i name her aarzoo

There’s a very cute girl right now in the metro. Right across from me. She must be around 14-15 years old. Tiny. Thin. Like a fresh tendril, a tulip flower. She’s wearing a wooden cap on her longish hair that falls on her small breasts. It’s a hat, not a cap. Probably bought from the roadside stall in Lajpat Nagar. Its not a beanie, it’s a hat. Her knees peep from under the deliberate rips of her jeans. She’s wearing those white heeled canvas shoes. Engrossed in a conversation with someone on her phone. Sentient in her expressions.

I’m stealing looks at her.

Her voice so thin, like the patina of sunlight outside. She’s picture perfect. Like a phase most of us go through in our lives and have a photo or two as a memory of. The hat is maroon and black lined and extends down to her hair in the form of a scarf of the same combination. It looks soft, her hat and her hair. A narrow, almost invisible kajal lines her bright doe eyes. Eyes full of possibilities. Of dreams. The kajal, like streets running in tedious Eliotesque argument. Her thin sinewy fingers, a lot of work they need to do. And she has that patent pink reebok bag that all of us have had at that age. My best friend in Kanpur did, we girls running barefoot in our courtyards with no burden of books, riding bicycles to coaching institutes and doing Maths till two in the morning because that’s we loved.

Girls, like us.

What attracts me so much to her, I surmise, is my melting memory of me from that age

So soft, a mirage getting to closer to which would mean losing it

Malleable
Tender
Like fresh unboiled milk
Like the cream of a coconut

A thin face. Almost no cheeks and shapely, heightened cheek bones. My station is about to come.
I was once as thin as her. Never though did I have a face that thin. That small. Am twenty six, now ebbing on the heavier side of it, and heavily conscious of my face that I think looks like a tabla.
She, a poster child of possibilities, of exploring, of anything can happen, of all things waiting to happen—good or bad, she doesn’t know.

I too was that old, or do you say young, once. She’s biting her nails fervently as she talks over the phone. Her eyes, man. That innocence, that agile capriciousness. The arduous tenacity with which she looks for a word lost in her own conversation, inside one of the forgotten long drawn drawers of her mind. She got down at the station right before mine.