Hold my Hand (Penguin Metro Reads)

by Durjoy Datta

  ‘I don’t need her permission to go anywhere,’ I stamp my foot.

  ‘Oh, shut up! She doesn’t even let you cross the road by yourself,’ Manasi interjects.

  ‘She’s just a little protective,’ I say defensively.

  ‘Little? I am surprised you don’t have those CIA anklet things that help track movements. Your mom will be so happy to get you one!’ she says and laughs and looks at Aman to see if he’s laughing, but he is just standing there, looking handsome in his half-smirk, half-smile.

  ‘Still a better investment than an iPhone!’ I say.

  ‘But do get us something from there, champ,’ Aman says and pats my back. He often addresses me as champ, champion, genius, THE man, super-dude, and I quite like it.

  ‘I will,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t get me a book about fat people,’ Manasi says.

  Aman is looking away from us. A few girls from the other section pass us by and wave at him. He waves back at them and they blush and giggle. Manasi frowns. It’s never pleasant to have a crush on the college’s hottest guy (especially when he is already dating a slim, pretty girl). It also doesn’t help that Aman is sensitive and smart, and in a weird sort of way, he is a passageway. You have to have a crush on him in order to move on.

  Aman leaves for his tennis practice and Manasi starts tapping on the phone again. She is playing NFS now. We sit there for an hour, Manasi tries to better Aman’s score and fails, and I read a book; we wait for the next class to start.

  3

  It’s a big deal, believe me, but my Hong Kong Project is not being celebrated enough. Manasi is uninterested in my going because I think she will miss me, although she hasn’t said it herself, and Mom’s crying because her only son will be across the border, actually two borders if the aircraft flies over Nepal and into China and three if we fly over Nepal, Myanmar and China, which I would like better since I have never been on an aeroplane before. I still believe clouds are made of fluffy, soft cotton and not vapour. I would soon get to the bottom of this.

  Atan Technological Services, an Indian software giant with annual revenues of over $ 7 billion, chose five first-year students from over six hundred IT and Computer Science engineering students who applied for a paid internship in one of their numerous live projects. Paid internships for students like us is like winning free tickets to a One Direction concert, it’s like a bravery badge.

  The woman from ATS had scanned my résumé and the ridiculous list of books I have listed as my favourites, and she asked me if I would like work in the development of a cataloguing software that ATS was developing, taking the Hong Kong Central Library as a test case.

  I remember the churning in my stomach, the dizziness, the happiness that coursed through every inch of me, and I had smiled and nodded my head like a baby seal, happy and grinning from ear to ear.

  ‘I would love to!’ I had said, trying to control my excitement.

  ‘I am not sure about the details but you might have to go to Hong Kong for a little while during the project. I will have to get back to you on this,’ the woman had said.

  I couldn’t wait to tell my parents and when I did, Mom cried and said she would let me go only over her dead body, and Dad reminded me of Bengali pride and recounted to me the names of everyone in our family who had ever worked or works in a library. If all libraries combined to make a country, we would be the first family of that country. And I was going to add another feather in its cap.

  We ate muri ghonto and shorsher maachh that day, and Mom cried some more, and then smiled because she saw a CISCO advertisement on television which welcomed us to its Human Network and the voice over informed Mom that ‘libraries travel across the world’, which she quickly inferred as since libraries travel across the world her son wouldn’t have to. Anything to hold her nineteen-year-old son back. She was mistaken.

  Today, the class is IT Infrastructure and Manasi and I don’t need to concentrate because I have gone through the book, cover to cover. I love new books, course books or not, and I enjoy underlining the living hell out of course books and making little notes in my flowery handwriting on the margins.

  ‘Hey, stud! When do you leave?’ Aman asks.

  ‘The week after next. There is still time,’ I say. Aman is grinning, he’s constantly grinning, and that may be because he knows he’s beautiful when he’s grinning. He’s also playing Temple Run on Manasi’s phone and his hand-eye coordination sucks, which is strange because only yesterday he won an inter-college tennis doubles trophy all by himself.

