‘Everyone says that. I just hope it just does,’ she sipped her coffee. ‘How is that friend of yours doing?’
‘He is good. That’s where I was. He lives nearby.’
‘Ohh, that’s cool,’ she said. ‘Does he know you’re meeting me here?’
‘Yes. He asked me to be careful and he hopes that I die.’
‘Careful? Why?’
‘He says I will fall in love.’
‘Aha! Will you?’
‘If you keep being this charming, I might,’ I said and she smiled.
We talked for another hour and she told me about her unending collection of books, her love for hardbound novels, and then we discussed books and her favourite authors, and her job and her colleagues, her sister and how much she loved her, and she asked me about college and Sidharth and whether I was dating somebody. I told her about Sarah and Sheeny, and she told me that I was a little, lost kid, and I couldn’t help but agree. And then she received a call from her office and had to go. She hugged me when she left and thanked me for being there. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was in a rotten mood and I had helped her see through it. I had no idea how.
‘See you soon then?’ she said, as she was leaving.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘How soon?’ I asked and I wished sound waves were not waves, but particles and I hoped I could stop them from reaching her.
‘Excuse me?’ she said and smiled.
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘I heard that,’ she said. ‘After office today? Seven o’ clock?’
‘Seven. Okay.’
‘You are free?’ she asked. ‘Oh, I forgot, you’re a student. I hope I don’t eat into your playtime.’
‘Whatever.’
She smiled and said she would text me the place. She walked away and drove off. I smiled to myself. This was going better than I had ever imagined.
‘You bastard!’ Sidharth exclaimed. ‘You are going out with her again? She asked you out or you did?’
‘I don’t know. I guess we both did,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe you. You couldn’t have asked her out, you would have rather pissed your pants. So how’s she? Better than last night? Girls usually look better after sundown.’
‘She was so much better. She’s so pretty and smart. We even like the same books!’
‘Oh. My. God. Shut up and stop thinking about having kids with her already. You’re like a little school girl, man,’ Sidharth mocked. ‘So, did you click a picture?’
‘What? No, I didn’t!’ I said.
Sidharth mocked me and compared me to women who scream for boy bands, sparkly vampires and the like, after a while, his enthusiasm died and he got back to his porn and his PlayStation. I, on the other hand, had a tough time counting hours and checking my phone for her text and at around six, she texted me to ask if I could reach Connaught Place in half an hour. Apparently, she had got free from her office earlier than usual. Though she said it was okay if I made it by seven, but what she didn’t know was that I would die—DIE—to spend an extra half hour with her.
‘Would you drive me to CP?’ I asked Sidharth.
‘What?’ he asked and put his game on pause. He wasn’t doing so well, his team, Arsenal, was getting beaten by a lesser known team. ‘I am not going anywhere.’
‘C’mon, man! It’s urgent, she’s waiting. I came with you to your stupid party; you got to do this for me.’
‘You are going on this date because of the stupid party, asshole!’ he argued.
‘You know what I mean, Sidharth.’
After a few minutes of persuasion, he said yes, but only if I introduced him to her, too. He wanted to see the girl who had been driving me nuts since the last eighteen hours. Eighteen hours? It seemed a lot longer, more on the lines of eternity. We hopped onto the bike and reached CP in twenty minutes and waited where she had asked us to. Sidharth told me he would kick my ass if the girl fell short of what I had described her as, smart and gorgeous.
‘Hey!’ a voice screamed out. I looked behind and there she was, sitting on the pavement, smoking her cigarette. ‘Come. Sit,’ she said.
‘Is that her?’ Sidharth whispered in my ear and I nodded.
‘She is amazing! Die in hell, Joy, IN HELL,’ he said and squeezed my arm. I know.
‘Are you guys talking about me?’ she asked and thrust out her hand. ‘Hi. Manika.’
‘Sidharth,’ he said.
‘So, what was he saying?’ Manika asked me.
