Sealed with a kiss

How sparks fly when we aren’t looking too hard.

April 17, 2016 08:41 am | Updated 08:41 am IST - Mumbai

He leans forward and gently parts his lips, his tongue momentarily unfurling to lap at the sharp jet of fountain water. Suddenly, his eyes dart open. His fingers uncoil in shock. Another pair of lips has found his. Another tongue soon meets his. Water continues to shoot between their mouths, almost reaching their noses. Almost instinctively, they raise their lock just above the spray. She goes on her tiptoes, like a skilled ballet dancer floating up to taste him. He watches — instead of looking into — her eyes. Finally, she pulls away. He covers his mouth, as if berating it. She coolly wipes her lips. And walks away. His 10-year old heart is beating out of his chest. “You remember it…you remember how it felt,” croons his adult voice.

I didn’t know it back then, but this scene — that of gloriously lyrical first contact between Pip and Estella in Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations — was to permanently shape my rose-tinted glasses. This would be my first kiss. And though I knew at the back of my little mind that it looked too perfect, that Patrick Doyle’s surreal score didn’t exist in my mundane world, my quest for the unattainable would make me a hopeless romantic. It would keep me going, in the face of numbing shyness and all-boys schools. I ended up drinking a lot of water at strategically placed coolers. Those soft lips never came. I took up sketching and occasionally visualised myself as a fateful Pip-meets-Jack drifter. But I drew cars and dinosaurs and ancient Kings; a naked queen was yet to present herself. Sprinting through rainy streets made me feel like an older Pip (Ethan Hawke) shadowing Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). I craved for someone who’d elegantly waltz in and out of my life. I craved for someone to chase.

Starry-eyed and young, I began to fall for various Indian avatars of Estella — flaky, self-aware and distant, chips on their slender shoulders, the living manifestations of unobtanium. Ironically, the moment they dropped their ice-queen guard, the moment we got closer, cinema would lose its essence. Pip would lose his artistry. Adolescence would lose its trickery. The green hues of Cuaron’s frames would lose colour. Expectations lost their greatness.

As with a brooding Pip, it wasn’t love, but the loss of love — and the embrace of true loneliness — that defined my next phase. It fuelled an ambition, a burning desire to prove something to someone, to anyone, that I’m good enough. I, too, wanted to drain a bottle and scream up at a fancy mansion, “I’m a wild success! Are we happy now?” Only, I didn’t know who “we” was. There was no one face to drive me forward. This is heartbreak’s most deluded mask, this unnatural urge to find romance and solace in silence. I strived to immortalise the quintessential no-pain-no-gain stereotype. Though I imagined an Amelie Poulain-style narrator waxing eloquent about the adventures of a globetrotting loner, subconsciously, I was still a boy seeking magic at a fountain. I travelled on single tickets, but secretly hoped to meet a stranger on the train ( Before Sunrise ), encounter different nationalities of intimacy ( Queen ) or spend a night shedding my inhibitions ( Victoria ). But the more I looked, the less I became. Love — or its cinematic grandeur that I had adopted — became an enigmatic, intangible entity.

Last year, as I cynically revisited Cuaron’s lucid lie one final time, a Facebook message popped up. “I like your pieces,” it said. How does it know I’m broken? “Your movie reviews,” it prompted.

Two nights later, I sat on a bar stool waiting for this fellow writer. When I saw her, it was through the bottom of my glass of water. I wiped my lips and stood up. She was considerably shorter, but didn’t stand on her toes to greet me. She looked and walked nothing like Ms Paltrow.

When Pip runs into Estella years later, she is a mother. She is not the elusive, selfish girl he once knew. She is contemplative, vulnerable and even less beautiful. She is human. For once, she has nobody to walk away from. She has seen the world, laughed, cried, grown, loved, lived and left it all — and now she’s home. He doesn’t fall for her immediately, but he will. He knows he will.

Sparks didn’t fly at the pub that night. But I knew they would. Eventually. They still do today — only, not audibly and dramatically, not near fountains and full moons. They fly when we aren’t looking too hard, and they fly when we decide to be lonely together.

Our meeting had no soundtrack. And there won’t be a film or novel about this first kiss — clumsy, rushed, in a car holding up a deafening traffic jam.

But I remember it. I remember how it felt.

The writer is a freelance film critic, writer and habitual solo traveller

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