Nirmaan swallowed a lump. He understood Raisa’s meaning perfectly because that was exactly how he looked at Afsana as he bore her home on his bicycle the other day. It was all too unreal. The only difference in his case was that he hadn’t yet declared himself to her because he wasn’t as sure of himself as Kapil. If he had really seen Afsana as an idea then that idea had blossomed into a concept within a week. As he sat listening to Raisa that concept had already turned into a story. And when a person becomes someone’s story, it’s difficult to sever oneself from it.
‘Do you know what, Nirmaan, there’s someone inside me who wants to give Kapil a chance, see what it’s all about; I’ll probably discover that he is interested in me because I’m actually interesting or that he is simply curious because he merely fancies my outer appearance. His proposal affected me, otherwise I wouldn’t have discussed it with you. Like whatever you wanted to tell me tonight, I’m sure, has affected you as well,’ Raisa concluded. She looked at Nirmaan expectantly. It was his chance to talk.
Nothing happened for some time. Nirmaan sat still, seemingly lost. Raisa shook his arm, ‘Oi! What’s up?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ Nirmaan’s throat was dry. ‘Nothing,’ he repeated, more confident this time.
‘What “nothing”? You said you wanted to tell me something, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. But it’s . . . it’s nothing.’
Raisa could read an abrupt reticence in his hesitation. She didn’t pester him.
As soon as Nirmaan was back in his room, he sat by his study table listlessly. Although there wasn’t any test the next day, he needed to revise his physics tuition notes. The pressure of remaining ahead of his class made him sigh. He drew out his physics textbook only to find a scrap of paper staring at him. It read:
You are the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.
- The girl who punctured your bicycle.
VOICE NOTE 25
It was the first time Afsana was meeting Tarun Somani, the man recommended by her parents, in a restaurant. They were to get married as soon as she graduated. She was pissed off and seethed within; however he seemed gung-ho about making a good impression on her.
When the waiter placed the menu on the table, Tarun slid it across to Afsana. Following several abortive efforts to meet her after school, Tarun had telephoned her father and asked his permission to take his daughter out on a date. Afsana’s father had readily agreed, but Afsana had dug her heels in. This date with Tarun was the result of the verbal duel that had ensued, and here she was, perusing the menu.
‘What will you have?’ Tarun asked. In his mind he had already decided to have a Mysore masala dosa and was anxiously waiting to see if she desired the same.
‘Maybe . . . umm . . . ’ Afsana took her time making up her mind. ‘Okay, I’ll take a Mysore masala dosa.’
The similarity in their choice made Tarun beam.
‘Great!’ He quickly gave the order to the waiter before returning his gaze to Afsana.
‘I love south Indian food,’ Tarun declared in an attempt to break the ice.
‘I love non-veg,’ she replied.
‘Non-veg?’ he sounded appalled.
‘Butter chicken is my favourite.’
‘Oh! I didn’t know your family was okay with non-veg. We abstain from non-vegetarian food.’
‘My family doesn’t know. But do you know that I’m a minor?’ Afsana asked, looking arrow-straight at him.
‘That’s why we’re not yet married,’ he nodded.
‘Don’t you think people need to get to know each other before they get married?’
‘There’s a lot of time left before we get married. We can get better acquainted by then.’
‘And what if we fail to bond during this interim period? What then? Are you going to call off the wedding? Will our parents allow us to call it off?’
Afsana’s maturity made Tarun swallow a sudden lump in his throat.
‘This marriage won’t be called off,’ he said. ‘We either like each other or we don’t.’
‘I know that!’
‘You have to understand, Afsana, we’ll eventually have to get married because our parents have to merge their businesses. If we somehow adjust and learn to accept each other we can live happily irrespective of this business thing.’
This was the moment, Afsana felt, when she had to reveal the secret in her heart or he would never understand what she was hinting at. She braced herself.
‘I love someone else,’ she said baldly.
Tarun gaped at her for an instant before laughing out loud derogatorily.
‘I didn’t crack a joke.’
‘Sorry. You reminded me of something.’