  Aman would make a great hero in a Young Adult book: courteous, handsome and sensitive—a curious mix of Edward Cullen and Augustus Waters, without the canines or the cancer. I always end up associating people with characters from books. The professor is boring, he is the kind of character that dies in a Robert Ludlum book and no one misses him.

  ‘Man! You’re so lucky. Do send us pictures of all the pretty women you hang out with in Hong Kong,’ he says, then realizes his folly (I have almost never dated!), and restarts his game.

  ‘I will send you pictures of the library and the clock tower and of Disneyland,’ I say and he laughs.

  ‘I can’t believe you won’t be here for my birthday, dude,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be amazing! Ritika is planning something big. She constantly asks about you and whether you would be here.’

  ‘She doesn’t even know him that well!’ Manasi butts in. ‘Oh, did I tell you guys? I saw this really cute guy who offered me a seat in the bus. He was looking at me, I could tell, and then I looked at him, and then I stared and then he got off the bus. I wonder if he offered me the seat or he just had to get up and I happened to be there,’ she sighs.

  ‘You should have talked to him, Manasi! You let go of way too many cute guys,’ Aman says, innocently.

  The professor looks at us, shoots an icy look, and goes back to drawing flowcharts on the board.

  Aman tells me, ‘Ritika does like you. She has like a million single friends in Miranda House. You should be there at my birthday. You will definitely meet someone.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone will be interested,’ I say and not without reason. The last time I met a friend of Ritika, she had told Ritika and Aman that I was tall. She had used just one word to describe me, ‘tall’. If I were in a book I would just be a tall character. Nothing more.

  ‘Oh, c’mon! We could be going to a club and it will be so great,’ he said. ‘We could even get you drunk!’ He winks in his charming, disarming manner, and I can see why Manasi, and whoever he meets, melts when they see him.

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I say. I don’t hate clubs, but sports and dancing are my two big nemesis. My one leg is usually clueless about the other. It’s like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, either I know how fast they are moving or where they are moving, never both.

  I have been to a club exactly twice in my entire life, and both those times I stood in a corner, playing Snakes, dressed in my loose checked shirt, my ill-fitting jeans and my chunky trekker shoes, while Aman weaved and met and hugged and danced with countless girls. Wet bodies grinded in front of me, and it looked like a perfect opportunity for contagious diseases and lice to get passed on.

  Aman has been trying hard to get me interested in the idea of drinking, but how people use digestive tracts to transform alcohol to vomit is of least interest to me.

  ‘You can take Manasi,’ I say. ‘She will tear up the dance floor.’

  ‘I can’t go. I am on a diet and I will not go anywhere that will put me in the vicinity of food,’ she says, even though I know she is obsessed with music and dance. She’s fat, but boy can she dance! And I don’t think it’s the diet. Just this morning she ate a humungous sandwich from Subway.

  ‘Oh, c’mon, Manasi! I can’t go there and say my two best friends haven’t come. That’s not cool,’ Aman says and makes a sad face, looking vulnerable; Manasi almost cries and says that she will come, and he smiles and Manasi liquefies.<
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  ‘HEY! LAST SEAT! YOU THREE! GET UP!’ the professor shouts and throws a chalk at us. Aman catches it millimetres away from my spectacles—cool with an emphasis on the two Os.

  The three of us say, ‘Us? Me? Me?’ and point to ourselves.

  ‘YES! GET UP!’ We stand up and he asks, ‘What are you three talking about that is so important?’

  Before anyone of us can answer, and by anyone I mean Manasi and Aman because I am on the verge of tears, he shouts, ‘GET OUT!’

  Aman doesn’t hesitate. Manasi follows him outside the class, and I stand there hoping my wet, quivering eyes, like a schoolgirl from a Manga comic, will melt the professor’s heart. But he stands there, furious, his hands on his hips, and I leave the class.

  ‘What took you so long?’ Aman asks.

