Quietly he came and touched my shoulders when I was trying to find my way all by myself on a hot summer morning. First look at him and I found a friend. It is rather difficult to describe my relation with him but I can definitely say this much that we have always been in love.
I fell in love with him the day I took the train that took me away from home. He was waiting at the station. It was as if he was waiting there for me. Quietly we walked side by side without saying a word and the vastness of his being started engulfing me.
Man he had colours! Colours that I had never seen or ever even thought existed. I was perpetually awestruck. His shades mesmerized me. I could not believe that it was possible for some one to contain that much. The stories he had to tell, the scenes he had to show were beyond anything that I had ever known or imagined. He was larger than any form of life I ever thought was possible. There was nothing about him that I could ignore.
I used to stare at him while walking on the road or traveling by bus or just while sitting at my window. When he used to tell me his stories I listened with all the concentration in the world. The passion he had when he spoke about Independence and the student's movement of the seventies was more than anything that I had ever felt. The sadness in his eyes when he spoke about the people who stay on the road would tell me that he knew them from so close that at times it was difficult to understand that they were not the entirety of his being. He loved the buzzing noise of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual murmurs at the Coffee House and also the coziness of Cafe Coffee Day. He used to laugh at me when I cursed the rain and the water-logged roads. I used to laugh at him when he got stuck in a traffic jam. We cried together while sitting at the Park Street Cemetery on a lonely afternoon. Our first kiss was at Nandan on a stormy evening. The nights were always about open terrace and the city sky-line. Whenever I went home for holidays he used to come to the station to drop me off and stand there waving at me till I could hardly see him. Our conversations were weird. They always began with the meaningless frenzy of people trying to go from one place to the other. The mad rush of evening metros, the fight over an auto, the murderous buses and we used to laugh at the traffic police and abuse the government. But all of those always ended with my promise to come back to him wherever I might go.
One day we took a tram to the opposite direction, the other day we walked on road bare-foot. Another day we just sat at Esplanade talking about life and its idiosyncrasies. One day we also watched a movie at Nandan and took a walk from there to Elgin Road Crosswords. We watched theater on every other weekend. We never got tired to walk from St. Paul's Cathedral to the Race Course. The launch ride to Howrah station always had to be on a rainy day and our first visit to Princep Ghat awaits another day to complete the story. Everyday he used make me fall in love with him a little more. Even with the weird people he made me meet. The fights that I had because of him and the lovers I declined because of his jealousy never even for once made me doubt my love for him.
On the last day that I was with him it was raining again. When I looked at him I realized that he was sad but then I knew he will be fine and shall wait for me patiently till I came to him and we start our whirlwind love story once again. That day Kolkata made a promise to me too. He promised that whatever might happen he shall always make a place for me when I return and wait for me at the station just like the first day.
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Yes. Kolkata was never a graceful ageing lady for me. Kolkata was the tall young man with big eyes, in punjabi and jeans and chappals with a stubble. Oh a black leather-band wrist watch on his left arm and a weird sense of humour.