‘He just said that you were amazing and he wished I would die in hell,’ I said.
‘Well, thank you,’ she said and smiled at Sidharth.
‘Pleasure,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you two have fun. I have some work, so I will go and do that.’
‘Ohh, you have to go, right? I am sure it’s very important,’ Manika said and winked. ‘This is so high-school type, you leaving the two of us alone. But then, you guys are about that age, aren’t you?’
‘Your girlfriend is very smart, Joy. I don’t like it,’ Sidharth smiled.
‘I wish she were my girlfriend, and she will not be if you don’t get lost,’ I grumbled, and we laughed. He got on his bike, bid us goodbye and drove away, his bike thundering. And almost immediately, my phone beeped.
‘I can bet my kidney on it that it’s Sidharth,’ she said, puffing on her cigarette.
‘What if it’s not?’ I said.
‘Anything you want,’ she said. ‘What if it is? Okay, if it is you will have to show me the message.’
‘Deal.’
She laughed out pretty loud after reading the message:
If you don’t get this girl, I will personally cut off your balls and draw fake boobs on you. And she is, as I said, out of your league. Get her. And tell her that I like her sister. I am sure if Manika is this hot, her sister would be too!
‘Funny guy,’ I said. ‘Thank god for my kidney.’
‘What had you told him about me?’ she said.
‘Nothing much, just that you’re pretty, smart and funny, the usual, and that you’re a journalist and you love books and art.’
‘I am glad you didn’t miss out anything,’ she said and stubbed out her cigarette.
‘You always wanted to be a journalist?’ I asked her.
‘Well, not really. It appealed to me then, but not anymore.
I liked writing and I could never write a novel myself, and journalism was the next best thing.’
’Why don’t you write a book? You’re an avid reader, and you already write so you have the two required prerequisites to be a writer!’ I said.
‘Maybe. Someday. I don’t think anyone would read it. And I am not able enough to write a literary book. I don’t want to write for adults, you know, I like reading them but I think a lot of it is really pretentious and make-belief. I want to write a young-adult book, something that people my age can connect to,’ she said and smiled. ‘I think I am boring you. You always wanted to be an engineer?’
‘Not really, but I never WANTED to be anything. Engineering is what all middle-class guys do. Engineering, Management. Naukri.’
‘Aww! But there must be something, right? If you were to do something for the rest of your life and be paid for it, what would it be?’
‘Never thought about it,’ I said. ‘I have always been too busy with entrance examinations and coaching classes. I think a well-paying, comfortable job, that’s all I want.’
‘Hmmm,’ she said. She wasn’t impressed.
I told her that I thought one has to be rich to have big dreams, and she was disappointed that I thought so. Manika was slightly well off, her dad worked in a big oil company and raked in quite some money. But she had never been the spendthrift type. Despite a new gleaming car, she always preferred the metro more; she hated the traffic.
I couldn’t stop asking questions, and she entertained all of them with a patient smile on her lips. She told me she loved Chinese food and puppies and coffee and YouTube, and whistling
during movies, that she has never missed watching any Shah Rukh Khan or Ben Affleck movie, that she hates her ex-boyfriends, and given a choice she would strangulate her boss; I started to love the things she loved too. I liked that she loved reading books and that she wanted to write one, that she blamed herself for what happened to her sister, and that she thought there was something I would want to do in life beyond having a comfortable job.
‘Should we go somewhere else? It’s a little cold here?’ she said, as she got up from the pavement. It had been two hours since we had started talking. Her cheeks had turned red from the cold, and she pulled a muffler over her neck. She looked so painfully gorgeous in those moments that I wished that time would freeze for a little while, so that I could just look at her. As we walked away from that pavement, she held my arm to shield herself from the cold wind and I instinctively put my arm around her. She looked at me with those big brown eyes and Sidharth’s words rang true in my head, ‘You are falling in love again, Joy.’
