When I was nine, I had a crush on a boy.
I want to lie and say that it lasted till I moved away to a new city at 10, but that was not how it was.
I still carried the ‘crushing’ weight of my feelings for this boy with me through to a new city, to a new school and even to a new country.
A friend from middle school encouraged me to start an Instagram account to find him.
I was 12 years old. I barely knew how to use social media but with a little encouragement and much technical support, I made my first, my very own social media account.
Naturally, I searched for HIS name first.
I typed it in the search bar countless times, and found different boys with the same name, the same surname.
They weren’t him, or were they?
How could I know?
It had been three years.
Would he even remember me now?
Why would he ever remember me?
I HAD A CRUSH ON HIM.
Then, I found HIM. Well, a part of him.
To be precise, his older brother.
And I sent a DM right away.
‘Oh my god, hey’
‘It’s been so long, almost four years since we last met.’
‘How are you? How’s uncle and aunty?’
And very shamelessly, I asked him the very question that had made me reach out:
‘So right, also how is… and does he…”
EUREKA.
I finally got HIS Instagram username and I texted right away.
Two days into Instagram DMing him, I confessed my feelings of three years.
I was living with my family in Lusaka, Zambia, at that time. We had moved to the city during the months of long power cuts, anything from 8 to 16 hours.
My 12-year-old self had decided that this unfortunate month was the right time to confess to my longest crush.
The power went out, as usual, that afternoon. I was sweaty, anxious and frustrated.
It was looking to be my worst confession already.
I repeat that it certainly was my worst confession, till date, because he wasn’t online that whole day.
(Now that I think of it, he was hardly online and would admit to being busy most of the time. He would not respond to me until after two or three days. It took me another five years to understand that that was what boys did when they weren’t really interested.)
I thought to myself:
He could have responded.
He could have been waiting for my text.
What if he thought that I was joking around?
What if it was the internet connection?
THAT STUPID WI-FI ROUTER
I unsent my message to him 130 times.
What I didn’t know was that unsending a DM meant that a notification would still pop up on the phone.
Here is that DM:
“Hey so, I know this is weird but you made me feel really comfortable and safe when I first moved into school. You were so…” and “I really like you. I like like you.”
Oh to be 12 and to use, ‘like like’ for the boy you were madly CRUSHING on for what felt like forever. For the boy who probably introduced you as a second cousin to his friends because you both were “family friends”.
Yikes. Embarrassing.
So, when the power finally came back, I plugged in the WiFi router, switching it on and off thrice, just in case and for good luck.
I believed that all the best things came in threes.
I was wrong.
Because when I grabbed my tab, a Samsung Galaxy Tab E and switched it on, there it was.
On the notification bar, inside a curved rectangle, a single DM from @baby_cloud_09:
“Hey, I’m a bit surprised but I like you too.”
Eureka?
It has been exactly 10 years since my first confession of love.
I have confessed to many boys since. Romantically. Unromantically. Made grand gestures. Made hardly any gestures and yet, funnily enough, had my heart broken. I have fallen in love or at least thought I did.
Despite that, each time, I persevered and I loved and I lost, grandly.
It was the internet, too. It opened up a frisson of possibility, inviting me to play a game with my own self. It created an eroticism – to hope and wait in desire, to give in to desire, not only for a boy but for the woman I could become.
This year, I completed 21 years on this strange planet and I continue to feel stranger each day, much like my first confession.
My window of possibilities
I think about my first time using a computer with an internet connection, one summer afternoon in Kerala.
Amma’s tharavadu or ancestral home in Kerala was the very first to install and introduce a desktop in the family. It was placed on a Hello Kitty study desk. The internet cable, again the very first in the family, ran along the cracked beige wall in the upstairs hall. The sides of the cable were stuck with sellotape to stop it from hanging loose and falling off.
On summer vacations, I would run upstairs every morning, making the old wood on the stairs creak, clinking the paadasaram, or anklets, on my feet. Then, I would power blast the computer.
It was a three-step process: POKE, WAIT and BEHOLD.
POKE the power button with my index finger,
WAIT in anticipation,
sweat forming on the sides of my forehead when,
BEHOLD, the colours flashed.
The Windows logo formed beautifully and the sounds behind it flowed like music.
My window of possibilities. And for the next two hours, till lunch, I would not be able to discern what was hotter – the CPU or the weather in Kerala.
I sat crouched before the computer, and went swimming in the internet sea, sailing across websites and docking on my favourite island (s) – friv games, 123games, girl games.com, games2win, games for girls.
I played dress-up games an awful lot. Dress-up games with blonde-white figurines smiling at me, uncannily, while I fitted their tiny bodies with tinier clothes. Then, I would remove everything to see them half-naked in pretty pink bikinis and shiny bodies. Gleaming at me, these monstrous figurines. Gleaming at a real-life-girl that would grow up and not have a doll-like body like that.
