Pluton's Pyre

by Gyandeep Kaushal

  Chapter 1.0

  I’d thought that the moment she left the classroom, I’d intercept her on her way out and take things forward from there. But that didn’t happen in the first break, as she remained seated. She spent it talking to Shraddha and Anita and didn’t go out. During the lunch break, I couldn’t find the nerve to do it. But I was firm in my resolve to do it, no matter what. I had to do it and it had to be that day. I would give fate no chance to ship me into her friend zone. So I pulled myself together.

  ‘Hi, Malvika,’ I said as I crossed her path when she was leaving the classroom, in the third break. ‘Do you have a minute?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in an amicable tone, and stopped walking.

  ‘Could we have a word, just us?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ she said meekly, looking back at Anita and Shraddha, who were accompanying her out.

  They left us together and walked out, taking up positions in the corridor.We walked away from the door, further back into the classroom, to avoid the interruption of onlookers.

  ‘Actually, I had something for you,’ I said, and produced the paper from the side pocket of my trousers. ‘What is it?’ she asked, as her eyes glued onto it. ‘You want me to go through your lines?’ she asked very sweetly. ‘No, it’s different actually,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you see it yourself?’ I handed the paper over to her.

  I could feel a jackhammer drilling through my ribs as she unfolded the paper. My breath became heavier every nanosecond. I could literally see her eyes sifting through every word in the paper. I felt like singing Pehla nasha right there, merely with the thought that her fingers were touching the paper exactly where I had touched it. It felt special to know that she was reading the words I’d written for her.

  In a matter of a few seconds, she folded the paper back into its previous shape.

  She was done reading it. She had completed reading the ‘I LOVE YOU!’ in that paper and she was looking at me, still holding it in her hands. Oh, I could still trace a hint to that smile of hers. She was looking at me and I was looking at her. Like the day I’d caught her looking at me and smiling, I didn’t want her to feel shy about it, so I smiled soulfully at her. I could only see her tender luscious lips moving, before I could hear the voice.

  ‘What is this, Suraj?’

  What was it? I couldn’t fathom. She had yelled at me so loudly, I nearly ducked at the sound of her voice. Since when did people start answering proposals so vehemently? Before I could tell her it was my proposal, if she found it too difficult to understand, she spoke again.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, huh?’ She looked around and found every pair of eyes glued on us. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  It took me a while to realize what the situation was, in its correct form. With that wild look in her eyes, I felt as if she looked into my soul.The tremor in her voice was paralyzing my senses. I was so intimidated that I could feel a lump in my choking throat.

  ‘Malvika, would you please calm down and listen to me for a bit?’ I struggled to give voice to every shaking syllable. ‘Will you let me explain?’

  ‘Please, Suraj,’ she overemphasized the first word, ‘will you just care to shut up?’

  Just then, Shraddha and Anita came in. ‘What is happening?’ Anita asked Malvika. ‘And what is this paper?’ She glanced at it and then took a clear look at it. As soon as she was done, she gave me such a look that I felt like a bloody pest.

  I wondered why Malvika didn’t protest and kept looking at me instead.That paper, at least, was supposed to be strictly between her and me.

  ‘Please, I didn’t mean to offend you. I just wanted to let you know of my feelings,’ I said in a low voice, so as not to add to my public embarrassment.

  ‘Your feelings?’ she spoke so loud it seemed as if she deliberately wanted the entire class to hear her. ‘What made you think you could do this?’

  ‘You,’ I said, a little annoyed.

  ‘Me? Are you crazy?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Really, care to explain?’

  ‘Didn’t you smile at me every time I smiled at you? For the last few days?’

  ‘Whaattt?’ she nearly shrieked at the top of her lungs. I supposed that was the final nail in the coffin, inside which I could see myself lying lifeless. ‘Just because I smiled at you a few times, because we were in the same group, thinking we were kind of friends, all of us, you thought you could use it against me like this?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry Malv—’

  She cut me off again. ‘Don’t tempt me,’ she hissed,’you’re crossing your limits’. She continued, ‘Thank me for not showing this letter to the vice-principal immediately. One more word from you, and I promise I won’t think twice before doing it.’

