First Glimpse
It was an ordinary, breathless morning in April 1993, the kind of morning when the heat rose early from the stones and laid its palm upon the old city. Salar woke around eight o’clock in the pol of Ahmedabad where he lived, a narrow world of joined walls, shared courtyards, familiar voices, and secrets carried from window to window like incense smoke.
Outside, the day had already opened its eyes. Women called to one another across courtyards. Vendors sang out the names of fruit and vegetables as if reciting an old street poem. Somewhere, from a Vividh Bharati radio, a Bollywood song floated through the air — thin, sweet, and full of longing. Salar sat on his bed for a while, staring at nothing. “How will I pass this day?” he wondered, though he already knew the answer. Summer vacation had made his life into a slow-turning wheel: books, long conversations with his grandfather or father, and television in the evening when the house finally softened into night.
He was not allowed to make friends in the pol. His parents feared that friendship, like rainwater in an old wall, might seep into him and change him without warning. “Bad company spoils good children,” they often said, and the sentence had become a small locked gate inside him. So he brushed his teeth, ate his breakfast, and began pacing around the front hall. His grandmother, whom everyone called Anna, sat nearby with the Quran open before her, her voice low and steady, while she gave instructions to his mother and two unmarried sisters as they prepared lunch in the kitchen.
Salar longed for a friend with the quiet hunger of a caged bird watching the sky. He wanted someone to run with, laugh with, quarrel with, and make peace with before sunset. But most days, he only watched other children through distance and silence, imagining himself among them like a boy drawn faintly into someone else’s picture. That morning, as he paced, his feet carried him to the front door. He stood behind its vertical iron grills, the old 1970s pattern cutting the world into narrow strips, and looked out.
Then he heard it: girls’ voices, bright and broken with giggles, coming closer along the lane. There was also the soft click and whirr of bicycle wheels. He did not know it then, but some moments do not arrive with thunder. They arrive gently, wearing the face of an ordinary morning, and afterward nothing inside a person remains exactly where it was.
The pol was narrow, with houses leaning close on both sides like old relatives whispering across the lane. There was barely enough space for a scooter to pass. Salar waited, curious to see what kind of bicycles the girls were riding. First came a small maroon BSA Champ bicycle, its cream-coloured seat shining faintly in the sun. And upon it rode a girl of about ten.
Strands of fringe fell along the sides of her forehead, while a neat red-and-white hairband held the rest of her hair in place. She wore a cotton mustard-yellow kameez and a brownish olive-green shalwar, colours that seemed to carry the warmth of turmeric, dust, and afternoon shade. Her large almond-shaped eyes were lowered toward the pedals, serious with concentration, as if the whole universe depended on the careful placement of her feet.
Salar forgot to breathe.
She was only two or three metres away, yet she seemed to appear from some other world — one softer, brighter, and unreachable. To see her was not like being struck by lightning exactly; it was more like hearing, for the first time, a note from a song he had always known but never remembered. His throat dried. His eyes fastened to her face. The lane, the houses, the voices, the hot morning, even his own body seemed to fall away. Only she remained, moving slowly past the iron bars, and something inside him opened like a window he had not known was there.
“Who is she?” his heart seemed to ask, though another part of him already knew.
She looked completely absorbed in the bicycle, unaware that a boy behind a door had just been changed by the simple act of seeing her. She pedalled on, small and graceful, and the sound of her bicycle wheels became, to him, the sound of a secret being written.
For the next ten or fifteen minutes, Salar stood where he was, waiting for her to pass through his vision again. Each time he heard a voice or the turning of a wheel, hope rose inside him like a kite catching wind. He wanted to call out. He wanted to say, “Will you be my friend?” or even just “Hello.” But the words stayed trapped in his chest. Fear stood behind him like a watchman. He knew that before he could step outside, before he could become the boy he wanted to be, someone would stop him.
At last, the spell broke when his sisters called him upstairs to help with something. He went, but he did not return unchanged. In the back of his mind, a small clay pot of strange new feelings had been set over a hidden flame. He had known who she was before that morning, but knowledge and feeling are two different doors. For the first time, he silently said her name to himself: Umaiza.
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The name moved through him like a spark through dry grass. Umaiza. At once, an unexplainable sensation ran through his body. It felt as if his blood had begun to boil, yet the thought of her filled him with a happiness so tender it frightened him. At thirteen, he could not name what had entered him. Love was still only a word from songs, films, and novels. He did not yet know that life sometimes plants its strongest trees from seeds too small for a child to understand.