It was the greatest feeling in the world. It filled my heart with joy that just can’t be put into words. I wished to bump into every friend of mine, just so that everyone could see whom I was with right now. The. Prettiest. Girl. Ever.
‘That easy, huh?’ I said.
‘Fate,’ Joy said.
‘So? What next? You asked her out? Or another date? Or did something happen on that date?’ I asked, my curiosity peaking.
‘Nothing happened. Other than the fact that she broke my heart into countless pieces.’
‘What?’
‘Yep. That’s what happened. Just when I was looking at her sitting in that Japanese restaurant chewing on disgusting sushi that she ordered, imagining my entire life with her, she just went ahead and broke my heart into tiny little unsalvageable fragments. But then again, I don’t blame her; she had not asked me to be smitten. I was just being stupid,’ he said wistfully.
‘Will you just shut up and tell me what happened?’
‘She had a boyfriend,’ he said.
‘What? She had a boyfriend? Why didn’t she tell you that before?’ I asked, a little surprised
‘Because I had not asked her.’
‘But she should have told you!’
‘That’s what Sidharth said, too. I vowed not to call her again after that ridiculously wonderful date.’
‘Then what?’
‘Nothing much. Just depression … Just plain depression. I cried and cried and cried,’ he said.
‘You’re such a cry-baby, Joy,’ I remarked.
‘I have been told,’ he answered and continued.
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 3
‘No, you can’t be serious. You are serious? Wait? Are you serious?’ Sidharth said, visibly shocked when I broke the news to him. Quite obviously, his reaction was a lot less extreme than mine was. I was fuming, sad, depressed, angry and suicidal all at the same time. And yes, I cried.
I took a deep breath and said, ‘I am serious. It’s not her fault.
It’s not as if she was hiding it or anything. She just didn’t feel it was necessary to tell me. And if it makes things any better, she even asked me if I had a girlfriend.’
‘Just so you know,’ Sidharth said, ‘it doesn’t make this okay. So what are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Joy! True love! This is what you don’t find every day. I mean normal people don’t find it every day. You are different. You find it every day,’ he digressed.
‘Stop it.’
‘Okay, but seriously, this girl was different. You should go out and get her. And did I tell you that Ganesh called?
We can take her boyfriend out from the equation, too. Nobody would know. What do you say?’ he said, all pumped up and excited.
‘We are doing nothing of that sort,’ I said and dug my head into my pillow. I cried.
‘You are not even going to call her?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘You disappoint me,’ he said. ‘You’re such a girl!’
‘Fuck off. If Mom calls, tell her I am sleeping here. Project work.’
‘Whatever.’
I didn’t call her.
A few weeks passed by and I was back to the drudgery of my normal life without that beautiful face tormenting me day-after-night-after-day. Yes, she called. She even called and asked me if we could meet up sometime. Though my heart just begged my mind to let go and meet her, I always came up with some pretext not to. It was a good decision not to meet her. I knew I would have fallen more in love with her every time I saw her. How could I have not? So, I tried my best to stay away from her. She was trouble.
Yes, sometimes I did check the newspaper and some social networking sites for traces of her and found many, but I exercised total self-restraint. I read her book reviews and would imagine her curled up on a couch with a book in her lap and a cup of coffee in her hands, spectacles perched precariously on her head, and I wondered if she ever thought of me.
I even started dating again—just an odd date here and there, nothing serious—and tried hard to get over her, but I was looking for her in every girl I met. It was a very different feeling, though. I wasn’t really sad that I wasn’t with her, though I knew that I would be the happiest guy if it were otherwise.
Oddly, I still felt thankful for that night and the day after, because for however short a period it was, the time I had spent with her was the best eighteen hours of my life. And it wasn’t my fault either that she had a boyfriend. So it was all fine. I missed her face, her smile, the sound of her laughter, but whenever it came back to me, I couldn’t help but smile and feel lucky that it had happened. A few months passed, and I stopped checking her Facebook profile. It wasn’t as if I wasn’t still in love with her, I just accepted it as a relationship that didn’t work out and I got dumped. Sometimes I just looked into the mirror and smiled at my superpower to be so stupidly in love. I knew from that moment that life would never be the same. It was gut-wrenching, but I knew she would always be there, those eighteen hours would always be there.
