EX

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  Between Neel and me there lay his notebook where he was noting down the details of his experiment. I had mine on the other side. For once I saw him tapping on the notebook as if calling for attention. I glanced at him and then on the notebook. It was written: I am sorry!

  I took my notebook and kept it on his side and wrote: Why are you sorry? And tapped my finger on it rather fiercely.

  He wrote: For Avni.

  I wrote: She should be sorry not you.

  I know but she won’t be. So I am.

  What’s her problem?

  We are in a relationship.

  So, what’s that got to do with me? Everything, I confessed to myself.

  Did you tell anyone you had my shirt?

  Yes, Nisha.

  She must have bitched you out to her.

  The teacher was taking rounds. When she came to our end, we flipped the page. When she ambled away, we exchanged a furtive glance. His face was genuinely apologetic.

  It’s alright, I wrote. I didn’t hit her back, only for you, I thought.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said aloud. The teacher turned immediately and barked out at us, ‘No talking I said.’

  I never spoke to Nisha afterwards. I hate gossipmongers. She must have known I had got to know about it. Neel and me? Really? Were we a threat to Avni? I don’t know why but I felt happy. It somewhat numbed the slap for me. After the Chemistry practical class, we had to go to the library.

  I was impressed with Salt Lake International’s library. It was a huge hall and unlike my previous school they had a good collection of fiction, non-fiction, and academic books. Neel was sitting in a faraway corner with other boys while I sat by the table which had three girls with whom I had never talked before. I pulled out a Harry Potter book from a nearby shelf, and pretended to read it while the truth was that I was looking at Neel time and again. He did look at me once and smiled but I was so confused that I looked away. I repented it immediately.

  Few minutes later, someone asked for permission to enter the library. The librarian allowed Avni to come in with a warm smile which I thought he could do without. The smile told me that the librarian knew her well. She spoke to the librarian for some time, walked to the last book shelf in the hall, and then disappeared behind it. I couldn’t see her anymore. The bookshelves were placed in a manner which shielded the person behind it unless the books were pulled out of the shelf. And the one shelf she went behind was the last one adjacent to the bench around which Neel and his friends were sitting. I was about to look somewhere else when I saw the guys sitting with Neel nudging him with a naughty grin. I could guess what they were hinting at but I was not comfortable accepting it. Then the worst happened. Neel got up and, pretending as if he was searching for some book, went from one shelf to the other to finally behind the last one where Avni was probably waiting for him. What for?

  I felt injured when I guessed the answer in my mind. It was then that I decided to get rid of the goody-goody-girl image. Good girls shouldn’t be in love. I was. Was I? Why else had I washed and ironed his shirt? Why else had I not complained about Avni’s slap to the teachers? Why else was I feeling injured thinking about what all those two were upto behind that book shelf? It was time for a decision. Firstly, there was no denying the fact that I was in love. Yes! Maybe prior to meeting Neel, I was sure I would never be in love. It seemed like a waste of time to me. But I never thought this being-in-love thing would catch me unawares. I had to forget Neel. He was someone else’s. I took a deep breath and made a decision: I won’t come in-between Neel and Avni.

  I saw Avni come out from behind the shelf with a book (as if!), wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. The next minute she moved out of the library.

  I intentionally didn’t come in front of Neel that day. It was only when everyone was dispersing after school that I saw him with his cycle alongside Avni, Nisha, and a few other students, ambling away towards the main gate. They seemed to be laughing at some joke. It was a hurtful sight. The more Neel and Avni smiled at each other, the more my heart was squashed. If I had not done what I did, then my heart would have died a certain death. And I was in no mood to witness such a private funeral for the rest of my life.

  I walked straight towards the group and called out, ‘Hey, Neel.’ They paused. And turned. I went to him, put my arm around his shoulder, smiled at him, and kissed him on his right cheek.

  ‘Thanks for offering me to write songs for Paintbrush,’ I said.

  I didn’t care to wait for Avni’s reaction. I didn’t care to look at Neel’s reaction either. They shouldn’t have gone behind the bookshelf. That really pushed me to wear my bitch-suit.

  I had started to love Neel not because everything was right about him. It was because something was wrong with me. And that wrong felt immensely satisfying. Once I reached the main gate, I turned to see Neel who was standing like a cuckold. Ditto for Avni. I wasn’t sure whether I did the right thing or not. Maybe Avni did love him, but now that I too loved Neel there had to be some sort of a competition. Like uncle Darwin had said: survival of the fittest! May the best win, I thought, and walked out of the main gate showing my chubby middle finger to Avni. Little did I know I had just flagged a war of the bitches.

  6

  It was raining outside later that night. Standing by my room’s window, I wondered if there were actually two kinds of rain: one, which you wish to simply admire from the safety of your house; the other, which compels you to move out of your comfort zone, go out in to the open, and get soaked. That’s what Neel excited within me every time I saw him in school and tuitions. My world was full of craters until Neel decided to rain on them, filling them up and making it all appear as an ocean full of secrets. I wanted to get out of my emotional comfort zone and get soaked in him, and not merely admire him from a distance. And if that impulse was love, then probably I was in love with him. Don’t you think our own senses conspire a lot against us and keep secrets? Falling in love probably happens when our senses share those secrets with us. It’s like mini explosions happening in the mind, heart, and where not.

