Of Course I Love You!: Till I find someone better…

by Durjoy Datta

  ‘Whatever. Don’t you hurt the poor girl. I don’t think you ever loved her.’

  ‘Of course, I love her,’ I protested. ‘I won’t hurt her.’

  ‘Anyway, how much did you score this time? I got a damned sixty-two. I think all the professors are just biased against me,’ she said.

  ‘Sixty-nine per cent,’ I said, proudly.

  Since Vernita and Smriti weren’t friends any longer, I could afford to tell her what I had really scored. Smriti would never know that I had lied about my marks or that I had improved over the last semester, with a good five per cent increase.

  ‘What the fuck? That’s five more than what you scored in the last semester. Congratulations, Deb!’

  ‘Yup. Thanks,’ I beamed.

  ‘I am sure you study the whole night and don’t tell us. You are taking tuitions, aren’t you? Such an asshole,’ she said and made no attempt whatsoever to hide her displeasure.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Whoever goes to a place like that?’ I asked, voicing the opinion of Virender and Yogender, who were still swearing at us for dragging them out of their hostel. JCB was the most notorious hostel that year because of these two guys. Every few days, they would catch some innocent guys, make them throw a big booze party on some pretext and turn the washrooms in the hostel into a puke dump.

  ‘It’ll be fun, trust me. And we can’t let these free passes go waste! You have no idea how rare these are,’ Shrey said.

  ‘Shut up, man! Let us go to a coffee shop or watch a movie. Why drive all the way there? We have bloody exams in a few days,’ I suggested, not so politely.

  ‘Deb, just because you scored sixty-nine this time doesn’t mean you get to do all that exam bullshit in front of us. Are you coming along? Yes or no?’ Vernita looked at Viru and Yogi.

  They were small-town guys—one from Ludhiana and the other from Jalandhar—and not quite the smoothest, but they complemented each other perfectly. The huge, muscled Virender with his stand-up acts and the thread-thin Yogender with his cutting one-liners did pretty well together. It was hard to imagine them without each other. And just like every other guy I hung around with, they were obsessed with, well, you know! Most of our lives—the engineers’, that is—revolved around one focal point: girls.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ they echoed. Viru and Yogi usually tagged along with us whenever we went out somewhere.

  Arguing with Shrey and Vernita was something they couldn’t do. Moreover, they knew as long as Vernita was in the scheme of things, there would be free alcohol which was a change from their Iodex and cough syrup highs. For Vernita, it meant company, as I didn’t drink and Shrey had taken to pretending it was cool not to drink since he lost a beer challenge to Vernita way back in first year.

  ‘But guys, seriously! There is nothing out there. It’s defunct and nobody goes there these days, definitely not in this weather,’ I said but it fell on deaf ears. They had already made up their minds. When Shrey suggested something, everyone assumed it would be something cool to do.

  The only incentive of going to an amusement-cum-water park was seeing Vernita in a skimpy bikini. I knew she would not wear anything like that, but the one-in-a-million chance was motivation enough to say yes. Even if she didn’t, there was nothing to lose. The wetter she was, the better she was.

  Moreover, amusement parks were places I could actually prove to be a greater man. Big rides didn’t scare me. As a kid, my sister and my father used to taunt me every time I backed away from the prospect of being flung out to hell from those huge rides! But eventually, I got used to them. Now, it was fun to prod big guys who turned blue and vomitted on scary roller coaster rides.

  It was February and it was getting warmer. However, not warm enough to be in Splash, the amusement-cum-water park. But we still went there because Shrey wanted to do something different. Normal life is always too boring for him.

  We entered the amusement park section and saw that most of the rides were hanging together by a thread of rust. It looked like it had been lying abandoned for a decade. Both Shrey and I—we weighed in the mid eighties—decided against subjecting the already crumbling rides to the unconquerable forces of our mammoth thighs and bulky asses. We chose the water rides instead.

  We hired swimming costumes that were supposedly free size but were anything but freeing. They almost squeezed my balls into one bigger one. I was getting tired of looking around every time to check if anybody was watching before I could pull out the costume, which kept burying itself deep inside the crevice between the two huge masses of flesh that jutted out from my back. One could have studied human anatomy and the reproductive organs of men by looking at me or Shrey. Yes, it was that tight!

