Love…

I’ll tell you what, I had the most beautiful morning this day. Nothing particularly spectacular happened – nothing that was stridently beautiful, or a touch of miracle or anything like that. I went to my usual hole-in-the-wall coffee place.

Jai made my first mug of masala chai and
I had to ask Sabeen to say his name thrice because he speaks so softly.

FC was there – being his usual, loud, bragging self – almost yelling, for that small space, that he gets in the way of everyone’s hair and everyone’s conversation, he’s hell bent on flirting, but the girls don’t sustain interest beyond two questions.

Gaelle, I think is 60 plus and she and I sip on our chai, and smile knowingly. I skooch over to her side of the long table, and we converse in quiet, we talk about her learning hindi to me not having washed my hair in 5 days.
We promise to meet again the next morning.

Then there’s the two-year-old Chandra and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen,and she’s yakking and babbling and nibbling on her cinnamon bun with a vengeance, but she’s smiling at everyone and she makes all of us forget ourselves, and our shambolic lives, for a few minutes – so drenched in her baby-beauty. She also sports an Audrey Hepburn Hairband too.
I squat next to her and ask, at her eye level- “are you doing yoga too?”
She’s now giggling… Or maybe gurgling.

Then Sudeep arrives – I like him because he’s quiet, and he speaks quietly, and he stays at least 5 metres away from the bombastic RC.
(5 metres only because that’s the size of this tiny hole)
FC finally leaves, and suddenly this hole doesn’t feel that tiny or that turgid, we all feel a bit of breathing space.
We inhale.
Sudeep, (who’s 60 plus) talks about why he is here, and concludes that this little hole is an asylum – if you survive one hour here, you can survive anything.

I tell him – this little hole is the living breathing pulsating explanation of the word ‘Sonder’.
We are all the leading man and the Leading Lady in our own lives- but such a nondescript backstory in the lives of whoever is sitting next to us.
They have their own Leading Lady lives to tend to, once they step out from here.
It’s sometimes wonderful to breathe in the scent of humans- these milling, bustling humans with their morning coffees, their unwashed hair, their bombastic nonsense, their quiet conferences to their bustling everyday ambitions.

I say my Bye to Sudeep, and come to my sunlit corridor that has been completely colonized by the virulent mountain sun.
I call my beautiful friend and she’s squealing when she sees my face.
I tell her, “I wanted to share this beautiful mountain sun with you”, and she’s saying – “I am so happy.”
My other friend texts me saying her son loves undiyoo just like I do, and I smile at the little things our friends remember about us. I do a yaaaay.

I think of the number of people I can call on this beautiful morning and I realize it’s such a large number of beautiful people that one rarely gathers in this tiny, ephemeral blip of a lifetime.

The shy, young boy that I met on the airplane texts me saying he’s usually quiet but that we had a great conversation, and now he’s going to talk to whoever sits next to him on the plane – it had started with me saying, “your burger looks sooo good.”

A friend had recently asked me, “so who would you say was the greatest love of your life ?”
I had said, “nobody.”
She says, “yeah true. I think you’re the greatest love of your life”
We both laugh, but I tell her this, “it’s not that I love myself so much that I register it with a definition – but I am a very happy person, it takes me small things to be happy, and I don’t think I need to sit around waiting for that one great love to arrive, and store up all my love and resplendent happiness for that one person- I love distributing it here, right here, to these great criss-crossings of people, to Jai that makes my coffee to Gaelle who hugs me every morning, to every little thing, really.”

So as a very happy, resplendently happy single woman on this particularly happy morning, I get surprised everytime, every single time, when someone says, “I hope I find love”

Oh you have!
You already have!
You have already found love in all the everyday things.
And so much of it.
If only you knew.