They had not one layer of fat on their two-dimensional bodies. Not one speck of imperfection in their big blue eyes, which were eating up half their faces.
I would never be pretty like that.
When I would tire of dress-up and doll-up games, I would move on to a cooking game. Soon, I would be whipping up omelettes for breakfast, fitting beef patties into hamburgers and filling up iced cola. By then, Amma would yell from downstairs, “Lachu, thazhe vaa. Chor kazhikaan samiyaaayi.”
Lachu, come down. It’s time to eat lunch.
The irony.
I was always ashamed of the girly games I played.
Acha would never let me wear clothes like that.
Amma would never make me hamburgers for lunch.
This wasn’t a life I had known. It was perhaps a life that I wanted, one that I had wished for.
That made me ashamed.
Growing up, I noticed young girls being shunned for short skirts that crept up their thighs.
Young girls being taught to shun the other girls that wore short skirts and cute dresses.
But I always wanted to be like those young girls.
Sometimes, I tried to be sneaky and played kissing games on the computer.
Kissing games where the two characters would be sitting on a park bench, trying to avoid being caught by the security guard holding a ‘lathi’.
Kissing games where the security guard was easily distracted so that the couple, when I would click on them, would embrace and smooch each other on the lips.
CLICK CLICK CLICK until the ‘love meter’ was full or else I’d lose.
What a bad way to lose. There were worse ways to lose like the security guard catching you and chasing you off.
‘GAME OVER’
flashing on a pitch black screen.
But for me, the worst was definitely Amma catching me off guard playing a kissing game, and saying, “Ayee..chiii..inganthe oronna kalikinne.”
Ew, what is this? You’re playing such games?
She did not let me use the computer lest I play such “dirty games” again.
I carried this dirty shame with me through the years.
The same shame I felt when I confessed to my crush of three years.
The same shame that rose to my cheeks when he found me in his study, sitting alone on a chair in front of his monitor screen, years before my Instagram confession to him.
I had looked at him, wide-eyed and scared.
I had scrolled down the mouse too fast.
My cheeks had reddened as he came closer, stood behind my shoulder and asked: “What are you doing Lakshmi?”
“Nothing!” I blurted out.
I could have kissed him. I could have kissed him, then and there. Under the yellow light of the study lamp. I could have kissed him. His face just a few inches from mine, I could have kissed him.
But his face had turned to the monitor screen, while I sat there, petrified, still side-eyeing his silhouette to my right.
He was just a 13-year-old boy but he was all angles in the light. His half-formed jaw, the crookedness of his Adam’s apple, the mole behind his ear, his full mouth just a few inches from mine.
I could have kissed him then and there but Amma told me that kissing was dirty.
And then he scrolled up to find that I had been playing the same dirty game that Amma told me not to.
And I saw that he had the same look in his eyes that she did when she caught me one summer afternoon.
How could he ever like me now?
How the internet became a less icky place
“Kissing games? I still play them.” laughed a classmate of mine, one afternoon, in our journalism lab.
I was taken back to his study. Flashes of the monitor screen, the games.
“Of course I remember! I always used to play 123 games,” gushed another classmate of mine.
“What do you mean by kissing games?” asked another.
Before I could start on my soliloquy, I was interrupted by someone else who passionately described with great detail the games and how they worked. I looked at her in awe. Perhaps I wasn’t such a dirty girl, after all. Perhaps, I wasn’t the only one. Perhaps, what the world had denounced as dirty and silly and girly was a window to a rich world, open for me to claim.
And so, when I was given my very own device that I could connect to the internet – a Samsung Galaxy Tab E – I had downloaded all the girly games I once loved and remembered.
The first was Hello Kitty Cafe.
It reminded me of my desk, back in Kerala.
All my games were on cooking and dressing up.
All too girly.
The ‘dirty games’ that still gave me that twinge of shame.
But that afternoon, surrounded by my batchmates and their stories, the internet became less of an icky place and more of an interesting one. I realised that it is not true that good girls never break rules, or play silly games. That good girls are never insecure about their bodies or never want a boy to like them.
And just like that. One fateful afternoon, in my undergraduate classroom, I realised that it did not matter if I was a good girl or not.
What was it to be a good girl anyway? Yes, I played dirty games. I had carried that shame. But I was not ashamed of it, not anymore.
Written by Lakshmi during her undergraduate as she found herself returning to questions of girlhood, shame, memory, and the internet. She continues to write about memory, desire, identity, and the quiet absurdities of growing up through personal essays that blur the boundaries between the intimate and the cultural.
