Venereal Disease (Well, okay, no, but it sounds more interesting than 'Valentine's Day')

I have never celebrated a Valentine’s Day with a significant other (even when I was dating, there would invariably be fights on either the 13th or the 14th itself (ah, tempestuous romance of college days, how I miss thee. NOT.). But the day is still pretty damn special for me. Okay, I’ll admit, it’s so blatantly commercial that it’s difficult to see where the romance begins and the promotional schemes end. And honestly, if you’re a woman and you’re PMSing and you’re – god forbid in these hearts and flowers times – single (gasp!), the copious amount of red-heart-bedecked store fronts and ultra-mega-gigantic billboards shouting “Valentine’s Sales” and “Two-for-One Lovers’ Discount” get to be a bit much. Well, when I say a bit much, I mean only in the hitting-in-the-head-with-a-bulldozer sort of way.

Sour grapes, you say? To which I heartily rejoin: Nahhhh. Sour grapes is this woman I know, who’ll walk down Marine Drive in the evening and scowl at all the poor privacy-deprived couples and mutter about taking them out with a bazooka. Oh, or this other person I know who’ll walk into every greeting-card store and not-so-surreptitiously stick all the heart-shaped balloons with a pin and then gleefully proclaim “I broke 75 hearts today!” Um, note to self: must find new friends’ circle. But really, what I don’t get is how people don’t see the day for the corporate-sponsored malarkey that it is. I know it’s been said a million times before, so it can stand to be said again: Why should there be a separate day allotted to love and showing it? It’s a nice concept, I’ll grant you that – a special day set aside like any birthday or anniversary (and there’s no such thing as too many special days). But card companies and restaurants and TV and movies have turned it into this whole huge deal, to the point where I actually know people running around in a panic at the last minute because they don’t have a date for the 14th of February.

Oh, and since I have chronic foot-in-mouth disease, to these people I said: “So?” And boy, did I ever get reamed out. “Don’t you have a romantic bone in your body?”; “Do you want to die an old maid?”; “Don’t you know how important the day is?”; “Don’t you know how much fun it is getting all those gifts?”; “Do you WANT to be a lonely 80 year old with 47 cats?” and the like. I dunno, really. I’ve always rather liked cats, and as for dying an old maid…well, I really doubt one Valentine’s Day is going to tip the scales either way on that probability! As for the gifts….ok, yeah, I’m losing out there. But damn it, I’m a woman of the 21st century and I earn my own money (albeit not much), so I can buy my own damned Swarovski crystals (the teeny-tiny ones)!

I think what prompts most people to want to celebrate the 14th of February (aside from all the nummy chocolates and the cosy hand-holding) is the fear (or maybe despair) of being alone when most of the world is paired up. I said earlier that Valentine’s Day is a special day like any birthday or anniversary, but unlike those days, which are celebrated by family and friends and large groups of loved ones, Valentine’s Day is a day for two. It’s a more intimate day, a more exclusive one, and third wheels are not encouraged to tag along. It’s very firmly a Couples Thing. And, deep down, there’s a lot of people out there yearning to be part of a Couples Thing, especially on the 14th, when the Couple Vibe is on display EVERYWHERE. They want to walk down halls with fingers intimately clasped and play footsie under restaurant tables and gasp with delight at gifts received and seal the day with a kiss (or, okay, more).

So the thing is, what I miss today isn’t a significant other. This day is normally special for me because in Bombay it always meant going to Leo’s or out for dinner with the entire bunch and groaning over the fact that EVERY place insisted on playing “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You” and “Everything I Do” at least 6 times in succession. It meant looking at couples fighting and smirking to ourselves that we were footloose and fancy free and, most importantly, free to ogle without recrimination, even on this, the much-touted Most Hallowed of All Days of Love (pardon the oodles of sarcasm). It meant eventually piling into someone’s car and sitting by Marine Drive or Worli Seaface at 3 in the morning, speculating about what we’d all be doing and where we’d be, and who we’d be, 10 years from now. It meant a very real, and very visceral fear (confusingly laced with a little anticipation) that maybe next year, one of us wouldn’t be there, because we’d have found someone (someone else, someone not us) and abandoned our little ritual for the wonders of Valentine’s Day. Not romantic, no, not at all, but special in more ways than anyone can quantify.

And okay, now I’m in Cal, and we’re all running up our phone bills (yeah, no more Swarovskis for me...sigh) calling to and from Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta and Dubai and Sydney. But there’s still the smirking and the speculating and god, tonnes of catching up (and all without the sappy songs in the background!). And fine, even if it isn’t 3 in the morning in someone’s car on Worli Seaface? It’s still pretty damn special.