Thirty five years ago, just after appearing in the 12th Board examination, five school-leaving boys took a journey outside their home town for the first time without parental supervision. They headed for Puri, an overnight distance by train from Calcutta (now Kolkata), and stayed in a holiday home on the beach front. Endless plunges in the sea, eating local food, smoking without having to look for cover and funfilled chatting under the stars with intoxicating sea breeze made them forget the passage of time. On one of those days, they took a day-long bus trip for local sightseeing.

A brief romantic encounter (in today’s world it would definitely be called hilarious) took place during the day between one of the boys and a copassenger, who travelled with her parents. The coach had 2×2 seating on either side of the aisle. She sat next to the window, and the boy in the same row, in the aisle seat across. About 15 minutes into the journey, she exchanged seats with her mother and occupied the aisle seat. Already smitten, the boy found his heart pounding, now with only the two feet wide aisle between the two. Covert exchange of silent admiration, trying to extract the last drop of confidence from a racing heart but still not being able to voice a word, and subtle remarks punctuated with impish grins from the friends spanned the journey.

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Whenever the bus stopped and the tourists disembarked, the boy thought, “This time, this is the time…I will ask her something… Will start a conversation”, with cold sweaty palms and head spinning with romantic thoughts. He was certain, almost consumed by the thoughts of reciprocal feelings from her, that there was hope. At the end, though, nothing happened! No words were exchanged, no crumpled paper notes were dropped and no Prophet appeared from the heavens to help the boy. The bus journey ended in the evening, and the two parted ways. That was the summer of 1991. Almost four years later, the boy, a young man by then, was training in the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. He returned to Calcutta for medical treatment (not a usual term break) in the middle of August 1995, and stayed for about a month until he recovered from the injury.

As he’d been an avid reader, lying on the bed throughout the day left him with little choice but to stay in the world of books, journals and newspapers. The daily newspaper subscribed at home was The Statesman, English, and a couple of Bengali publications. On 7 September 1995, Thursday, the paper landed on his plastered right knee with its usual supplement, “Voices”, written, edited and compiled by teenage youths from the schools in Calcutta. The cover story was “Love at the time of growing up”.

The attached photo of the same newspaper page tells the rest of this tale! The young man didn’t have the time to explore further, since he had to return to IMA, Dehradun for completion of training before being commissioned in the Indian Army. He didn’t keep the newspaper, maybe thinking the affair to be too serendipitous, too far from being real. But the incident didn’t erase itself from his ever romantic heart. Some time or the other, posted in the far, silent hills of the North East, remote frozen Siachen glacier, amidst the artillery guns thundering across Drass, Kargil and Batalik and blazing deserts of Rajasthan, there were those fleeting moments when he thought of that brief, sweet encounter, when unspoken words seeded a plant that stayed and survived without losing their charm. Why did he have to suffer an injury to be in Calcutta on that 7th September to see the newspaper? This question came into his thoughts sometimes.

The answer was there inside somewhere, hidden in a nook of his heart. Sometimes, we know where to find the answer in the book, but we fear if turning to the page would perish the hope. During a journey to Kolkata recently, he had to visit an office in Alipore. The work got over quicker than expected and he decided to take a walk back to the hotel.

En route, he found the National Library building, and the idea of looking for the newspaper struck the 52-year-young man. After a brief effort on a sultry afternoon, he got to see the same newspaper in the National Library archives in Kolkata! Yes, memory hadn’t played any trick on him, he realized as he looked at the newspaper which had held a young man in awe nearly 30 years back. Today is Rabindra Jayanti, the birthday celebration of the most celebrated romantic author of our times. As Tagore remained ruthlessly romantic in saying “The short story must end, without an end.”(Pardon my audacity in translating, “Sesh hoye hoilo na sesh”), I dedicate this short story to a valiant effort of helping the boy to find his day-long co-passenger, clad in a black and white striped top in Puri, lost forever but found often in the traces of a 35-year-old heap of memories!

(The writer is a retired Lt. Colonel of the Indian Army.)