  ‘I was collecting my register,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Deep!’ Manasi says to me. Then she turns to Aman, ‘He was begging the professor to let him stay. Coward!’ she says disgustedly. She’s Googling a new diet plan, but soon she is downloading pictures of Zayn Malik, who is one-fifth of her favourite band, One Direction, and Justin Bieber, about whom she has an unhealthy amount of information.

  ‘I DIDN’T BEG!’ I protest.

  ‘It’s good that he let us out,’ Aman says. ‘Ritika is about to reach here and if she invites you, you might be tempted to postpone your Hong Kong trip.’

  I mumble something unintelligible. I don’t like being thrown out of classes, I feel humiliated and small.

  ‘Why is she coming here?’ Manasi asks.

  ‘She wants to meet my friends. Is that so bad?’ Aman says and puts his arm around Manasi and kisses her on the cheek. Although I am a better friend, I can’t do that to Manasi, but he can because he is Aman. I wish he wouldn’t do that because Manasi takes it seriously. Manasi nods her head.

  I spot Wasim, the cricket captain of our college, in his soiled trousers and lame cricket cap, walking towards us. He waves at Aman and as he passes by, shouts out, ‘What’s up! There is a crazy party tonight at Hype. You should totally come with your girlfriend, man. It would be AWESOME, dude!’

  Aman nods and they do a handshake which looks like an arm-wrestling match and Wasim walks away, not looking at either Manasi or me. Despite our considerable width and length respectively, Manasi and I are like F-21 stealth aircrafts, detectable by radar, but naked to the ordinary teenage eye.

  ‘What do you think?’ Aman asks us.

  ‘He didn’t invite us,’ Manasi says.

  ‘It’s like we are invisible,’ I say. ‘And I am pretty tall, you know. I think I am pretty hard to miss. Not that Manasi can ever hide.’

  ‘I’m so fat that maybe he mistook me for a building or something,’ Manasi says.

  ‘Oh, c’mon, you two,’ Aman says defensively. ‘He doesn’t know you.’

  ‘Obviously, he doesn’t. If I were you, Aman, I would never hang out with me,’ I say.

  ‘I would totally hang out with me so that I can share my food and then both the MEs will be only half as fat,’ Manasi responds.

  ‘And I will be friends with two Manasis and walk around with my arms around them like James Bond or something,’ I say and pump my fist and she smiles.

  Aman tells me I will have plenty of pretty women around me in Hong Kong and though I laugh, I am nervous. I have never been around people I don’t know or been to places I am not familiar with, I am awkward and eye contact for me means staring at people’s foreheads, but I think that’s the point of travel, to see new places and meet new people and think about the lives they have lead and be them for a little while; something that books do, too.

  But new people, new places scare me. Even the Delhi Metro scares me. I look at the map and it’s yellow and blue and green and purple lines crossing each other. It’s beautiful to look at on a map, but in real life, it’s moving metal cages on wheels and concrete and real people walking very fast, bumping into each other, staring at me because I am standing in their spot.

  ‘Here she is,’ Aman points out to a girl at a distance, who’s walking in our direction. Manasi’s face falls. I can tell she is thinking about the imaginary cute boys in her life.

  Ritika is a thin girl, a foot shorter than me. As she walks towards us, her hips sway and if great music could be seen, it would look like her hips. She has a small face which is fair and cute and proportionate and symmetrical. I feel sorry for Manasi.

  ‘Hi, guys!’ she says, in her chirpy little voice.

  Aman hugs her. There is an awkward moment where I don’t know whether I have to hug her or shake hands and we end up shaking hands. Manasi and Ritika smile, after which Manasi busies herself with her cell phone.

  ‘I LOVE your college. It’s so huge. I can’t believe I am shocked every time I come here,’ she says, as her pink handbag, which hangs from her shoulder, sways. It goes perfectly with her pink denims.

  ‘You should come here more often,’ Aman says and puts an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘Some people don’t invite me here,’ she says and points towards Manasi and me, and we just smile stupidly. ‘And Deep! Please do come whenever I call you. I have told so much about you to the girls. Some of them really like you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  Ritika insists some more that we come to the party she’s planning, and then she compliments Manasi on her hair, who blushes, because people like us, the stealth aircrafts, blush when others who are more gifted compliment us.