  We moved out from our washrooms and what greeted us wasn’t actually unexpected but it still left us gaping in shock.

  Our different day out had empty slides, water with spit and greenish-black algae floating on it, three guys with protruding crotches in undersized costumes and a couple of attendants, woken up from their slumber by the sight of a girl in hot pants and a delightfully tight white shirt that would have turned transparent if she had stepped into the water. An amazing thought.

  ‘Now what, guys?’ Vernita asked, as she looked around. If we were not to die of pneumonia, then we would certainly die of every water-borne disease known to man.

  ‘Let’s look around. There must be a cleaner pool,’ Yogi said and left with Viru. The quicker they found one, the sooner we would leave and the earlier we would reach a cheap bar where they could drink themselves silly.

  ‘If you look at it in the broader sense, it’s not as bad as it looks. The water below the surface shouldn’t be that bad. The algae must be doing a great job of keeping the water clean and healthy. Therefore, if we can just skim the muck off the surface, we have a great day at hand. At the National Physical Laboratory, there is a …’ Shrey said pulling his swimming trunks down from beneath his crotch.

  ‘Do you even think before you open your mouth or is even that mechanically controlled by some guy in the National Physical Laboratory?’ Vernita barked at Shrey who had gone into one of his ultra-hi-tech nonsensical talks which we had come to hate.

  Meanwhile, all I could look at was the sun glistening off Vernita’s legs. I seemed to have a fetish for legs. How could somebody go on with some technological bullshit or look for cleaner water when you had an option of staring at a half-naked girl. It was not something that happened every day! Maybe they weren’t just normal. I was normal.

  ‘Nice, sexy legs! I could just eat you up. Aren’t you just the hottest?’

  Vernita stared at me as if she would gobble me up alive. I would have loved that look if it had been in a closed dark room, but not there. Shit! How could I say that out loud? I mean everybody knew I was, let us say, a little overt with my sexual references and innuendoes, but this was downright ridiculous. I couldn’t have just said that.

  I hadn’t.

  He had.

  There he stood, as if mocking Shrey and me. He was a little shorter than Shrey but had a body that was custom-made to turn on women. Huge biscuit-like abs, big cannonball shoulders, rippling muscles and a great tan that would have had Brad Pitt looking for cover. The same costume this time seemed to be made to his specifications. He didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body whereas we had oodles of it spilling out from all sides of our trunks.

  I wished his sculpted body was the only good thing about his body but it wasn’t.

  He was a smooth guy from south Delhi and was friends with everybody who mattered. He was Vernita’s boyfriend and that’s what I hated about him the most. Not that I envied him, as I knew Vernita made for a lousy girlfriend, blaring and knocking the daylights out of him 24/7. She made life tough for her boyfriends when she left no stone unturned to freak the guy out every time her period was late. She never trusted condoms. Or self-control. She was one of a kind.

  ‘Hi, baby!’ he said as she hugged him in what seemed like the assembling of a high-
precision machine. Each of her curves fit into every muscle on his body as if they were two halves of a beautiful, curvaceous, sensual sculpture. It was so incredibly sexy that we almost started shifting in our places, embarrassed, as if we had been caught watching porn.

  Shrey and I had this peculiar habit of finding flaws in perfectly normal guys to feel better about ourselves, often non-existent flaws. Yet, Shrey and I had found nothing wrong in him. But we weren’t used to regarding anybody as competition and called this the ‘nobody-is-a-stud-except-me’ phenomenon. Every guy in Delhi suffers from this. We think we are studs, though we are really not.

  It was a good thing that Tanmay was always busy managing college affairs, looking good, sculpting his body or trying to top his exams! The less time he spent with us, the better we felt about ourselves. He was every girl’s dream come true—sincere, intelligent, hot and unbelievably soft-spoken.

  ‘Anybody who wants to die today? Pneumonia, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis? We’ve found just the place to do that. A cleaner pool,’ said Viru, rubbing his hands with obvious delight.