‘What?’
The waiter arrived with their order. Tarun quickly ripped off a piece of his dosa, dipped it in the hot sambar and ate it.
‘I too loved someone when I was your age.’
Afsana resented his condescending tone.
‘And I too thought I would marry her,’ he said, ‘But I couldn’t because she loved someone else. I was hurt, I cried, but now when I think about it, I can’t help but laugh. Perhaps it’s because I cried then that I’m able to laugh about it now. It was only a phase, but at that age it seemed too real, too genuine and too forever to let go. But . . . ’ he scooped out a spoonful of the coconut chutney.
Afsana waited for him to continue as she gobbled a large portion of the dosa herself.
‘ . . . now I know it was only an infatuation. So, I can totally understand when you say you’re in love. Don’t worry, it’ll pass.’
Afsana didn’t appreciate any of Tarun’s monologue. Even if it were an infatuation, who the hell was he to tell her that?
‘What if you did marry the girl you thought you loved? Would you still say it was an infatuation?’ she asked.
Tarun was struck speechless for a moment. He stuffed more dosa into his mouth, giving himself time to think for an apt reply.
‘No, but—’
‘So anything that blossoms into marriage is love and that which doesn’t is infatuation. Only adults can allow themselves such privileges.’
‘Only kids allow themselves such ignorance,’ Tarun chuckled.
The sneering chuckle as well as the ‘kid’ label infuriated Afsana. You don’t call a seventeen-year-old a kid, she thought, and gobbled up her dosa faster than she normally would have done.
‘I’m getting late. I have tuition,’ she replied curtly.
‘I’ll drop you off.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
Tarun understood that the next time he would have to work twice as hard to win her.
Afsana took a shared auto-rickshaw to the Ultadanga footbridge where she was due to meet Raisa in another half an hour. While she waited for her soul-sister, Afsana thought about Tarun’s words. What if her feelings for Nirmaan were only infatuation? Her heart felt heavy even considering this possibility. What was a painful thought now, could it feel like a joke, say, ten years later? She prayed not. She took out a one-rupee coin from her pocket. Kissing it on one side she told herself: heads, it’s love; tails, it’s infatuation. She tossed the coin in the air and the moment it landed on her palm, she closed her fingers over it. Heads or tails? Her heart was beating fast. She put her fist into her pocket. It had to be heads. When one was sure, there was no reason to believe in something as nonsensical as a toss of a coin, she told herself. The next minute, she saw Raisa hurrying up the steps of the bridge. She waved to her. Raisa waved back and within seconds was by her side.
‘Look what I got today, Affu?’ Raisa said, gasping for air, and extended a red rose to Afsana.
Afsana sniffed it appreciatively.
‘I can’t explain how amazing it feels when someone gives you a red rose with that certain look on his face,’ Raisa said.
‘What look?’ Afsana returned the rose.
‘Like I’m the world to him.’
‘To whom?’
‘Kapil. The boy who proposed to me
recently. He loves me.’
Afsana noticed that her soul-sister looked rather flustered.
‘Are you sure he loves you or is he only infatuated with you?’
Raisa looked as if Afsana had slammed the emergency brakes on her excitement train.
‘What do you mean?’
The two girls walked down the length of the bridge, bought jhaal moori from a roadside hawker near the HUDCO housing society and strolled towards the Kakurgachi crossing on the footpath. Afsana told her about her date with Tarun.
‘How does it matter what it is?’ Raisa said.
‘It does, Rice. Infatuation is like when you take an airplane; it takes you high all right but it brings you down in a jiffy as well and then there’s nothing. Love is a long train journey in which you spend hours going through all your basic activities; it’s almost a home on the move and, most importantly, the journey stays with you.’
Raisa gave her an exasperated look and exclaimed, ‘Oh my god! You too are in love!’
‘Like hell I am!’ Afsana crushed the paper cone that had contained the jhaal moori. At that point, she suddenly felt that her life was all messed up.
Silence reigned as they ambled on aimlessly.