  Just then, Abhineet and Aditya stepped into the scene. ‘Bro, come with me,’Aditya held me by my arms and pulled me out of the class.

  ‘Get him out of here,Aditya,’ she didn’t bother to spare me an inch of dignity, even in the last minutes.

  ‘Man,’ said Aditya. Swayam and Abhineet were standing next to him. ‘Have you gone crazy?’As if I was supposed to listen to him now.

  ‘That was a prank we wanted to play with you.When Abhineet and Swayam told me you liked Malvika, we thought it’d be so cute, so much fun to see you getting all het up about her. But I really didn’t think you’d go so far. You proposed to her, really?’

  It didn’t surprise me to hear the truth from Aditya.After the dose I had from Malvika, what Aditya said only came as salt being rubbed into the wound. I was done!

  Chapter 1.5

  That near-blinding incident made me see a few things in the right light: that Aditya and his friends were not my friends; that trusting anything besides your own counsel spawns possibilities of perils to follow; that regret gets you nowhere as it does not undo the harm done; that Dhiren deserved to be tasered and thrown down from a hilltop so he would never mentor anyone again.

  I realized Malvika had never liked me, not in her wildest dreams. And perhaps, I should never have written that poem.

  Things pretty much changed for me after that eventful day. I never joined Abhineet, Swayam, or Aditya in conversation again.The very next day,Aditya even talked to Rachel Ma’am, our class teacher, and gave her God-knowswhat reason to have his place changed from next to mine. This was a clear display of his dissociation from me, and perhaps an attempt to save his ‘friendship’ with Malvika. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t say anything about me to Rachel Ma’am when he talked to her, as I was watching her throughout their conversation. She didn’t look at me once. She simply gave him a new seat. She swapped his seat with a boy named Pratham, who became my new bench partner.

  An honest friend, Aditya had dropped me exactly at the same station from where he’d picked me up—I was the outcast again, thanks to a few people I thought I could trust and I thought were friends. Once again, the basketball court steps became my perch for lunchtime.

  I was no more just another student at St Joseph’s. I was special, for I had adjectives appended to my name: loser, idiot, despo... ! Not that anyone called me names like that to my face. Only that every time my eyes encountered someone else’s in the class, even passively, I could see it in their expressions. Everyone looked at me as though I was some bacteria-infested creature, except one—Malvika. She simply never looked at me again.

  Two years later, Malvika left St Joseph’s and moved somewhere else for further studies. But I stayed on. On the advice of my family and my own counsel, I took up the science stream and did my intermediates from St Joseph’s.

  I sure was not the strongest person in the world.Yes, I admit to shedding a few tears after I came home the day she left school. But I don’t think I cried because I regretted proposing to her. Neither was it because I wondered how different life would’ve been in the two years that passed before she left and how the two future years would have been, had she said a
‘yes’ then.

  No,it hurt me only when I wished she would’ve looked at me just once after that day, if she would’ve let me explain, once, if she could’ve let me say my sorries I could’ve made peace with myself.

  Peace they say comes from within, but I have no idea what that feels like. How can anyone know peace after four full years in school, talking to no one, absolutely no one, except for a bench mate and that, too, on matters related only to timetables and homework?

  I was a loner… a loser… that nobody cared a shit about! My silence was my punishment for daring to open my mouth and break the code of silence by expressing my feelings for Malvika. Four years of Coventry was a big price to pay for one moment of confession of calf-love.

  I won’t say any other girl in school was as, or more beautiful, than Malvika. That would only make me sound like I hated what I could not have.Yes, there were a few lovely girls, with their big eyes, like Daadu would say. But I find it difficult to answer one question: was there no girl who liked a hair about me? But I was so gravely injured that even if some girl would’ve thought about me for one second, I would not dare to ruin her by making her associate with a social reject that had been humiliated in front of the whole class that day. I couldn’t.I was consumed by cancerous complexes that went on developing in me over the years, killing every cell of confidence that I had in me once.