  In the days that passed, after I kissed Neel in front of Avni, she made sure I suffered for it. Had I not kissed him, I could have seen Neel practising with his band. But Avni made sure I didn’t. Neel liked me. I knew it, but he pretended not to. And because of his pretence, we were neither good friends nor lovers. He knew I had a soft corner for him. All through the following week, I made sure I glanced at him enough to make him realize he wasn’t just another guy for me. If he still didn’t get it, then he was an asshole, I told myself. But thankfully he wasn’t one. I saw him catch my sharp glances most of the times. When he gave me his phone number, he asked me not to tell anyone. He was so scared of Avni! What’s the point of a relationship when we do things out of fear?

  I had no friends to share anything with. That’s probably one of the reasons why thoughts about Neel gripped me emotionally more strongly than ever. When one is alone, the thoughts he wants to run away from are the thoughts which stays with him all the time. With time I lost touch with my only friend from my previous school—Shreya. When I shared this with Yo-didun, she said it’s no big deal as people keep coming and going from one’s life. The pain, she said, doesn’t come from the fact that someone left us. We feel the pain of separation because of the intensity with which we try to hold onto those who are done with us or never had to do anything with us to begin with. I asked her whether wishing for someone is a good reason to get someone for real. She put forth a straight ‘no’. I was shit scared. I wanted Neel the way Avni got him. I wanted to go behind the bookshelves of the library with him, and come out wiping my mouth like she did. I wanted to walk out of the school every day alongside him. And I also wanted him to laugh at my jokes. In simple words, I wanted Neel to be mine. Exclusively mine.

  ‘What if someone loves a person but doesn’t get him? Does that mean it isn’t true love?’ I asked Yo-didun. She laughed. I never liked it when she laughed at my queries. I
t made me feel like an ignorant fool.

  ‘What do you mean by “get the person”?’ she asked with a certain twinkle in her eyes which told me she was only testing me, and already knew what I was trying to ask her.

  ‘It means to live with the person all your life, to be married to him, to admire the various sunrises and sunsets of your life with him, and to embrace him tightly during those sunrises and sunsets.’

  ‘You are a true teenager now. Just like I was,’ she said.

  What she told me next was something important and true. She said, ‘For all of us, the preference always is the physical expression of our longing for someone, the physical justification of our feelings, and also the physical manifestation of the desire we associate with the one we claim to love. There’s always this craving for a physical proximity in everyone’s idea of love if not in the definition of it. Hence the need to classify love into true, casual, and you know what all. Try not to restrain love by subjecting yourself to such baseless classifications. And try not to see your love for someone as something that you need, per se, even though it may sound great. That is because the need for the thing will always narrow your perspective of that thing and shall make you feel more miserable than happy being in love. That’s one reason people undergo depression when they don’t get a person they think they love.’

  I tried to put what she said in perspective. I was not happy seeing Neel with Avni. Why? Because I wanted him to be physically there by my side. Then I asked myself: why I can’t be at peace with myself knowing that he loves someone else? How was his love for someone else affecting my love for him? Funny, I realized the answer then and there—that Neel’s physical proximity to me was important to me. I don’t know why it made me feel as if my love for him wasn’t true. Understanding my dilemma, Yo-didun said an epic statement which I shall never forget: she said love and lust are twins. Many a times they look similar and hence the confusion. But their traits are distinctly different. I obviously was curious to know how to distinguish between the so-called twins?

  ‘By the feelings they generate in a person,’ Yo-didun said. ‘Lust generates pleasure. Love generates happiness. And no one but you decide what is pleasure and what is happiness.’

  After the high dose of philosophy, I asked Yo-didun one simple question: Should I do something in order to draw Neel’s attention or wish Avni and Neel a happy love life and part ways with him?

  Yo-didun said, ‘I won’t suggest anything. But I’ll wait to see if you really are my granddaughter or not.’

  7

  I had nothing to do with the fact that Neel was admitted to a nearby hospital that summer. He was admitted because he choked himself to an almost fatal level after smoking a bidi. I later heard that he didn’t smoke for fun. He had lost a bet.

  When I told Yo-didun about it, she was shocked. She said nobody under eighteen should smoke. I told her almost half the boys and girls smoke in our school. Yo-didun immediately grasped my hand and said, ‘Promise me you will never do such a thing, Shonamoni.’

  I promised her because I was sure I would never smoke. Yo-didun asked why their parents didn’t reprimand them for smoking. As if they would tell their parents about smoking and drinking. Yo-didun complained that the connection between parents and children was getting diluted with every passing day. What she didn’t know was that kids of my generation and their parents have a world of their own, and both, especially the kids, make sure neither intrudes into the other’s life. I’m a prime example.

  I also told Yo-didun about the virtual world, the Internet, where people often were what people weren’t in real life. In response she asked if she could be a sixteen-year-old in the virtual world with such innocent fervour that I cracked up laughing. For lack of knowledge, she thought the Internet was a medium for time travel.

