Tina. Tina. Tina.

Do you know it all began with you?

I was six, or seven when I saw you, but I found you in retrospection.

Do people get crushes when they are six or seven? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. I still don’t know, but looking back, maybe I did. Maybe it feels a bit different from crushes one gets in their teenage days or even later in life, but I am grateful to have found you. All your life, you have written a lot of letters and I wonder have anyone written you a letter? Maybe they did, but let me also write you a letter and hope this finds you. This is half a letter, half a bit of my faded memory.

My childhood memories are blurred but I remember one summer holiday in Bombay where I convinced my mother to buy me a notebook from a street shop, when everyone else was busy bargaining in the Fashion Street. The notebook was something in between a notepad and a notebook, one side of the notebook had a picture of Salman Khan and the other side had a photo of Rani Mukherjee. Back home, when the whole family was doing a shopping haul, narrating the successful tales of the bargain and gasping at the alarmingly low rate of the clothes they brought, my aunt noticed the notebook in my hand.

“You picked it up because of Salman?” she asked and I nodded, but I felt weird because I didn’t know how to explain that I picked it because the other side of the notebook had Tina from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

Everyone in my house loves Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. It’s almost like a comfort movie for my family, especially my aunt, but my memory of the film is just Tina. Her entry scene, she singing Om Jai Jagdish Hare, Rahul getting smitten by her and I am able to relate to Rahul. Every time the movie plays on TV, my family gathers, all excited to watch the story of Rahul and Anjali for the hundredth time. I remember telling my cousins that I loved Tina the most and everyone looked at me in utter disbelief as if I said the Earth is flat, so I buried it. And my fascination and being awed by seeing you for the first time became a secret I never visited. Every time I thought of telling it loud, I got scared of being invalidated. And for years, everything remained hidden and almost forgotten.

Bollywood cinema was staple at my house, and love was a forbidden word. No one utters it but everyone consumes it if uttered by Raj or Rahul from the screen and the more I let Bollywood spoon feed love to me, the more I found myself confused. It was like I understood love and yet I didn’t. I never felt what Veer felt when he looked at Zaara, or what Rahul felt when he looked at Simran. I sought it, yearned it, forced to feel it but never understood it. And for years, I wandered, never fitting anywhere, all I could do was relate to things in bits and pieces and everything traced back to you.

Maybe the reason I never found anyone in my class good looking was because no one awed me the way you did, maybe no one made my heart flutter in real life was because I yearned for someone akin to you but searched the people at the wrong places. Maybe if I knew why I loved watching Kuch Kuch Hota Hai despite hating the film, things would have made better sense.

Maybe if I understood why I wanted to buy that notebook and told my aunt why it was never about Salman Khan, then maybe I would have understood everything a bit easier and would have been a little less confused.

It took me years, all of my twenties, to realise the fascination I felt for you, a character in a film that I hated and yet kept watching every time it came on TV, was my first little crush. I felt something different, almost alien to the feelings I’d been taught or forced myself to feel. Even now I spiral back thinking saying this loud will invalidate what I felt, I trick myself and say maybe it was not a crush, I have had crushes on guys even though it was rare but a look around, I still have that notebook tucked inside a wooden box with my childhood memories. Not a word written on the book, but every blank page carry memory and each memory lead me back to you.

Always and forever in awe,

G