snow in the front yard for all these days. And now that I was back home, I should do the shoveling that weekend.

Amma was quiet for a while, meticulously putting curry on the rice on our plates. I perceived that she would say something soon. She had often observed silence before saying something important. I was right.

“Your aunty called me last night,” she began in her soft voice. “There is a girl’s family interested in you. They have given a photo to your aunty and she wants you to take a look at it,” Amma continued. But I could not listen.

I thought of arranged marriages and the traditional match seeking process. Brought up in the liberal Western educational system, I failed to understand some of our traditions when I was a kid. But in recent years, I noticed that I’d been keenly studying them both out of curiosity and to understand them. What if I had agreed to see this girl?

The girl’s family would do an undercover operation to find out if I drink. Even an innocent Labatt Light at a friend’s BBQ party would disqualify me from their consideration. Once I’d passed the 100% drink-free test, they would invite our family to see the girl. Our family would visit her family’s house. All of us would sit on the ground like in Tamil movies. The older folk would be chewing betel nuts and talk endlessly about their villages in Sri Lanka. They would probably ask questions like do you know this person or that person in Sri Lanka. Things that would not interest me and probably bore me.

I would wait in anticipation to see the girl. In the middle of our conversations, the girl would come out of the room with timidity and coffee in her hands. Everyone would stop talking and there would be pin-drop silence. She would probably be wearing brightly coloured sari that would make her look sexier than she actually was. And everyone would look at my facial reaction to see if I like her.

I found the entire process hilarious. I could not resist laughing at the thought. I burst out laughing and spewed out the food that was in my mouth. My mother and brothers looked at me in bewilderment.

The next day I awoke early for a Sunday morning. I tried to go back to sleep but the thought of the Tamil girl kept me awake. I closed my eyes and thought of my life since childhood.

Women have always mystified me. I was born without a sister and schooled in an all-boys boarding school. I felt shy around girls when I was a kid. I felt discomfort sitting next to them in kindergarten; this was at a time when I started to differentiate between sexes consciously. As I reached my teenage years, I started to develop an interest in them. The biological transformation within me longed for them. I held a glorified opinion of women and felt sympathetic towards them for shouldering what I thought were more than half of human miseries. I was so sympathetic that I supported blindly ultra-feminist ideologies.

Back in Waterloo, my attempt at meeting the Tamil girl did not materialize. I did not know anything of her, her name or what program she was in. All I knew was her attractive face. That too I was beginning to forget. I thought of her repeatedly, trying to recreate her face in my memory and not letting her appearance blur away.

On a Wednesday, I finished my elective class in the arts building and was leaving the lecture. While walking out, I noticed a honey brown girl coming out of the opposite class. I slowed down and stood there for a moment studying her. It took another moment to recognize that she was the one I’d been looking for – the girl who had occupied a huge chunk of my inner thoughts.

I opened my book to study that night. I read through twenty pages only to realize that I had not understood anything. I had a hard time concentrating. I thought of her repeatedly. I thought of her graceful walk, her proportional bosom, her large luminous dark eyes and her slender fingers.

I’d never met a girl as beautiful as her. She possessed soft raven hair that settled on her head without a single strand falling on her face. Her honey brown colour bestowed on her radiance. Had she been bit darker or lighter it would have made her lose her perfection. Her nose stud and her sensual tight vest made me see the Eastern and Western culture confluence in her. I imagined how she would look in a sari that would hide some parts of her exquisite body and reveal the other parts…

To Be Continued

– R. Nada

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