  Later I informed Yo-didun that if a guy doesn’t smoke in my school, he is nicknamed TGIF: The Great Indian Fattu. Students teased him stating that every TGIF had the same DNA which only meant they were a product of an intra-community fuck fest. I couldn’t tell Yo-didun the last part. She asked me not to stay with such kids who smoked and consumed alcohol. I told her in that case I would have to go to school after school-hours and return before school-hours.

  I don’t know how were the times when she grew up as a school kid but since then times have changed for sure. My generation went to school but we were not merely school students. There was nothing innocent about us. And we definitely weren’t ignorant about anything. It was all there right in front of us: from the latest development in the cosmos to the latest adult MMS. With such information available to us 24X7, how could anyone be innocent? It was like how certain fruit sellers force-ripen the fruits and make them ready for selling. My generation was getting forced-ripened just like that. Growth-wise, our mind was ahead of our body. Hence our inner self was naturally a breeding ground for a lot of shit because everyone, including me, was a school going adult. At sixteen we behaved like twenty five, we said slangs with ease, we were casual and experimental with our sexuality, we searched for love because our hormones wanted us to and not because our heart felt the need to, we were selfish, we had no clue what our culture was all about, what freedom was for our previous generations, seemed like a cage for us because we wanted to leap ahead where our predecessors had stopped out of fear and shame. We didn’t complain about each other to parents anymore, rather we showed middle fingers and bitched it out, we were ready to fight, we liked noise, we loved chaos, we kissed and smooched at the drop of a hat because the American television series told us that’s the ‘cool’ thing to do. We watched porn more than we prayed. We were a group of attention-seekers and emotion-haters. So yes, our generation had come a long way from Yo-didun’ s. And the gap was so much that our elders, our education system, or our own morals no longer could teach us a better way to grow up into mature adults. And whenever they tried to change us, we had our middle fingers ready for them too. We were a fuck-all generation.

  I told Yo-didun none of that. She wouldn’t have got anything of this and perhaps would have cursed the world for turning worse since her youth faded. She would also have been tensed wondering how her Shonamoni would live in this bad world.

  It was only when she asked how Neel was doing that I remembered I had to visit the hospital. The only problem was that hospital was at some distance from my place, and Ashok mama wouldn’t have allowed me to go alone since I was a girl nor would he have taken me to the hospital himself since I was not his girl. Moreover, if I had told him I was supposed to visit a guy in the hospital, Bijoya mami would have triggered a soap opera at home. Instead, when I told this to Yo-didun, she asked me to visit Neel at least once in the hospital.

  As a solution to the problem she said, ‘I haven’t gone out to shop for many years,’ and winked at me. I kissed her so hard that we almost fell off the bed.

  As we laughed, I hoped Avni had not visited Neel before me. How wrong was I.

  8

  Yo-didun and I, on the pretext of shopping in Haathibagan, took a taxi to Lake Town where the nursing home was. Yo-didun preferred to sit in the lobby while I checked with the receptionist, and went to the floor where Neel was. Thankfully I was there in the nursing home during the visiting hours by default. I soon found the room and saw Neel sitting on a bed. By his side was a woman helping him eat something.

  ‘Hi!’ he said on seeing me.

  ‘Hi!’ I said and smiled at him. He smiled back and introduced the woman standing by him as his mother. With an unsure smile, I folded my hands to greet her. She gave me a condescending look, and avoided looking at me, focussing more on helping Neel drink the soup. But I noticed Neel did not turn his eyes away from me even once. Whenever he looked at me, I wanted to get inside his head, into his heart, and read aloud whatever he was thinking and feeling.

  His mother got a call on her phone and she stepped out of the room for a better network. She was about to call a nurse to help Neel have the soup when I volunteered. I th
ink it was because of the urgency of the call that she gave me the soup bowl and left. I sat down where she was sitting, and helped Neel take a spoonful of the steaming soup. I had taken his mother’s place. I don’t know why but I loved the thought. Of course I didn’t want to be his mother, but whatever motherhood stood for—care, love, nurture—I wanted to mean that to him then.

  ‘Mom is always worrying. I am alright now and can have the soup myself.’

  ‘It’s okay. You should listen to your mom,’ I said as if I was a middle-aged nanny myself.

  ‘I heard you are here because you smoked? Why did you do that?’

  ‘I got into a stupid bet. You know how it is. I had to prove a point or gift myself a stupid nickname for the rest of school life. Neel is a TGIF. That doesn’t sound good, no?’

  ‘And now you are here.’

  ‘Yes. After I smoked the bidi, my vocal cord was choked.’

  He said it casually as if it wasn’t anything serious he had suffered. My cheeks flexed into a faint smile.

  ‘Thanks for coming. I didn’t expect you,’ he said next.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I mean it’s not a holiday.’

  ‘I skipped school. And one second, I have something for you.’

  I quickly flipped my bag, which I had slung across my shoulder, and brought out the get-well-soon card I had made for him the previous night.

  ‘Get well soon, Neel!’ I said giving him the card.

  ‘Wow! Did you make this yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ I said with a pinch of pride. For the first time in my life I had myself awake to make something for someone.