  ‘We can all now die an excruciatingly slow death. The filth in that pool isn’t as deadly as this one,’ Yogi added with obvious sarcasm. ‘Hi, Tanmay!’

  ‘Let’s go, honey. It will be fun,’ Tanmay prodded Vernita.

  ‘Can’t you see the water here? Are you out of your mind? I would rather kill myself than step inside the water,’ Vernita shot back.

  ‘The first person who has talked sense today,’ Yogender butted in.

  ‘At least let’s go and check out the water. The tissues of our bodies are made of cellulose and proteins which actually store sunlight and release its energy according to Planck’s law of irradiation where the wavelength is so controlled that maximum heat is released, according to the Dasons’ formulae, and our body slowly adapts to the …’ Shrey started again.

  ‘Jump right in and stay put for an hour or stay shut,’ Yogi interrupted thankfully.

  ‘Fucking true, man! Great job, Yogi. Let’s see you prove your National Physical Laboratory bullshit right here …’ said Vernita and winked at Yogi.

  ‘Let’s do it then,’ Shrey said.

  ‘Let’s do it? Are you serious? Are you serious?’ Viru exclaimed, as he looked wide-eyed at Shrey.

  ‘Yes, I am damn serious.’

  ‘No! Don’t bullshit. Three years. Three damn years,’ Viru said in a strangely accusing tone.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For three years I thought you were this really funny guy who could relate the colour of one’s pee to the kind of rum he prefers. Tell me this is the only time you ever talked sense. Tell me all the other times you were just joking!’ Virender chuckled.

  ‘Cut it out, guys! This isn’t bad … one … two … three … just three floating blobs of spit,’ I said as I fished out my costume yet again before it was swallowed up by the two humungous blobs of fat.

  ‘Heaven itself!’ Yogi smirked.

  ‘See, there is nothing much in this place anyway, so rather than just standing here half-naked, let’s all jump in and make something of it, at least,’ Tanmay said with a seriousness appropriate only for practical vivas.

  The only slide that was working was a 50-foot tall slide that came down vertically. Quite visibly, everybody wet their pants just at the thought of riding that one. I grabbed the opportunity to yet again mock the weak-hearted. After my schooldays had ended, I never missed an opportunity to do that.

  ‘So, are you sure?’ Tanmay asked, almost nervously.

  This is new.

  ‘Of course, I am sure. I have been doing this since I was a kid. I don’t know why you guys are so afraid. They are just slides, man,’ I said, rubbing it in.

  ‘Okay, see you on the other side.’

  As I stepped out onto the ledge, the first doubts crept in. There was no way this was 50 feet. I was floating in the clouds. And all I could see of the others were their tiny little heads. Nevertheless, egged on by their shouts—and more importantly, by my ego—I lay down on the ledge, one hand stuck to my thighs and the other grabbing hold of the attendant, trying to streamline myself as much as I could. The attendant let go.

  Bucsssshuuuwaaaaaahh!

  I was numbed. The ice-cold water gushed into my nostrils and lungs. It felt like a thousand hands had slapped me on my chest and legs. The impact was terrible. The bump in the slide had unbalanced me and I splashed into the water side-first with my legs and arms wide open. It was surely not the most graceful of dives, and definitely not the kind that I expected from myself. I could already hear their chuckles.

  Make a great appearance out of the water and it will just be fine.

  So I sucked in my paunch and braced myself for a Casino Royale-style emergence from the water. I pulled myself up from the pool, helped only by my not-so-muscled arms and felt the water slip down my curves à la Daniel Craig. And seeing the others’ eyes stuck on me, it seemed as if I had actually pulled it off. Their eyes were fixed on me as if they were dumbfounded by my stupendously courageous achievement. They followed every step I took as if to register whatever I did, so that they could replicate it when they went in next. Or they were still scared?

  ‘So?’ I broke the silence. ‘How was it? Pretty great, huh?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ said Vernita, looking at me as if to check whether I had managed to come out in one piece. ‘Not that impressive! I had expected something … more. You know. It’s just not enough.’

  ‘Not that I am interested, but yes, not impressive enough … maybe just enough,’ said Yogi.