  Aman and Ritika leave after a while. I can see they’ve left Manasi in a bad mood. She doesn’t talk for the rest of the day and I finish the book I am reading, The Book Thief. It’s about a girl who loses everything, starts over and then loses everything again and then . . . it’s like Snakes.

  4

  Henner Jog was twenty-three when he wrote his first book, and it took him three more years of editing and rewriting and rewriting and editing to get the book in publishable shape. And his book is phenomenal, every sentence, every incident, every character so well thought out, that I am sure he took at least three years to write it in the first place before saying, ‘Okay, maybe I can get this book published after all and blind the world with the brilliance of my words for I think it’s time for me to rule the narrow passageways of libraries and every bestseller list there is to rule!’ Or maybe he just said, ‘Okay, let’s see what others think of my book.’ Knowing him, I think it was the latter.

  This means I have a three-year head-start. Something I need badly because he’s brilliant and I am, like, a tall boy who’s not needed unless there’s a fused light bulb.

  The odds are stacked against me.

  But then again, there are two million books that get published every year, probably ten times as much get written and submitted. So even while I sit in the library staring at the ceiling, watching the fan slowly rotate, wondering what triggers people to create characters and make them go through happiness, love, trauma, death and drama, trapping them in pages for other people to read and believe as if it’s all happening, there is a 0.33 per cent chance that I might finish writing a book. I can take that chance to start thinking about writing a book—0.33 per cent is a lot.

  There is no one who better understands this than Arindam. He signed a contract with a publishing house while he was still in his first year of English literature at Delhi University. It’s been two years since the deadline has gone by; two years that he has been occupying the seat directly below my seat on the third floor of the library and he’s yet to turn in his manuscript.

  Arindam, himself, is like a character of a tragic book that gets turned into a bad movie. Though he is poor he had hoped life would change once he signed the contract. But after he has passed out from college, he had bills to pay and is struggling. He manages rent because he is a freelance writer for some websites and magazines but that is not enough to go by. I love him though. I love his scraggly beard, his torn bag, his ancient laptop with a few missing keys, the printed pages of his manuscr
ipt that have notes all over, and his spectacles, which hang loosely over his nose whenever he’s typing. He’s very short, like five feet, and is healthy for a poor guy. But he is also well read.

  I was fascinated by him when my father first introduced me to him. I used to think, and I still do, that I am going to be one of the lucky few who will see a well-written, thoughtful book emerge from a brilliant writer, and see it in print and read it and appreciate its genius before everyone else, and in a small way I will be a part of the book and it will be my legacy as well.

  ‘Hi,’ I say as I approach his table. I am carrying Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address, not only because it’s written by a Bengali author, and we are proud Bengalis, and I love the book so much that I can date it, but also because I know he loves the book, and my need to impress him is as great as my desire to woo Megan Fox.

  ‘Hey, the tall guy with the fetish for books. Come! Sit!’ he says and points to the chair in front of him. I sit and smile and hope he doesn’t ask me piercing questions about the book because I am not sure I get the subtexts of the books I read.

  ‘Nice book, do you like it?’ he asks.

  I nod. ‘How are you? How’s the book going?’ I ask softly, not wanting to hurt him.

  ‘It’s going great! I finally resolved the issue I was facing with the conflicting ideologies of the female protagonist. She’s a bit of hypocritical slut, if you know what I mean.’

  I didn’t know what he means but I nod my head anyway.

  ‘When do you finish it? And when do I get to I read it?’ I ask.

  ‘You can read it when I finish it,’ he says. ‘Because if I give it you now I will constantly be wondering what you think I should write. I would think of impressing you.’

  Impressing me? I’m already way beyond impressed.

  ‘Okay. How’s work?’ I ask. I really want to ask if I should start thinking about writing, but in my head it sounds like, ‘Do you think I can model for women’s clothes?’