Pluton's Pyre

by Gyandeep Kaushal

  ‘I am all right. It’s something else that’s bothering me.’

  ‘Care to tell me?’

  ‘It’s actually related to studies,’ I took a deep breath as I heard her saying this. ‘Exams are approaching so I thought it would be a good idea to start early.You know how poor I’m at Java. I was trying to get a good insight into that swing controls chapter and I finished it. At the end of the chapter, there’s a ‘frequently asked in exams’ section, where these questions are listed. There were a few programmes in that list too. So I picked the first one. It’s about a pizza-centremanagement-software and I’m stuck at it.’

  ‘My god, you sound exhausted.’

  ‘That’s because I am.’ Really, she sounded wound up.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘I thought I should try it out myself first.’ I could imagine the cute puppy-face behind that voice.

  ‘Awwwww,’ I chose my funniest voice to pick on her. ‘Pooal baby haj talaied enuph?’ I baby-babbled to her.

  ‘Shut up,’ she grew vexed at being mocked. ‘You don’t understand how important this is. If I fail in even one subject, I don’t know how I’ll face Dad.’

  ‘Okay, you want me to help you?’

  ‘Umm, I was actually wondering that if you were not really occupied, it would be great if you could come over at once. I mean you can definitely say no, if it...’

  ‘No need to make excuses, silly,’ I vocalized ‘silly’ in an awkward attempt to mimic her. ‘I’ll help you out, don’t worry.’

  ‘Oh god, thank you, thank you.’ I could hear her slumping to her knees in relief.

  ‘Okay, what’s bothering you? Where exactly are you stuck?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? How come?’

  ‘I don’t know… there are errors all over. Every time I try to run it, it dumps a bucket of filthy red marks all over the screen. I really don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Umm, okay, I guess I can deal with it, but it seems impossible to extend my help without seeing the screen. Why don’t you come to college tomorrow? We’ll have something at the canteen and then crack it inside out. What say?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t want to waste my time attending college, before I’m over with this thing. I don’t have to worry about attendance. I have more than enough. I guess I can bunk a day or two.’

  ‘Okay, so how are we supposed to do it then?’

  ‘I was thinking we could do it at my home.’ I couldn’t believe my ears for a while, but I was intrigued by the very idea of it.

  ‘But what about your landlord and landlady? Won’t they object?’ I asked. I didn’t want to show my desperation upfront, so I projected doubts.

  ‘Actually, they’ve gone to visit their son’s family in Jaisalmer.They’ll be staying there for another week.’

  ‘Oh, I see. But are you sure about this, I mean, about all this, everything?’

  I was trying to act like a gentleman and pretend that I was not all that surprised or whatever.

  ‘Oh yes, I am,’ she said. ‘Going anywhere else would only be extra trouble and I can’t afford any. I mean, if you have a problem, then it’s okay, I won’t...’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll come,’ I butted in.

  ‘All right then, 6:30 tomorrow, I’ll be waiting.’

  ***

  After greasing Shobit’s hands with a couple more Marlboro packets and a chilled bottle of Budweiser, I got the permission to touch his drone.That brat knew there was nobody else I knew that had a bike. He’d suggested that I must consider the bike stolen, if he didn’t have his smokes and booze.The bribe actually cost me more than what I’d have paid for all the gasoline.

  ‘Hey, come on in,’ Geetika said, from behind the window. She was standing there when I came. She must have been watching and waiting for me. ‘You can haul your bike in, if you want to. I think it’s safer there.’

  I did as she said. I parked the bike on the main stand and closed the gates.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, with a broad smile as she opened the door. ‘I’m glad you came.’The moment I put forward my left leg across the threshold, she stopped me. ‘Wait... I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to wear our shoes inside.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a kind of thing my landlords have.’

  ‘So am I supposed to keep them here?’

  ‘You can place them there,’ she said pointing at a shoe-stand, which was kept near the main gate.

  I left my shoes and socks there and moved inside. It was quite a big house they had.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you around,’ she said.

  Unlike conventional houses that have a visitors’ room or a veranda, a hallway led to the dining hall, as soon as you entered the house.There were three decently furnished bedrooms, a kitchen, and two bathrooms.The entire house was an exemplary display of quintessential upholstery and exquisite furnishing.

  ‘This is too nice a home for an old couple,’ I said, as we moved up the stairs from the dining room.

  ‘Yeah, it’s too good actually. My only plight is I don’t live here. But Naani or Naanaji never mind having me down here occasionally for a movie or something. Occasionally, I even get invited when Naani cooks something special.’

  ‘Oh, so everybody loves you, I see,’ I said in passing. She smiled when I said that.

  ‘And this,’ she specifically accentuated, raising her arms up to her chins, hands far away from the body and palms up, ‘this is my room.This is where I stay.’

  I made my way in and was awestruck. Unlike my room, or rather ‘our’ room back at the hostel, that looked like a zoo, or perhaps a place where hounds mated round the clock, this was heaven I was looking at.

