Identity

Dearest Arnab,

When I think of you today, I think of all the things I did not want to be when I stopped being a child. Most of all, I did not want to be ordinary. When I look back now at the dim memories of the boy I pretended I disliked because everyone else was crazy about him, I can see how my childhood was dying, slowly asphyxiated by the hypocrisy of wanting my uniqueness to be underscored and validated. You see, I liked the same boy that everyone else liked.

I don't know when this hypocrisy became a part of me; it glinted on my bare throat and my naked ears, my unpolished nails and my scruffy clothes; it dripped venomously from the fangs of my jealous, ordinary glands, my just-like-everyone DNA. I thought I had it mutated by the books I read (Do you know I had read Gone with the Wind when I was eleven, Daniel Deronda when I was fifteen?), that I had some sort of special equipment with which to judge a lesser world peopled with lesser mortals than me.

I wonder sometimes if you fell for that. That you never saw beyond the inverted snobbery that I had adopted to fool myself. That you took my evaluation of myself and made it your rose tinted dream.

I wrote this letter to you to shatter it.

Love,
Ketaki