Cucumber

19:01, 01 June 2003

I went into this past weekend with my cucumber strategy. I was to show Piyush that I can have fun without him, that I am not clingy or droopy about the End, that there is no risk I will have the �scene� he fears. I was to avoid calling him, texting him, walking up to start conversations with him, etc. He was to come to me when he felt the threat had dissipated. Because I know it was my emotional honesty that threatened him and drove him away.

Operation Cucumber was a success, albeit a Pyrrhic one. At Adeline�s barbeque at her Malibu beach house, I was having fun talking to everyone. Piyush sat across the table from me, blocked by the furled sun umbrella. To each of us, it was the same as if the other was not even there, as we had no contact between us for the majority of the time. No eye contact, no proximity, no one-on-one conversation. The only connection between us was our hello and goodbye.

Saturday Rubab had a dinner and Marc drove me. Again, Piyush and I mingled at opposite sides of the party like two acquaintances who don�t have much to say to each other and maintain a mild dislike for each other as well. I was hyperconscious of not approaching him, not seeming to follow him, always trying to be far away, doing my own thing and having my own fun. Again, hello and goodbye were as good as it got.

I have not heard from him since that goodbye on Saturday afternoon. Frankly, I wasn�t expecting to hear from him. And a part of me would not expect to ever hear from him again. That may sound harsh, but I realise now how very retarded he is concerning relationships, especially girlfriends. (Note: I use the word �retarded� in its non-slang usage: a delayed or slow development.) Even Friday, heading into Operation Cucumber, I expected a little more maturity from him. But the avoidant cordiality of our two weekend encounters shows me that his capabilities are even less than I had previously thought.

There is no point in being mad at him, or even blaming him for any of this, any more than one could blame someone with cerebral palsy for his handicaps. Piyush doesn�t even know that he can't handle his own emotions. He cannot access them, let alone understand them. Ergo, he cannot interpret the emotions of others, least of all those of women. My letter to him was written in a foreign language.

Perhaps I sound condescending. I don�t mean to; I just think that he really needs to learn a lot about human interaction. He�s been very influenced by the abandonment he felt from his father, the inferiority he felt from his older brother and the cultural signals he�s received about women. There is a lot he needs to learn and I don�t know that I could or would want to teach him, were our relationship continuing. It is strange for me to be the adult in a relationship, and I�m not sure I have enough experience in that role to help someone else with it.

What really angers me is that I let this happen. Because I am the one with the bird�s eye view of this relationship, and if I had realised, earlier, just how incapable he was of handling such emotional intimacy, I could have acted accordingly. I could have acted in light of his shortcomings and perhaps could have preserved the status quo until the end. Instead, I was the catalyst for this current chilling of our relationship. I challenged him a little too much, I showed my feelings too honestly, and I think he got scared. I gave him a hook on which to hang his withdrawal. Because now he is pulling away.

He has completely overreacted to what was, on my part, a very small gaffe of overly high expectations and romantic idealism, and I think the reason is two-pronged. First, such emotional intimacy is threatening when one cannot reply in kind, or even admit to oneself that one feels the same way. Second, he needed a reason to point the finger at me for the end of this relationship. He�s turned my actions during the Situation (which consisted mainly of me telling Dipank how much I liked Piyush) into a negative thing that he can now look to as a reason to walk away, coldly and prematurely, from this relationship.

For these reasons, I am not surprised that I have not heard of him. He doesn�t want to reach out to me because it might spur another outbreak of emotion from me (a �scene� as he calls it) and/or because it might make it more difficult for him to suppress his emotions about leaving.

I find all of this so disappointing. I am disappointed in myself for precipitating this by opening up too much. I am disappointed that it has to end this way, and two weeks early. I am disappointed that he may walk away from our time together with a sour taste in his mouth rather than a fond memory of what fun we did have together. And all my disappointment has led me to lower my expectations to such an extent that I would not be shocked if I never heard from him again.