Ultra

She sits across him studying his face. He's engrossed in the papers he is skimming through. She traces his features - boyish looks, kind eyes framed by thin rimmed glasses, acne scars that look fresh from yesterday. She reflects upon his lucent smile that stays put like a permanent fixture, his best feature perhaps  - that smile that she'd never ever not seen. Even at this very moment, the ends of his lips are curved upward, like he is greeting his paperwork.

She has seen him quiet a lot - being in the same classroom as kids and adolescents made him strangely familiar to her though they hadn't interacted much all those years. They meet again, on and off and she smiles thinking of all the good memories. This is a guy that left a deep seated influence on her though they didn't have a distinct friendship. The interactions were sporadic, but she reflects upon them time and again, almost drawing a certain take away every time she traces those conversations back. He seems to have frozen in time, but there's something about him that she sees differently now.

"The smile may be?" She thinks to herself! "Was I in unrealized love?" She questions herself and outwardly negates it with a mild head shake. She is in awe. Like one would be with a hero. His brains and achievements were the stuff of many high school cafeteria discussions. But when she sees him this day, she realizes that she was never in awe with his brains as she is with his spirit. That unfazed smile - sigh! Isn't a perpetual smile associated with realized souls? like that dainty beam she spots on the face of the Christ or Buddha? Her comprehension seems to have suddenly expanded its horizons. She seems to have assimilated all those preexisting but unprocessed feelings around his presence. She is half tempted to disturb him and ask him if he ever gets angry - the tranquility she has seen him display from their childhood days and the way he has never let that beaming smile leave his lips even through conversations, his soothing voice that never raised an octave higher than necessary to hear- It would probably be the privilege of a select few to see that other side of him - the anger, the irritation, the unrest - which she somehow suspects is non existent.

He lifts his head up and catches her staring at him. His eyes light up and that immortal smile brightens up a few notches when their eyes meet. She doesn't bother to look away. She smiles back at him, a plethora of tender feelings drift through her heart! That moment generates a whole body of communication between them.That moment, perhaps, also defines the quaint bond she shares with him...a bond that buds in his smile and blooms in her heart.

Picture courtesy - Rahul Khanna's instagram (for that kind of a smile 😉)