This is not your typical love story; it is a Yash Chopra film. That’s what my friend said when I recollected to her my travels across Europe, meeting and bidding farewell to M—. I met M— in New Delhi in 2017 and again in Europe the next year as we tried to work out if our romance was meant to be a short-lived summer fling or had the potential for a longer engagement. In the end, we decided it was not going to work out. She worked in London, and I in New Delhi—it was an impossible cartographic challenge that no passion could overcome.
I met M— soon after my father died. After the cremation and funeral rituals, I returned to New Delhi and threw myself into work at the newspaper, where I was employed as a sub-editor. My book of poems, Visceral Metropolis, was brought out by independent publisher Red River to favourable reviews. I started writing a column on cinema and politics and another one on Indian poetry in English. It had been about a year since my previous relationship ended, and at the suggestion of a friend, I decided to download a dating app.
My success rate was not very high, but soon enough, I matched with M— on the app. She was a New Delhi native, now doing a PhD at Cambridge University. She was back home that summer to do fieldwork for her research. We met at a café in South Delhi, one of those aesthetically lit, glass-windows and porcelain-cutlery places that open and close with alarming regularity in the city. Our conversation was easy, and we met up again a week later at a pub opposite the sprawling campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. Though she was not looking for anything permanent or long-term, we decided that night to keep meeting up.
Our activities usually included me taking her to different parts of Delhi that I liked. Though M— had grown up in the city, she had hardly explored much of it. Soon after graduating from Delhi University, she moved to the UK for postgraduate studies. So I took her to the 14th-century Kotla fort, hidden in a road off Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg; I took her to Changezi Chicken at Daryaganj; and to Hussaini Hotel in Nizamuddin, which I believe has the best nihari in Delhi.
“Come with me,” I told her, “I’ll show you meri Dilli—my Delhi.” It was a sort of summer love, startling like an amaltas tree in full bloom. As the summer drew to a close, M— wrapped up her fieldwork and returned to the UK. We promised to keep in touch, to write to each other, but we knew it would not work out. The difference in time and space is often too difficult to negotiate. Soon enough, we fell out of touch.
In the summer of 2018, I received a fellowship for mid-career journalists to travel to Germany. My fellowship included six months in Berlin, where I had the opportunity to work at Deutsche Welle, the government-sponsored international broadcaster. For some reason, one of the first people I informed about it was M—. “Berlin!” she cried on hearing it. “I have never been to Berlin. I will see you there." This was a strange proposition but also an offer I could not refuse.
It was the hottest summer in Germany in many years, with a drought sweeping through the country. But Berlin was somewhat protected from the ravages of nature. I had already lived in the German capital for several weeks when M— arrived. So, I knew where to take her—East Side Gallery, Brandenburg Gate, Holocaust Memorial, Berghain—mera Berlin, my Berlin! We explored Museum Island together, and she introduced me to Vietnamese iced coffee, which I loved instantly.
We also planned to travel further east together, but on the evening we were supposed to take a flight to Vienna, she told me: “Maybe we should not be travelling together. It would be too intimate, difficult to unentangle.” I protested, but I knew she was right. So, I took the flight anyway and continued with my European travels.
In Vienna and Prague, I was miserable. Both cities were overrun with thousands of tourists, but I was alone. M— and I had decided to stop communicating, at least for some time. Tough love: best to pull off the band-aid at one go. It is a good prescription, they tell you. What they don’t tell you is that when you pull off the band-aid, it hurts like hell.
“Come to Paris?” M— texted me on my last day in Prague. Was it really a question? She knew that I had plans to travel to Paris at the end of my European tour. How did she land up there? Eventually, it was revealed to me how she had planned to meet me in the French capital—not to reunite but to bid me a final farewell. To show me her Paris, to take me to Montmarte, and as we looked down on the thousand lights in the evening, to tell me: “Here’s looking at you, kid! We’ll always have Paris.”
I returned to Delhi heartbroken. I threw myself into work at the newspaper, where I was employed as a news editor.
It was summer again in the city. The queue of amaltas trees in the road outside my house was blazing.
Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat.