He had first seen her long black hair and the way the sun turned it into  gold. She was drying  red chillies on the terrace and he flew over her, lower and then daringly still a bit lower.

She looked up, and laughed at him, closing her ears to the roar of his plane.  Then the children rushed out into the streets to see him and he knew he didn’t want to be seen by anyone else.

But he thought he could hear her laugh still.

When he borrowed his friend’s bike to find her,  he soon lost his way to her house. It was in the area close to the river, the crowded refugee localities where houses stood cheek by jowl against each other, television antennas rose high creating webs of their own, and  lanes lost themselves into ever tiny lanes crowded with cattle, bicycles and angry women who shooed him away because he came in the way.

So he returned to looking at her from the sky; making loops, circling, zooming low, and rising high in a flash.  He dared not go too close, or take a photo. He was taking great risks.  His superiors would never like it.

When he moved to another base, he tried to tell her someway.   There she was drying the clothes, her hair flying behind her,  her face raised to the sun and to him. As  he flew back, carrying out yet another loop,  there she was again, holding her head in her  hands. Was she crying?  Did she know already?  He shrugged amused. A fool in love thinks the world is just as foolish as he is.

It was only a year later that he rushed back to the scene, once more in his MIG. He was with the minister and dared not fly too close, though he had to fly low and long for a long time. The city was like nothing he remembered. The dam had broken and the river had eaten up the city,  chunks of it had given way to small lakes and huge puddles and there were people on terraces,  and they all looked terrifyingly similar.

Where was she?

But no matter how many times he flew back, and his fellow pilots marveled at his courage when the cyclone came back a few days later and wreaked even greater damage, he could not find her. And yet he didn’t give up.

Where was she?  He asked himself over and over again.

Sometimes as the years went by, he asked himself this over and over again.   There were women who came into his life and he loved them all, in different ways.   And in all of this, where was she?  Where did she vanish? Had she died in the floods, in the cyclone or in one of those small everyday accidents that so easily claimed women’s lives in this country?   Sometimes there were moments, he felt a desperate loneliness claim him and that surprised him.  He had not even spoken to her.  Not even exchanged letters.  He had seen her face bathed in gentle sunlight,  seen her hair, a lovely smooth silken rope he could sink his tired face into and thought he had heard her laughter. And her tears? He remembered the day he had seen her on her terrace, head in her hands.

And as the years went by,  he became a much decorated war hero. He had been awarded medals, many more of them since his first cyclone rescue mission those many years ago.   He didn’t feel so lonely, success had a way of covering up moments like that.

Then as time moved still on,  he returned to the city where his love had once lived.  He came out of curiosity and a feeling he couldn’t name.  She wouldn’t be  there, of course.  Maybe he came to find his younger self again.  The time he had been so unthinkingly daring;  when  falling in love had been so easy and so hard to take.

There was a big function in the school grounds.  The dam had been rebuilt, the old part of the town that had seen so much damage  restored to its original self,  the heritage lovers had seen to that. But he didn’t wish to visit that part.  He was in a hurry too.

It must have been the sun, for  his eyes closed to the never-ending speeches.  And when he opened them,  and narrowed them against the sun, there she was again, in the front row, just as he remembered her.  She smiled as if she recognized him.

“My mother,  she remembers you.  The pilot in that MIG who flew so low,  you were the one?  And then,  there were only MIGs in that base, no?”

He nodded.   She was the daughter, how could he have imagined it was her.   Her voice must have been sweeter,  and she had smiled a bit differently.   

“The other was for training,” he laughed.

What would she say next?   He didn’t want to hear about her mother dead, or even growing old.  That was not how he remembered her.

She was laughing, pulling out a paper, and handing him an uncapped pen. “My daughter, can I get your autograph for her?  You are one of our finest,  bravest soldiers…”

He found his fingers shook as he signed.  They weren’t the confident, certain fingers that had handled so many difficult planes.  They were old hands now, hands that had to let go of the past, hands that would never hold the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.