[shaad]

So we have had several serious dicussions on Forget Cricket recently, but what with this being after Valentine's Day, Tk 2.5 crore's worth of flowers being sold in Dhaka, Zahid still bemoaning his lost love Mona Lisa, Tonoy waxing rapturous over Pakistani girls in Canada, Orphy not getting any action and writing in support of gays, and One World getting chocolates as a gift, I thought it might not be a bad idea to talk about what love and romance was like when my peers and I were young. And as usual, in all my stories (all of them true), names will be changed to protect the identity of my friends.

Learn from your Elders

But first, a preamble about the generation that were our "boro bhais and bons." Apparently, romancing via cell/mobile phones are all the rage in Dhaka now; I mean, djuice largely functions as a successful business operation because of it. But I'd just like to point out that they are all newcomers to the field. This telephone romance was, if anything, advanced and developed by the generation that predated us.

You have to imagine the time. It was a very young Bangladesh. BTTB was trying to expand both the number of exchanges and the lines that the exchanges could hold. Needless to say, BTTB went about it in its usual incompetent manner. The result: for about a couple of years, cross-connections -- half of just about every number one dialed ended up reaching the wrong phone.

It was a much more conservative era. So-called love marriages were rare and viewed almost as taboo. The only romance that most of our "boro bhais" and "bonera" had experienced had been in the pages of fiction, of novels, and short stories. But those inadvertent cross-connections, they changed all that. An innocent phone call to a friend, misdirected, led to hearing a shy and silky sweet voice on the phone. And more often than not, that voice didn't hang up. They were starved for love, both the boys and the girls, and they rarely had had any opportunity to even meet members of the opposite sex of the same age who weren't relatives. They knew they were eventually destined for arranged marriages, to people they didn't really know, people chosen for them by their parents. But, for just a little while, with people they would never ever get to really meet, they had a chance to escape into the flights of fancy, and that they did, with wild abandon.

I don't know about you; but I find the innocent bittersweet telephone romances of that generation oddly touching.

Blowing in the Wind

But that was them. Let's move on to my generation. We were more "advanced", heck, some of us even went to co-ed schools. But, if anything, we were much more shy. Take my friend A, for instance. He had quite a crush on F, the girl in the house opposite his. In the time-honoured Bangladeshi way he became friends with her brothers, and visited them often. But in the presence of F, his eyes would become glassy and he would be tongue-tied, hard put to even say "Hello". Things finally came to a head when we were flying some kites on their roof (for those who don't know, at one time, and still in parts of Old Dhaka, kite-flying and kite-fighting was a favourite pastime, from roofs of houses that rarely had any walls or railings).

At any rate A, I, and one of F's brothers were each flying our own kites. And then F came onto the roof. And I saw A, looking at her, framed as she was by the setting sun. He was smitten, gloriously in love the way only the young and the innocent can be. He couldn't take his eyes off her. And, I think, for the first time, F realized this. But A was still, instinctively, a Bengali boy, a flyer of kites. Those of you who have flown kites know how important it is to maintain the tension in the line. And, instinctively, without thinking about it, A continued doing that. His eyes still riveted on her face, seeing nothing else, he kept on stepping back and back, keeping the line taut. And suddenly, there was no more roof beneath his feet. I yelled out a warning, but it was too late. Almost as if in slow motion, his eyes still focused on F's face, his kite line still taut, A simply fell of the edge.

The roof had been two storeys high. Luckily for A, the injuries weren't too serious: a broken arm, a broken leg, and a cracked pelvis. But something else too had broken in that fall: A's shyness. They talked, F and A, freely for once, while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. A was bedridden for a month and a half. F visited A almost every day. And they talked further. And the romance blossomed.

The Code of Lovers

A and I had both been Boy Scouts. So, one day, after he had fully recovered, he told me that he was teaching F Morse Code.

"Why?" I asked.

"You'll see," he said.

And I saw. At nine in the evening, he went up on the roof of his house and aimed a flashlight into F's second storey room. Slowly, laboriously, he spelled out "I love you" by switching the flashlight on and off. "I told her to look out of her window at nine, you see," A explained, the satisfied smile looming large on his face.

Unfortunately, the smile didn't last too long. F had indeed waited by her window, but A, in his love-fuelled excitement, had aimed his flashlight at the wrong window, that of her parents, by mistake. And it certainly didn't help that F's father was a fairly high-ranking retired officer of the Army signal corps.

For the next week or so, A didn't step out of his house. "Uncle", F's father, was seen walking around the gate with a rifle, you see.

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More true stories later if you guys like them...