‘Are all three of us screwed the same way, by any chance?’
‘Three?’
‘See, Kapil loves me, but I’m not sure if I should accept him even though he isn’t a bad guy. Nirmaan loves someone, but there’s something troubling him and now you’re saying you too are in love . . . ’
‘Wait a minute. Nirmaan is in love? Did he tell you that?’
‘He didn’t exactly tell me about it but I could guess that he too loves someone. When we were talking a few nights ago he abruptly went quiet as if he knew what he wanted to say but couldn’t phrase it properly and feared I would misinterpret it. I didn’t nudge him about it because I thought it’s always good if these things come out naturally . . . Affu?’
Raisa realized she was walking alone. She paused and looked around to see her soul-sister seated on the kerb, crying.
Raisa, who couldn’t conjure up a proper reaction to Afsana’s sudden gut-wrenching grief, ended up weeping as well. Raisa had seen Afsana cry only once before. It was when Afsana had told Raisa about her parents’ indifference towards her. But these weren’t tears of condemnation, this was an open floodgate of devastation.
It was not for want of trying that Raisa failed to inveigle a name out of Afsana. What was the point of furnishing Raisa with a name if Nirmaan really loved someone else? What could Raisa have possibly done, except perhaps sympathize with her? Now she would have to follow Tarun’s tack and years later, tell herself and other love-struck teenagers that her feelings for Nirmaan were merely a passing adolescent crush. However, in her heart, she would always know the truth about the strength of her love.
With a mighty effort of will power, Afsana clamped down on the urge to abuse Nirmaan over the telephone for not falling in love with her. She wanted to castigate him for not giving her enough time to express her feelings to him and for selfishly making her fall in love with him when he wasn’t really into her. When the tears eventually abated, she realized all of this was just too childish. She tried to sleep out all the quandaries within her heart, but couldn’t. After indulging in another pointless exercise of blaming her destiny and life, she wondered who the girl was, anyway, whom Nirmaan loved. Raisa was not sure who she was. She did ask Raisa about the piece of paper she had secreted into Nirmaan’s physics textbook.
‘What piece of paper?’ Raisa had asked.
It was proof enough that Nirmaan hadn’t told her anything about it. And it only meant he wasn’t even curious about the matter.
The next day, she stalked Nirmaan during school hours. First, it was during the morning assembly. In all, he talked with three girls: a little more with the third girl than the first two. They shared a laugh about something as well. Afsana didn’t know any of them because they were in other sections but she made a mental note of them. Especially the third one. During one of the classes, she casually walked past his classroom to see if he was sitting with any of the three. He wasn’t. During recess, she was fairly certain that she would see him with one of them, but she didn’t. Contrary to her expectations, Nirmaan walked out of the school alone. It only made the itch of curiosity in Afsana even stronger. She followed Nirmaan to his home but stayed outside the RBI quarters, because she didn’t want Raisa to catch her hanging around there. It was possible that the mystery girl was either absent from school that day or wasn’t from their school at all. She waited outside by the auto-rickshaw stand. In twenty minutes, he emerged again, changed into his civvies and cycled away quickly to his tuitions. She followed in an auto-rickshaw. Fifteen minutes later, Afsana watched him enter his tuition class in Salt Lake. She waited outside. It was after an hour that Nirmaan came out along with the other students, all boys. A normal girl in love should have been happy seeing no girl by his side, but Afsana was no longer normal.
Where is this girlfriend of his? Afsana punched her palm. As Nirmaan disappeared from her sight, she decided to return home. As she turned to leave, she had her heart in her mouth.
Raisa was standing behind her. Caught red-handed, Afsana ran up to her and hugged her soul-sister tight.
‘Promise me you won’t tell him,’ she whispered.
‘First pay my auto-wallah. I don’t have money,’ Raisa said.
VOICE NOTE 26
For the umpteenth time, Afsana reached for the small clock on her study table. It was only an hour before the alarm would go off and she would have to get ready for school. She kept the clock back on the table and flipped over to the other side of the bed. She repeated this exercise after a few minutes. She had been waiting for Raisa’s call, as per their deal, but no call had come.
