Harsh, a fourteen year-old boy, was in love with a woman he could not have, his thirty year old aunt. Aishwarya was his mother’s cousin and had come to stay with them after her husband had half burnt her face. She sought in their house and Harsh felt a strange pull towards her as he watched her furtively from behind the pillar. He would watch for hours as people sympathized with her, but her hazel eyes only ate up the floor. The wrathful swarthy burn marks claimed half her face but to Harsh they only made the other half of her face even more divine. She rarely looked up and never responded to sympathy. As his distant admiration and empathy increased, there came a point where Harsh wanted the wind to stop caressing her face as it passed through the marble courtyard. People sensed the young boy’s melancholic infatuation towards the unfortunate woman and sent him to boarding school to finish his education soon after.

As years went by and Harsh came back for his twentieth birthday, she was still there in the room by the window, overlooking the backyard in one forgotten corner of the house. Thankfully her window faced the giant banyan tree in the backyard. Her ashen eyes were still empty and sad. She looked at him after he greeted her and responded to his ‘How have you been? With one word and a dazzling smile she said, ‘Ugly’.

That was the moment when the banyan swayed in the pre-monsoon winds and he knew he was in love with this broken exquisite woman. Soon after, one afternoon, with the wind pregnant with the impending monsoon, they made love, tender beautiful love.

He made her feel beautiful. Through the long spell of monsoon they made love only to part in the autumn. Their passion-filled cries had resounded from the concrete walls as they lay naked in the courtyard, and that was the last he saw of her. That was the first and last time Harsh was in love. Ever since he felt like he was an outsider living on the inside, trying to recreate that monsoon he spent making love to the woman he loved. Lying in her arms, easing her pain bit by bit and making her whole again. Everything else ceased to exist. He had gone through the rest of his life, politics and marriage with little interest.