  So, my friendless life moved on. As I told you, I took up the science stream, struggled with theories, and wrote exams. I passed out of the twelfth standard with 63 per cent marks and I was satisfied. I was never a student who could cross the 90 per cent benchmark. After all 63 per cent wasn’t that bad either, a few in my class even landed in the 50s. In the months that followed, I attempted several engineering examinations, and I’m not ashamed of telling you, I couldn’t clear the big ones. I definitely didn’t get the IITs (as if I wanted to get in those!). But I cleared COMEDK. It could get you a seat in any of the many colleges in Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka that gave admission based on that score. It was slightly easier than most other engineering entrance examinations. So that’s how I got into Suraiya College of Engineering (SCE).

  Chapter 2.0

  I took up computer engineering because Dad said there was plenty of scope in that field.Those were the years when India was first putting out roots in that department. Take computer science as your stream, work well, score better and four years later, when you walked out, multinational companies would be waiting for you technocrats—I mean, if you were that good.

  SCE was a private institution, built and functional in an area of 8.5 acres. I’d found that out from the brochure of the college. SCE was nothing like any of the elite league colleges. No SCE student was ever placed with annual packages worth eighty lakh or something. But yes, the brochure did showcase a few names in the past placed in good corporations in the 20s and 30s league. For a COMEDK college that was not bad, not bad at all. If you compared SCE to other private institutions in the club, SCE was much better.The buildings were loftier, gardens greener and the pavements much cleaner.If you compared SCE with St Joseph’s,I guess the latter was only better in matters of infrastructure. Still, it was a matter of pride for my family and me because getting a seat in computer science in a college like that was a pretty good deal.

  It felt good to see students with all types of family backgrounds studying there. While some of those students were the offspring of big political leaders in Karnataka and elsewhere, a few of them hailed from families that had ultra-big business indulgences, which is what financed their lavish, shiny new SUVs and sedans, driven by their personal drivers, from which you could see them stepping down at the gate of the college every morning. It was a good place overall, with standard students composing the crowd.

  It took me only about a month to learn that I wasn’t in school anymore and that I was a collegian—the Bollywood dream of every young Indian heart.Although I wouldn’t say my life was as thrilling as those movies promised. Perhaps I didn’t want it to be. Perhaps I liked it that way: smooth, uneventful, without big adventures, or any messy affair to take care of. I wasn’t the kind of guy who loved partying. Discos and pubs were not my thing.

  I was kind of complacent with my hostel life in SCE. All I had to do was read my books with their dull-looking covers, eat (sometimes relish) the same rice, daal and watery curries in the college mess, hang out with friends and may be bum a cigarette or two with them once a month. And hear my friends and roommates saying how sexy they thought the girl at the canteen or the new teacher in some blah-blah department was, especially after they’d downed a bottle of Old Monk.

  Going back to Malvika, I was past her. I didn’t think about her sixty million times a day, nor did I feel much about that day anymore. To be frank, I was convinced that what I’d done was too stupid.Any girl would’ve reacted the way she did if a guy she barely knew came up to her with a preposterous four-line poem and proposed to her, thinking she loved him because she’d smiled at him occasionally. That was it.

  I didn’t feel strongly about anything anymore. I preferred to take it easy. I don’t know if it was the inferiority complex that’d seeped into me in my schooldays or if it was the fact that I didn’t have Dhiren, Aditya or his friends around me anymore to lure me into something. For the first three years of my life in SCE, I did not feel a thing for any female in the college.

  It’s a purely different thing that perhaps no girl felt anything for me either!

  It definitely wasn’t my studies,I think.I don’t know if it’s to be showcased, but I never flunked a single examination in college, ever. Not that I ever got very good marks either, or stayed in the top-ten list of the scorers. But for the student I was, it was satisfactory enough. I made friends of a kind, and all were, dictated by kismet, either close to my level of academic performance or a little below.

