Before launching off further, I better share my area of expertise. Well, if some kinky university in the US decides so, I could well be awarded a PhD degree in heart-aches and heart-breaks. Lest I seem to be boasting too much, let me tell you that I have nothing at all to do with cardiology. Nor any other medical science. I am a woman of arts and literature. A Blue Stocking if there ever be one. And thus the experiments have been in the laboratory of human relationships. Sometimes on my body and soul. Other times on the bodies and souls of others.

As it is an arty journey down thememory lane, let me begin with an experience with Kathak in the mid-sixties. I lived once with a brother in an army officer's hostel when I was but eleven or so. A clear case of having shown promise in the chosen field early enough one of those child prodigies. Back to the art of the matter, we young ladies used to attend a Kathak class in the community centre every evening. And there was in that hostel just one dashing, handsome air force officer a bachelor at that. This young man in his early twenties was the hero of all the little girls. And he seemed to enjoy every moment of the adulation.

Since it is a moment of confession, in the good old-fashioned Christian way, let me confess my fairer sisters caught his eye earlier. I had to do a lot more like playing with his toddler niece, lending him my box of colour pencils. A woman who always had to try hard. No wonder the aches and breaks. So when we had our annual dance do, I was the moustached and turbaned man who had to go about one step forward twirlingthe end of the painted moustache. My fair delicate friend was of course the pretty Rajasthani belle who had the far more enticing gestures of lifting the veil and giving those coy glances.

But my great moment came at dinner after the dance when the moustache had been taken off and I was back in the lehnga-choli; the dashing `Uncle', for that's what we all called him, took me to a corner of the lawn and said, ``I will tell you something but you must not tell anyone. I liked you the most of all the dancers tonight.'' Ah! I had achieved the ultimate. Never mind the extra effort. But the first heartbreak came when I heard `Uncle' whispering the same line to my friend who was the belle with a coy glance.Thus the journey in the chosen field had begun. In a case of misdirected anger, I gave up learning Kathak and always held a prejudice against the form. When the time came for my daughter's dance classes, it could be anything from Odissi to Kuchipudi. But not Kathak.

Living in the provincial small town, therewere long and painful heartbreaks aplenty. Even those of my fairer sisters. And to be fair to the unfair sex, even those of my male friends right through the ebullient eighties and the naughty nineties. Until I took the big brave decision, which the heroines of Anton Chekov just could not take, and moved from the provinces to the metropolis.

And the latest miracle that I have met, you could call it a great discovery crying out `Eureka Eureka', is that hearts do not break in the metropolis. There is just not the time for heartbreaks. Neither the energy. Just one night's sleep gone or a couple of sleeping pills and you are back on the road, `repaired and retreaded' as Sylvia Plath once said. It's time I moved to another area to gather fresh expertise.