The First Love

Tinku( also known as Chandrani, a name she thoroughly disliked ) and Debashish, first met when she was all of three and he, a year older. They had been placed next to each other in the first row of Nursery 1 in South Point and the entire year and the next that she spent in the school, they refused to sit next to anyone else ....unless they had a serious tiff...sharing pencils and scented erasers and cakes and chocolates and all their little childish secrets. And, call it fate or mere coincidence, they also happened to live next door to each other and were constantly holding loud conversations, he, from his upstairs window and she, from her small balcony on the ground floor...they would probably have grown to write the school boards together if her father hadn’t decided to move to distant Ranchi when she was about five.

Ranchi was like a hill station those days and though she missed her best friend terribly for the first few years, she soon made new ones, girls all, in the strict convent which kept its gates determinedly closed to the inquisitive boys who studied with the Jesuits next door. 

Years passed and Tinku, a grown-up young eighteen, decided to look for a seat in one of the better-known Calcutta colleges, interestingly, her father’s Alma Mater too.

College was exciting and there was always the hope that maybe, just maybe, Debashish would join the same college and they would meet, after more than a dozen years. Because she hadn’t forgotten him ......though they had not kept in touch and she could barely recall his face, she thought about him every other day and wondered how tall he’d grown and, if they were to meet on the streets, they would recognise in each other, the best friends they had been, those many school days ago.

There was a boy in the department adjoining her own, who was nice and friendly and always ready to give a hand to that Ranchi girl as he called her. And she was in for a pleasant shock when he introduced himself as Debashish Datta from South Point.
Debashish...and South Point too!! Wasn’t that a lot of coincidence...could it possibly be.....? Had her Debashish been a Datta or a Bose or a Ghosh? How she wished she could remember, as she lay awake, tossing and turning in her bed that night. 
The next morning she asked him if he remembered a Chandrani from Nursery, a thin little girl who shared his bench and his pencils and his tiffin and never ever sat with anyone else during the entire two years they were classmates. Of course, he didn’t remember her ..but he would ask his mother, he said, maybe she still remembered the girl who claimed to have been his one-time neighbour. Yes, they had lived at Ballygunge Place, when he was young, but they had shifted to New Alipore later and he had few or no memories of their stay in the older house. ‘ But let me ask my mom', he said, ‘you do look familiar'.
‘ I don’t ‘, she laughed…but secretly, her heart was on fire.

About a week later they bumped into each other in the corridor. He had a huge smile on his face,  ‘You were right’, he shouted excitedly, ‘my mother remembered a little girl who stayed next to us and was my class fellow at School. But she called you something else, do you have another name?’ ‘ ‘Yes, my nickname, Tinku’
“ Yeesss Tinku ...Hey, what a small world this is turning out to be’
After that, of course, they just took off from where they had parted, those many summers ago ...and when, after a suitable waiting period of five years and comfortable jobs each, they walked the seven steps around the sacred fire, the young man also called Debashish, looked at his young bride, and silently promised, never ever to tell her, that he wasn’t the boy she had been best of friends with during her first two years at school,.....he had joined the school much later and had never even met her Debashish,  and it didn’t really matter...for her, he was ready to live a lie...after all, wasn’t everything fair in love and war?