After finishing the chores with his sisters, he sat down for lunch with his grandfather, a short, lean man with a dark complexion and a heart that held Salar as carefully as a lamp holds flame. Usually, Salar talked so much during meals that his grandfather would warn him, half stern and half amused, “Eat first, beta. Your words can wait. Food cannot.” But that day, Salar only nibbled at his food. His grandfather looked at him once, perhaps twice, but said nothing. The boy who normally overflowed with speech had become a well with its water hidden deep below.
After lunch, as usual, it was time for the house to surrender to the afternoon siesta. Salar went upstairs to one of the rooms that faced the house where Umaiza lived. He opened the window, and a wave of hot, dry air touched his face like the breath of a furnace. He looked down into the gali, hoping to see her again, but the lane lay empty and stunned by heat. Only a couple of stray cats moved through the silence, searching for food among shadows.
“Maybe she will come,” he thought. “Maybe once more.”
But she did not.
He closed the window, lay down on his bed, and picked up one of the Gujarati novels he had borrowed from the library. The letters stood before him in neat black rows, but their meaning dissolved before reaching his mind. The book had become only paper; the real story had begun elsewhere. It was in the maroon bicycle, the cream-coloured seat, the lowered eyes, the red-and-white hairband, and the name that kept returning like a refrain: Umaiza.
Thinking of her made him happy, but also shy, as though he had stolen a flower from a garden no one had given him permission to enter. The afternoon heat thickened. The room grew quiet. At last, with the novel resting forgotten beside him and her name still glowing softly in his thoughts, Salar drifted into sleep.
That evening, when the house had cooled a little and the day’s heat had begun to loosen its grip on the walls, Salar sat with his family to watch television. A newly launched channel called Zee TV had entered their home like a fresh breeze through a long-closed window. It was the year when India itself seemed to be changing shape under the new winds of economic liberalisation, and for families used to the familiar, measured world of Doordarshan, this new channel felt like a small miracle of colour, sound, and possibility.
After the television shows ended, a film began at nine o’clock: Yaadon Ki Baaraat. Salar did not know then that even the title carried a quiet prophecy, a wordplay hidden in plain sight, as if life had placed a signboard before him that he was still too young to read. A procession of memories — yaadon ki baaraat — would one day pass through his heart, and at its centre would be that April morning, that narrow lane, that maroon bicycle, and the girl whose name had begun to glow inside him like a secret lamp.
For the first time in his life, the old film songs did not sound merely pleasant or catchy. They seemed to open like folded letters. Their melodies carried meanings he had never noticed before, and their words seemed to lean toward him, asking to be understood. When a young boy and girl sang “Kya Hua Tera Vaada,” the tune — already one of his favourites — fell differently upon him. It carried a sweetness edged with sorrow. His eyes remained fixed on the television screen, but his mind had slipped away from the room. It was elsewhere, riding beside Umaiza in the narrow gali, imagining the sound of two bicycles moving together as if they were part of the same song.
As the film moved through its own tapestry of love, separation, promises, and longing, Salar began to gather pieces of himself from the images on the screen. He did not understand everything, but he felt everything approaching him. Then another beloved song, “Chura Liya Hai Tumne Jo Dil Ko,” filled the room. The words puzzled him and stirred him at the same time. “How can someone steal a heart?” he wondered. “And if a heart is stolen, where does the person live afterward?” The question was innocent, almost childish, yet it opened inside him like a door in the dark.
Again, he found himself lost in the thought of Umaiza — not as she truly was, carefully pedalling past his doorway, but as his imagination now wished to see her: riding beside him, laughing perhaps, both of them carried forward by bicycles and by something nameless, tender, and impossible to explain.
When the film ended, the house slowly returned to silence. Salar went to bed, but sleep did not come at once. In the darkness, he lay awake and sifted through the day like someone turning over bright stones in his palm. Why did everything feel different now? Why did the same songs sound deeper, the same night feel wider, the same heartbeat as if it had discovered another room within itself? It seemed to him that he had crossed into a new world — or perhaps a new era — without taking a single step beyond the house.
He had many questions, but no one to ask. He had always been shy, and the questions rising in him were too delicate to place before anyone. They were like young birds; one careless touch might frighten them away. So he kept them inside, close to his chest. And at last, with the songs still echoing faintly in his mind and Umaiza’s name moving through the darkness like a whispered refrain, Salar fell asleep.