  She had a 12-by-9-foot room. She’d lined the floor with a velvety floral carpet. One of the walls was opulently decorated with a number of actual handmade random-size paintings, arranged close to each other to make it look like some sort of a collage.The other walls were not so occupied. Everything was so in place, books arranged methodically on the bookshelf, the quilt nicely folded and kept beside the pillow and the sheet without a single crease or wrinkle. Her study table had been perfectly kept.A clean white linen tablecloth, a flower vase in the corner, books stacked on the back end, pens standing with great panache in a classic wooden pen-stand.

  ‘This place is beautiful. I would’ve never cared so much for my own house, let alone a PG,’ I said in a congratulatory gesture.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she smiled shyly, brought her hands to her chest, and gently bowed down in formal greeting.

  ‘May I keep it here?’ I said, taking off my jacket.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Okay, shall we start?’

  ‘Yes,’ she reached for her laptop. But before she could open the lid and turn it on, she turned towards me and courteously asked, ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Yes, if it doesn’t bother you too much.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said and smiled. ‘You stay here, I’ll soon be back.’

  She went downstairs to the kitchen to fetch us a cup of coffee each, while I sat there, continuing to admire the serenity of the room.

  ‘Here,’ she said, offering me my cup.

  She sat beside me and placed her laptop across her knees. She turned it on and double-clicked on the Net beans IDE icon. She opened to her project and said, ‘See, this is all I’ve done. Now the problem is I am not able to...’

  ‘Wait,’ I interrupted. ‘Before we start, I have to ask you something.’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Were you trying to ignore me?’

  ‘No, why would you say that?’

  ‘Why was your phone switched off for the last two days?’

  ‘Oh, my god,’ she said and slapped her forehead in despair. ‘That was because I didn’t want to remain occupied in unproductive engagements. A few friends of mine often call me at night and they talk for hours. Besides
, I don’t like rejecting phone calls from home. So I thought keeping the phone switched off for a few days should keep things in place. Unlike you, Mr Suraj, this computer stuff is not as easy for me as swinging a racket.You do know how much I have to struggle to get through this, right? You may finish off the entire Java book in a week, but it takes me an entire ten days to finish only a chapter. It was all about studies you see.’

  ‘If it was that, why didn’t you call me up and tell me about this problem sooner? I mean you did call me at the end, right?’

  ‘That is exactly what I’m saying. I only called you at the end. I wanted to try it out myself first. I just didn’t want to bother you without even trying. Plus, I never knew you’d try to call me.’

  ‘Okay, if that is true, I’m buying it this time. But if something like this happens again, I would really appreciate it if you called me instead of leaving me to wonder why for days on end. And who doesn’t want free coffee?’ I winked before I continued, ‘Okay now, show it to me.’ I meant the project.

  I took over the machine from her and tried to look into the thing. ‘Beautiful design,’ I said, looking at the GUI screen she’d managed to develop. She’d managed to pour her feminine characteristics well into her programme. Every button, every text field was well placed.Then I clicked on ‘source’ and—voila!—half the screen was red.

  After sifting through the code a little, I said, ‘It’s not impossible, I believe.’

  ‘Okay?’

  ‘The procedure seems to be pretty all right, except that we need to import a few libraries at the beginning.’

  ‘Where?’ Her furrowed brows indicated that she was confused and frustrated as I described the technical problems.

  ‘Here,’ I said and scrolled up in the screen and typed the code to import three lacking libraries. ‘And I can see a number of instances, where you haven’t closed the brackets properly and there are data type mismatch errors as well.’

  ‘Okay?’ the curvature of her eyebrows deepened further. I wanted to laugh on the inside at how childlike she was, when it came to confronting this stuff.

  ‘Also, the way you’ve tried to use class inheritance looks improper. The way you’ve done it, your child class cannot use the parent class variable,’ I added further. ‘And there are a few...’

  ‘Okay, wait—wait—wait,’ she said quickly before I could continue. ‘It’s starting to kill me. Can we please do it one at a time?’

  ‘Okay,’ I readily agreed. ‘So, let’s start with the improper data types first.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said and took a deep breath, ‘... sounds doable’.

  ‘Okay then, change that integer into a double. It seems integer types are creating the trouble because you’ve later introduced decimals in the billing area.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked.

  ‘There,’ I indicated.

  ‘Where... here?’ she was confused again.

  ‘No... not there, down below, in the next line.’

  ‘Okay... this one? Into double?’

  ‘Yeah... and that one too. There still are a few more. Change that... that... and that one, too,’ I said, indicating a few more errors.

  She was so out of her depth that I had to actually use my fingers and hers to pinpoint the errors on the screen.

  ‘God, this is so maddening.’

  ‘Don’t worry; all you need to do is to study data types in a little more detail. Need to dust the concept up a little, that’s all. It’s all about decimals. Now, change the variables of that parent class to public.’

  ‘Where... which one?’