When Raisa discovered that it was Nirmaan for whom Afsana’s heart both blossomed and bled, she felt profoundly sorry for her soul-sister. Profuse bleeding of any blossom had to signify love, Raisa decided.
‘Leave it to me,’ Raisa told her when the two shared an auto-rickshaw home.
‘You don’t have to do anything, Rice, please. Promise me you won’t sympathize with me for this,’ Afsana said impatiently, wiping the tears from her face.
‘Why would I sympathize?’
‘Because Nirmaan loves someone else and I love him and we can’t be together. That’s why. And don’t even tell me what people normally say, “forget him, move on” or any such nonsense. I’ll be all right on my own in a while.’
As she dropped off Afsana, Raisa promised to talk to Nirmaan. She also promised not to mention Afsana’s name unless absolutely necessary and would call her if her name came up. Afsana was waiting for this call. It was much later that morning when Raisa called to say that Nirmaan was down with flu, so she hadn’t been able to talk to him the previous evening.
‘He is skipping school today and so am I. I’ll call you in the evening and let you know if there are any developments.’
‘No. Call me the moment you have a talk with him. I’m skipping school too. And waiting,’ said Afsana and hung up.
It was after breakfast that Raisa visited Nirmaan. The maid answered the door. She went to Nirmaan’s room to see his mother sitting beside him looking intently at the clock as Nirmaan held a thermometer in his mouth. He tried smiling at Raisa. She raised a finger to her lips to shush him. Nirmaan stopped smiling. His mother gestured Raisa to sit down beside her without averting her eyes from the clock. However, Raisa remained standing in the doorway. Nirmaan’s mother removed the thermometer and murmured, ‘One hundred and two.’ She shook the thermometer to restore its mercury level and looked at Raisa, ‘No school today, dear?’
‘No, Aunty. I had stomach cramps this morning.’
‘Sit beside Nirmaan. Let me see what the maid is up to.’ Nirmaan’s mother left the room. Raisa got into the bed and made herself comfortable.
‘It’s good that you came,’ whispered Nirmaan i
n a feeble voice.
‘Why? Were you waiting for me?’
‘Not waiting because I knew you had school. But happy you didn’t go. Did you say yes to the boy who proposed you?’
‘Forget it. I have something more important to talk to you about.’
‘What?’
‘Afsana loves someone,’ Raisa said watching with interest as facial muscles twitched on Nirmaan’s face.
‘Don’t you have anything to say?’ she snapped, irked by his silence.
‘That’s . . . ’ Nirmaan tried to find the right words, ‘great!’ He just wanted to be left alone after hearing this bombshell, but couldn’t say so. He closed his eyes, hoping she would take a hint.
‘Not really,’ she continued. Nirmaan opened his eyes and frowned.
‘The one she loves supposedly loves someone else.’
‘She too?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What did you mean, Nirmaan?’
Looking at Raisa he knew the meaning of those narrowed eyes. She would keep at it like a dog with a bone until he clarified his cryptic statement.
‘It’s nothing, really,’ Nirmaan protested in vain, making a last ditch effort to sidestep the topic. In his heart, however, he was already wondering at the irony of the situation: he had feelings for Afsana but wanted to be sure of them before telling her and now he knew that she was suffering the pangs of unrequited love with some undeserving fool who didn’t reciprocate her feelings. There wasn’t any point in approaching her now, he concluded, even if what he felt for her was genuine.
‘Who is the girl you love, Nirmaan?’
Nirmaan shot an incredulous look at Raisa. How on earth did she know this?
‘What?’ He feigned innocence, but failed miserably.
‘I know it. You have someone. Now tell me, who is it?’
‘Nobody.’
‘Nirmaan, I’ll tell Aunty about it if you don’t tell me.’
‘Okay!’ Nirmaan tried to sit up and Raisa helped him. ‘There isn’t anybody. I mean, I don’t have a girlfriend per se. I only . . . ’ he paused, ‘like someone.’
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