‘So, where do we go tonight?’ Sidharth asked.
His father was on another one of his moneymaking streaks. The Sensex was doing well, and so was his father. It meant a lot of free luxuries for me. I didn’t mind and I prayed for his father to be the next Harshad Mehta without the scam, or without any Ponzi scheme.
‘TGIF?’ I said.
‘Sure. Whatever you say, man,’ he said and we drove on.
We ordered nachos and pastas and well-done chicken and he ate with a vengeance. He was working out hard these days and it was the only day in the week that he really ate like a guy as big as him should.
‘Joy,’ he said. ‘Do you remember the last time we went to college?’
‘We did. Last week? Why?’ I asked.
‘Do you hear what you are saying?’
‘What?’
‘We don’t attend classes! I don’t think we have ever attended more than a lecture a day!’ he said. ‘That’s sad, that’s not how it should be.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘We are fucking up our careers. People slog day-after-night-after-day and all we do is this … eat and talk about girls, go back home and sleep. That’s not the life we want to lead, man.’
‘But we pass all our exams and our scores are above sixty per cent, and that’s makes us pretty awesome, I think,’ I said.
Life at Delhi College of Engineering had been a cakewalk.
The attendance was never really a worry and now that we were in the latter half of our engineering days, things had become even simpler. The exams were considerably easy, the professors left us alone, and we were seniors, so we had settled comfortably in our roles in the social pecking order and weren’t as unsure as we were as juniors when we constantly battled the fears of being uncool (and often lost!).
‘I was thinking something else,’ he said. ‘You know, there is a provision that you
can do the last three semesters in a foreign university if you get accepted. And it’s on full scholarship. Everything is paid for, be it lodging, tuition fee, and even flight tickets! Imagine that.’
‘Yeah, but all the seniors that went last year were like little geniuses! They had projects and recommendations and the professors loved them. It’s not like we have a chance.’
‘We can. I still have one semester to go. The applications are to be submitted at the end of the semester. So I still have a few months left to work on my profile. I was thinking of taking up some projects under a few professors and giving it a shot. I will apply for some improvement examinations and get my percentage up by a few points. What do you say?’ he asked.
It was strange to hear such talk from him. Two years of engineering had passed by and he had not said a word about studies and suddenly he wanted to do extra projects, give reexaminations and apply to foreign universities. It was awkward.
‘If you want to do it, then why not?’ I said.
‘Why don’t you try for it too?’
‘Naah, I will try to go for management exams a year after I pass out from here. So, the whole foreign university thing doesn’t fit into my profile. If you haven’t noticed, I never wanted to do engineering,’ I said, a little worried now. Sidharth was suddenly getting serious about his life and career. I wished him luck, though I really didn’t like this new Sidharth. He was scary and he was making me feel worthless. Being happy for him was one thing, but scaring the shit out of me by getting serious about life was another thing altogether. I had to do something, too. I thought of Manika and the time she said, ‘There must be something that you want to do?’
Unfortunately, I was a lost kid.
During the next week, Sidharth went up to a few professors to ask if they were heading projects he could be a part of and contribute. They had never seen him, and the few who had weren’t kind to him. I used to stand outside their offices, hearing all the nasty things that they said to him but he didn’t back out and kept begging for projects; he told them he was ready to even wash beakers or scour for sponsorships. After trying his luck with twenty-odd professors, he finally found one who didn’t exactly give him a project but gave him the permission to help a senior of ours with a project that he was working on. I hadn’t really seen Sidharth taking so much shit from anyone, let alone old professors, so all of this was very uncanny.
Ohh Yes, I'm Single: And so is my Girlfriend Page 8