My First Love Letter

It was love at first sight. 

She was my classmate. She was like a flower about to bloom. 

I was just fourteen then. The testosterone had just started to rise. 

Whenever I saw the sweet one, my heart would run fast like an express train. The bullet train was unheard of then. 

I used to sit in the first row just in front of the teacher. Whenever the teacher asked any question, I was told to keep mum till other students got a chance to answer. If no one could, it was my turn to answer. I was thus considered a bright student. 

It so happened that as I  entered my teen,  my hormones going topsy-turvy, my eyes would naturally look at the students of the opposite sex and see the changes occurring in their physique. I developed infatuation with a beauty sitting in the second row of my class. It was difficult to look back on and off without being noticed by the teacher who happened to be sitting just in front of me. 

One fine day, the ‘bright student’ was missing from the front row and had occupied the back bench, with the sole intention of looking at the sweet thing sitting in the second row.

But it did not go unnoticed by the teacher.

“Where is Mr Intelligent?” asked the teacher.

‘Sir,  he is on the back bench’ students replied in chorus.

It was then I understood that it was not ‘good’ to be a ‘good’ boy in the class! I was brought back to the first row again which was a place of pride for me but I was miserable with the urge to look back at the sweet thing again and again.

Once with a lot of courage, I decided to express feelings of my heart to the sweet thing. What if she shouts, becomes angry, or reveals it to the teacher! It was a great dilemma, but my hormones would not allow me to sit quietly and ultimately I wrote a love letter, the first in my life which was something like this - …. ‘ Deer Ms X, I luv you very much … blah blah blah’ and then I secretly put that letter in her school bag.   I waited for her response with a palpitating heart. 

As luck would have it, the father of my sweet one happened to be a close colleague of my dad. The sweet one possibly did not have that inclination towards me, her love was algebra, civics, and history. I am sure that she had not read love stories of emperor Shahjahan for Mumtaz nor had she seen the movies like Mugal-e-Azam or Anarkali.

She handed over a love letter meant for her to the ‘villain’ I mean her father. Her father in turn handed over that precious secret letter to my dad, “Look what your son has written to my daughter”, said the villain. 

The next day I was summoned by Mughal-e-Azam, my dad. Here I must reveal a few things about my dad. My dad was a poet. He used to pen lovely rhymes in English and used to teach us English at home whenever he had free time. 

“ Son, I heard that you wrote a love letter to your classmate!”

I developed cold feet. I looked down to the earth as his sharp eyes pierced me. I talked to myself, ‘Oh, how could she do such a foolish thing, the stupid sweet thing did not even understand that it was meant for her and not for the parents!’

Said my Dad,  “ Don’t you know how to write a love letter, firstly spelling of LUV is wrong, it should be LOVE and what is the spelling of the Letter you rascal, is it LETAR  or LETTER! It's DEAR and not DEER! Don’t you know simple English?  There are ten more mistakes in your so-called love letter.”

I did not know what to say, now it was my turn to stand like a stupid in front of the towering personality of my dad. 

“ Now take a pen and paper, write each and every wrong word ten times each, and show me .”

Poor me! I wrote each and every wrongly spelled word ten times and showed it to my father. He also found many grammatical errors. Ultimately,  a new letter was drafted for my sweetheart, who by that time had become too bitter for me. I never handed over that redrafted letter to her. 

Later I heard the villain asking the Mughal-e-Azam, “Did you tell anything to your son?”

“ I am sorry for so many mistakes in his letter, Don’t you worry, he has corrected all those mistakes and I made him rewrite a proper love letter”, my Dad smiled.  Both had a hearty laugh.

After a few years, I did write another love letter, albeit to my new love but the romance and thrill of the first love letter was missing.