HIHMYMY – Chapter 1 – Height Asymmetry (Ms. K)

I was seven years old when the first time I had romantic feelings for a woman. Yeah I know it’s quite early, I probably dint even knew what to call it then. It all started one hot Monday morning, the first day of second standard. Being the shortest boy in class I had the privilege of standing in first row in the school assembly right behind the girls’ row. There she was standing right before me by virtue of being the tallest girl in the class. I just saw her hair styled as 2 pigtails. She looked so cute in that hairdo. We all sang Jana Gana Mana to glory and the assembly was about to be dispersed. Then I saw that she had dropped her badge. So I picked it up and gave it to her. She smiled coyly and said “Thanks”. The fact that I had to look up to her to catch that smile dint deter me from being floored by it.

Me and my then best friend Mr. S (yeah the second shortest boy in the class) were made to sit in the first bench and she was sitting in the last bench. The distance was unbearable. That was the first time I felt sad that I was sitting in the first bench (in those days or in that standard first bench was a sought after spot). I used to constantly turn back to look at her and she caught me glancing in her direction more than once. Then after a few days of exchanging looks, I mustered up the courage during one lunch break and invited her to play with me and Mr. S. We also invited her best friend Ms. P (yeah the second tallest girl in the class).

Whenever we used to play games in which 2 had to team up (yeah the games were always chosen by me) I always used to force Mr. S to team up with Ms. P and I always used to team up with her. Mr. S used to happily do it because Ms. P was the most popular girl in the class she was this model student who always used to do her homework, always get full marks in all subjects and was teachers’ pet. I was totally something else. My 192 page notebooks used to be reduced to 100 pages, half of the pages torn by the teachers and other half torn by my mom. I used to have terrible handwriting and partly the reason for that was I used to do my homework in the hand rickshaw which used to take me home so that I could go home and play cricket.

The four of us started spending a lot of time together over the next few months. We visited each other’s homes and when I went to her home I tried very hard to impress her mom. I think she liked me. It was an instinct or something I knew that I had to impress her parents too. Then one day I invited them all to my home. I had a premonition that it was going to be a disaster. But to my surprise things were quite smooth. We had lots of food, played hide and seek and I always used to make sure that she isn’t caught first.

Then it all happened out of blue. As soon as they left my mom made a casual remark that she is too tall and I would always be shorter than her. Till that moment I dint give much thought about height. But all the stored memories of numerous Telugu romantic movies came flashing by and I realized that not even in one movie was the heroine taller than hero. I was crestfallen. I hated my mom for breaking this to me. Since much of my earlier life was influenced by Telugu movies, I had to be true the image of a Telugu movie hero and I decided to break it off with her. I shall spare you the gory details of the break up since there were none.