  ‘Yes, but I still want to know, Deb, with something like that, how do you get your girls to stick around you? They must be really in love with you not to leave you after they see that,’ Viru said, with barely concealed laughter.

  ‘It’s a miracle, really. I told you guys, something different. I told you that Deb has something that we don’t,’ added Shrey.

  ‘Talent, maybe? Not everybody has it,’ I said, still confused about what they were getting at, but I decided to play along. ‘I am thankful that I do.’

  ‘Not many need it, but you do need a lot of talent with that,’ said Tanmay and they started laughing their brains out. Viru nearly fell into the water and as my eyes followed him, that’s when I saw it floating on the water.

  My trunks? My swimming trunks? Oh. Fuck. My trunks!

  All this while, I had been standing stark naked with my stomach pulled in, posed as a playboy bunny, and I had let them make a fool out of me. Not only that, I had joined in too. I will never live this down, I thought as I jumped into the water and with one fluid motion covered what wasn’t impressive according to their standards. But the laughter didn’t stop. Would never stop. This was just that kind of incident that tends to stick for life. It would now and forever be Deb and the floating trunks.

  As if it wasn’t enough to bury my head in the sand and nuke myself into oblivion, I was gripped by the question that would trouble me for a long time to come. Was I small? I kept telling myself that size doesn’t matter. But then why did Vernita come out with the ‘not impressive’ remark? Had she expected more? My mind wandered to the time when Vernita got dumped once and went around telling everyone that the guy had a minuscule penis. I thought she was being revengeful.

  To make things worse, they weren’t the least bit interested in the water slides or the water park any more. They now had an issue of national importance to discuss. Very minutely, indeed. How I wished I could go back in time and settle for a coffee rather than the goddamned Splash! Even the Mechanical Department canteen would have been a better option.

  ‘So, Deb, we had fun, right? We got to see your talents. And something more!’ said Yogi as he walked out of the washrooms wiping the non-existent water off him. He even smeared moisturizer on his whole fucking body. Oh hell, was I irritated! The damned costume had left an intricate design on my waist but couldn’t hold on to me. Damn Made in China.

  ‘Deb, it’s not that bad, you know.
These things can be corrected. Electric impulses in the ultrasonic range can elongate certain tissues in the body if delivered in conjunction with some microwaves. People are known to add a few inches in a matter of months. Don’t feel depressed,’ Shrey said.

  ‘National Physical Laboratory?’ asked Viru.

  ‘Nope! It’s all thanks to www.enlarge.com,’ Shrey grinned.

  ‘What the hell were you doing at www.enlarge.com?’ I asked, trying to shift the focus off me.

  ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed,’ Yogi said and they all burst out laughing. It’s never easy to be the butt of all jokes and certainly not when it pertains to the most sensitive of areas. Fortunately enough, we left the park soon as there wasn’t much to do and the conversation shifted to other things.

  ‘Hey, Tanmay, how’re Mom and Dad? Still minting money in the Middle East?’ Viru asked as he killed the engine.

  The plan to go to a nearby bar had been dropped. The sun had set. The car was parked on a deserted road. The doors flung open. A bottle of rum, roadside chicken, a couple of Cokes, a few cigarettes, a few plastic glasses, car speakers blaring in the moonlight, and the party was complete. Who cared about the ambience!

  ‘They are good there. Mom just got a promotion, so she might just hang around there a little longer than planned. Avantika is there, too. She will be back in a few days,’ Tanmay replied.

  His parents had been living in Dubai for the last many years and his father had a huge auto-dealerships business there. That explained all the expensive labels on his clothes or maybe they just looked like labels when he wore them.

  ‘So, what’s Avantika up to these days?’ Yogi asked as he rolled another joint.

  ‘Nothing much, doing B.Com. honours at SRCC and preparing for the CAT. She doesn’t have too many classes these days now that the semester’s almost over, so she took the first flight out. She hadn’t seen Mom and Dad for a while,’ he said as he stretched out on the car bonnet.

  Now that fascinated me—‘she took the first flight out’. As if it cost pocket change. Whatever happened to booking early and saving money?