Crushed

My first crush was when I was 12 years old. It was not the love at first sight kind, but something that crept up behind me and hit me hard one day. And it was the unrequitted, unattainable kind. The guy was tall and handsome and didn't know I existed. He was Imran Khan, the captain of the Pakistan cricket team! During his heyday in the late 80s Imran was the heartthrob of many a girl. I knew I "loved" him and I knew everything there was to know about him. I knew his birthday, where he lived in Lahore, what his likes and dislikes were, who his favorite actress was, who he was sleeping around with....I lived, ate, slept Imran Khan. I would make my dad take us to dinner at the Oberoi Grand when the Pakistan team was in Calcutta playing a one day match, with the hope of catching a glimpse of my hero in the lobby. I even went to watch a highly charged one-day match between India and Pakistan at the Eden gardens a day before my Final exams in school, just to watch Imran play and made myself hoarse screaming with glee every sixer that he dealt out, much to the irk of all the other Indian supporters around me. I had Imran posters all over my bedroom, not on the walls because that was a strict no-no in my house, but all over my cupboards and doors. The crush lasted for a few years. I think it started tapering off right when Imran married Jemima. I haven't had a crush on any other cricket player since.

But having crushes on celebrities is a normal part of growing up. I've been through the Maradona phase, the John Mc Enroe phase, the Tom Cruise phase and the Agassi phase. The Agassi phase I think, lasted the longest. I think I still had some of my Agassi posters clinging onto my door half torn and faded with time, when I started seeing B, who I ended up marrying! It makes me laugh to think about the crazy things I did or thought of doing each time I had these crushes and right now I don't even know what I saw in any of those guys. Tom Cruise makes me want to puke right now. But (sigh) I guess it was one of those crazy teenage things, something to do with surges of hormones I believe. You fall in love with anything because you are more in love with the concept of being in love. I even had a crush on a guy because he was wearing a T-shirt that was a color which happened to be my favorite at that particular time. Or may be it became my favorite color because he was wearing it and I had the crush first....wait, now I am confused....I don't remember which happened first. It was so long back. And it doesn't matter because it was just that, a crush, that lasted may be a milli-second in the span of my life. But these moments live on in your heart as sweet memories which can make you smile even on an otherwise ordinary, dismal morning.