I think I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. And that doesn’t

happen to me too often, let me tell you. But there was something about her—that lilting voice, those mischievous eyes and that dazzling smile—that

made me fall in love with her immediately.

Of course, there were many people who ran her down—namely, my best

friends. As we sat in one of the many cafés in Saddar that Karachi could  boast of back in the 70s, they would say things like “She’s too thin!” (You  know what desi men are like, they like their women buxom), that she couldn’t  speak Urdu properly, especially for a Muslim girl, and that she tried very hard to be like someone else we knew.

But my love was true and my babe and I would spend many evenings

together. Sometimes she’d run on the beach wearing a swimsuit, publicly.

Yes, she was daring all right. And she’d smoke. It was a habit I hated; I was

always worried about her health. But she didn’t care. She loved shocking

people.

Sometimes she would wear tight jumpsuits and dance the night away. She

even openly slept with other men, right in front of my eyes, sharing an after-

sex cigarette with one of them. And yet I forgave her. Because I knew that

this was just a passing phase. This was just rebellion. It was the 70s after all,  and the flower power of the 60s had come to India a decade later.

I also knew her better than she did. I came to realize that she was

traditional in some ways. She, like most desiwomen, wanted a man to cook  for, to clean for, to take care of. I could almost hear her saying in that

seductive voice of hers, “This is the way it should be—women should watch  their men eat the meal that they have cooked for them.”

For her, those honest admissions were few and far between. I knew that she wanted to run away from the world she had chosen to live in. And I would have been there for her every step of the way, to help take her there if she had let me. But she never saw me clearly. I sometimes think that she didn’t even know I existed, although at that time I thought it was impossible. As I got to know her better, I realized that my loneliness matched hers more

than she would have liked to admit.

But she just saw me as one of her many admirers. And I don’t blame her.

I wasn’t tall, or handsome like the men she got involved with and nor could I give her the luxuries she was used to. Let’s face it—I was a nobody. Once I  went to see her in Bombay—that’s what Mumbai was called then—and

visited her flat in Juhu, but it didn’t bring us any closer.

As time went on, I discovered that she was seeing a married man. He

loved her, but I think he was using her. She didn’t care. I wrote to her. Countless letters, saying, Baby, please. He’s not worth your time. He may be  an intellectual, but he won’t love you the way I do. But I might as well not have sent her those letters. She never answered them. Maybe she forgot? Or maybe she didn’t realize how much the time I had spent with her meant to

me.

I chalked it up to the obvious cliché—I was Pakistani and she was

Indian—and never would the twain meet. Getting to India once was difficult enough, and we were hardly Shoaib and Sania. So as time went on, I came

to terms with the fact that we were never meant to be.

My love didn’t wane over the years. I heard that she left India for the US

in the 80s, returning much later. Her beauty was gone and a haunting, almost eerie, pain had replaced the mischief in her eyes. She had gained

weight, but that didn’t matter, not to me.

I, by that time, had made something of myself. Life had been good to me;  I was an investment banker, married with children, but the emptiness remained. I still caught glimpses of her whenever I could; glimpses of the past. Of her in a white dress and a pink hat; in a yellow sari; in a black dress that showed off her curves, inviting me to let the night go by without worrying about what may come.

She continued to smoke and drink, I think. It didn’t help matters. I felt

like shaking her and telling her to stop the insanity. But the distance between our worlds had grown. I could have gone to see her, but I was told that she

had become a recluse. She had let life slip by her. And I was too much of a coward to tell my wife that my heart didn’t belong to her; that it belonged in India. The India we could have called home had it not been for 1947. Oh

well.

The final blow came in 2005. I heard it on the television. She was dead.My babe was dead. She had been dead for two days before her body was found. How could this be? How could I have let this happen? I blamed myself. I could do nothing else. I couldn’t rush to Santa Cruz Cemetery where she was buried, what would my wife say?

So instead, I locked myself in my room, feigning a headache and asked not to be disturbed.  A tear slid down my cheek.

Goodbye, Parveen, I said. Not just to her, but to my youth.