  Over time, I had a group that included females too, some being girlfriends of my guy friends, some friends to the girlfriends of my guy friends, while some belonged to it individually. There were sixteen of us altogether. That was a huge gang, I’d say.

  For whatever reason, there was no girl in the college, not even among the juniors, that attracted me sensually, nor had I come across a girl I thought sweet enough to fall in love with. I won’t say I never looked at a girl and thought she was looking good or something. I confess I had turned my head once or twice (okay, you can multiply that by sixty-six) if a girl wore something extra-revealing or flaunted a totally new hairstyle, but everyone does that. I guess, even dogs do (and I mean literally, dogs). Looking at a face and finding it soothing the eyes for a moment—it just happens, it’s a normal thing. Nobody can help it, and by nobody, I mean girls too, I think.

  I was somehow that simple, least-ambitious, very commonly found friend everyone has in their life.Everything was routine until that day.

  Chapter 3.0

  21 September 2002—I remember the day clearly. I was in the third year of engineering college.

  It was Anik’s birthday. He was a fellow in our group who’d invited all of us for a treat at the Forum mall, one of the grandest and most popular ones in Bangalore. We had a lavish lunch in a restaurant in the complex, followed by coffee at a parlour on the second floor.Thereafter, after bumming around in the mall, having visited the bookshop, a few electronic stores and checked out a few garment stores, we had flocked around the staircase that led to the fourth floor, just chatting. I was seated on the staircase, besides the railing, making sure no one using the stairs found me an obstruction.

  ‘What are you doing here alone?’ said one of the girls from the group, as she came and sat beside me. ‘Bored?’ she smiled and asked.

  ‘No, not bored exactly,’ I answered. ‘I’m just too tired to stand around and talk.’

  ‘Hi, I’m Geetika,’ she held out her hand to shake. Not that I didn’t know her name, it was just that never before had we had a one-to-one conversation.

  ‘I know,’ I smiled and shook her ha
nd. ‘I’m Suraj, Suraj Deoria.’

  ‘So, you’re Suraj, the geek, hmm?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say yes to that.’

  ‘You’re only being modest.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said humbly.

  The fact was that I didn’t make it to any hotshot college, but after I got into SCE, I’d actually become a little serious about things. No, not studies, not academics, but a bit about learning. I hadn’t taken computer science of my own choice. Hell, I would’ve taken chairs-and-tables engineering, if it’d been Dad’s choice and had it existed as a valid course in my college. I was that uncaring. But after I got into it, I actually started liking computers. In the initial year, I wasn’t much into my textbooks, but I liked to know about other things, things beyond and besides the textbooks, the course. The frequency of my attendance at Ganapati Cyber Café only grew by the weeks. I was their regular customer. After four or five months, they would even let me use their computer at fifteen, instead of twenty rupees per hour.

  My knowledge base grew. I started learning the basics of ‘C’ on my own, much before it was taught in college. So if somebody in the hostel had a problem with their system, I was available and approachable. It didn’t take long before news of my expertise spread and I became the famous ‘geek god’.

  ‘The food was good at Sultan Sahib, no?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I loved the paalak methi.’

  ‘I was just about to say that,’ she said and laughed. I laughed with her.

  ‘It was my first time at this restaurant actually.’

  ‘Me too,’ she said and we laughed together again.That was too much of a coincidence for a first meeting. ‘Where do you stay by the way?’ she asked.

  ‘In the boys’ hostel in the college, Room No. 1007, tenth floor,’ I said, ‘and you?’

  ‘Until January, I too stayed in the hostel, but only lately my parents advised me to live in a separate room.They said it was the third year and that they wanted me to focus on studies and pass engineering with good grades, because in their opinion the syllabus starts to get tougher from the fifth semester. I took the option.After all, Dad was willing to pay any amount for a good room. So right now, I’m staying in a PG.’