Write about your first crush.

I was a young boy of about nine or ten. Our ancestral home was located in a village called Pudukottai, far away from Chennai, the capital of Tamilnadu, South of India.

People in our village gather every year during the month of January to celebrate harvesting. They conduct various local fun and play activities that include staging dramas. 

We call it Pongal Festival in Tamil.

Theatre and drama in India, as you know, are very ancient. They date back to the 2nd century BC.

Folks in villages found them mostly entertaining in nature. The drama crew showcased a lot of local tales and people sat the whole night watching the cast. They didn’t sleep a wink.

I was attracted to one such drama and fell in love with the female cast. She was beautiful. Flawless in her performance. People clapped each time she appeared on stage. 

She was simply a WOW! I had no clue about what the story was about though. 

All I knew, I had found my crush.

I went crazy, didn’t miss the show, sneaked through each night, three nights in a row hoping I would meet her and say she did a good show.

On the fourth day the crew packed up and gone. I welled-up in my eyes.

As I grew up, one day my uncle told me that the cast in those dramas were mostly boys and not girls. The girl, he said, I was madly in love with could probably be a boy.

What! Was my first crush a boy?

Gobsmacked! Years have gone, but the memory is still fresh.