“Why, it’s a refinement of the Casanova logic you had talked about; how sad it was given that you were such a sensitive lover.”
“I really don’t know if callousness was a streak of my character shrouded by my capacity to love,” he said remorsefully. “Whatever, I kept my word and let her join her man on his release, but in the meantime to my dismay, being physically close, yet she was emotionally distanced from me; but it was her parting words – ‘glad you’ve given up your reign on my body’ - that wounded my pride of being a ladies’ man. It was from then on that I took to one-night stands as a guarantee against emotional failures; what an end it was to the lover in me.”
“It’s the tragedy of my life so to say,” he continued pausing as if to mourn the death of the lover in him. “If in spite of my means, I failed to inspire her, then for the lack of youth, I lost a woman on the verge of conquest. I met Mallika on the train, and it was a case of mutual attraction with the momentum to fast track affection. When she was all eager for a date, it was either my naivety for being truthful or vanity of not looking my age, damn them both, that put paid to it; unasked, as I revealed my age, she exclaimed, ‘oh, you’re my dad’s age’, and that was that. A la Ghalib, ‘of what avail is my beckoning her / wish she gives up self-restraint’, I hoped for long that the force of attraction would prevail upon her forcing her to seek me; well, she took my phone number before the fiasco of that seduction. When hope tired me, her enchanting persona was blurred in my mind but the beauty of that brief encounter ever remains fresh in my memory; even now, as I ponder over her inexplicable behavior, I wonder whether it was her vanity to desist from an affair with an older man that blinded her attraction; would’ve my disclosure in the midst of our lovemaking made her recoil from my arms? What if she were to know about my age after we were true and thick into an affair, wouldn’t she have still carried on with me? I know that I would never know.”
“Maybe she would have carried on for it is said that any fool can get into an affair but it takes a wise head to get out of it.”
While he laughed heartily, I felt heartened for having lightened him, be it for a while.