  ‘It seems you’re not able to follow. Let me help you,’ I said and plucked the index finger of her right hand and pressed the down arrow key to reach the desired portion of her code to make the necessary corrections at the required place. ‘Now let’s handle the brackets at last. Here comes the first one,’ I said and held her finger to press the up-arrow key to locate a region in the code, which had a bracket lacking. I made the correction in a similar fashion. ‘And here’s the second one done.’

  I was about to lead us to a third correction before she twitched her finger back. ‘Sooooraj,’ she whined like a baby, ‘I’m not a little child! You do it, I’m looking. I’ll learn this way,’ she said and kept looking at the screen.

  A minute later, I corrected all the errors and cleansed the code. She said she hadn’t studied the data type chapter yet, though it actually came earlier in the book than swings.

  ‘You’ve got to teach me,’ she said. ‘It’s so difficult to understand this chapter.’‘Okay, I’ll try to help you out, if you wish.When do you want me to do it?’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I asked a little surprised. A surge of happiness swept through my body but in tandem I was reminded that after bribing Shobit twice, I was almost broke for a third time.

  ‘Yeah, but are you free tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m free always... like a nomad,’ I joked.

  ‘Okay, tomorrow should be fine then. I’m free too and it’s a Sunday anyway. So, I guess we’ll be able to make something fruitful of it.’

  ‘As you say.’

  ‘And just one more thing,’ she said.

  ‘What,’ I asked.

  ‘When you come tomorrow, do knock at the door thrice.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘That way I’ll know it’s you, so I won’t have to shout and ask who it is at the door.’

  ‘Agreed, madam,’ I nodded chivalrously.

  Now that her project was purged of all errors, I turned her system off with her approval. She offered me some more coffee but I was getting late and had to return Shobhit his bike before 9 pm so I refused. So I picked up my jacket before she walked me downstairs. I put on my shoes and dragged the bike out of the compound. She saw me off until the gate and we said our goodbyes.

  After I parked the bike in the lot and made it to my room, the only thing I could think of was ‘tomorrow’.

  ***

  How often does a girl call you one night and want you to drop by the next evening, when there’s nobody else at her house? How often does she let you know she wants you to come again tomorrow because she wants you to give her private semi-tuitions, when there are, like, ten dozen much more capable teachers around?

  How often does a girl choose to show you a house she barely lives in? And what does it mean when she offers you coffee twice on the same visit?

  I could see now what fate wanted for me. She was the one! After eight years, my plain life was seeing undulations again, but only in a good way. Life may be plain and awesome and eventless, but when you finally come to know the girl you like has a thing for you as well, life gives you a real reason to live for. It’s refreshing how you come to know a little more about you every time she comes across. She brings beauty, confidence and a hope for you. I knew she was the one.And I knew she loved me too, yes.

  ***

  I left for her house at nearly the same time the next day. Arriving at the front door, I remembered to knock three times.

  ‘Hi,’ she greeted me as she opened the door. ‘Come in,’ she said.

  I’d never seen her like this before. She was dressed in a purple broomstick skirt that sheathed her down to the ankles. The effect of the crinkled flowing skirt was accentuated by a skin-tight burgundy top, with hugging sleeves that ended an inch below her elbows.A few bangles graced her wrists, and her slender neck looked even more so with a delicate gold chain encircling it. Her long open hair kissed her waist. I could breathe in her fresh fragrance, as if she had just stepped out of the shower.

  ‘Sit down, I’ll just be with you,’ she said, as she led me to her room. She came back a minute later with a glass of water.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said and took the glass from her.

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  Thank you,’ she blushed. Wasn’t she sweet like a cheeku?

  ‘I hope this will be of some help to you,’
I said, as I produced some notes I’d compiled the previous day for her. I’d prepared them for a swift last-minute revision.

  ‘Thanks. I’ll return them once I have them photocopied.’

  ‘No, you keep it. I have another copy with me.This one is for you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s so kind of you,’ she said. She asked me to sit on the bed and make myself comfortable. I complied. We began with the textbook first. I told her how we were going to do it. First, we’d cover up the main text and would later finish off with my notes. I told her we’d do it in steps. She was desperate, like a teenager, who wants to learn to play the guitar and asks the tutor to teach him how to master the rhythm first, without even knowing the seven notes well. Making her understand that she needed to learn the basics first was a pretty hard nut to crack.

  Only with her approval, we began. It didn’t take me too long to understand that she had good grasping abilities, only that she didn’t know how to really study the stuff. In around half an hour, she was confident with what she’d just studied. We took a two-minute break before we moved ahead with the chapters that followed.

  An hour later, when we were midway through the subject, she broke the continuity. ‘I’m hungry. Are you hungry too?’ she asked.

  ‘Well,’ I couldn’t answer immediately.

  ‘Hey, don’t worry, it won’t take too long. I’ll be back before you blink,’ she said and left for the kitchen.

  She kept her word and was back in a minute. Actually, she’d ordered some food from a nearby restaurant, even before my arrival. She’d merely warmed up everything. There was a kadahi of shaahi paneer and some butter naans. We even had soft drinks.

  We soon finished the food. She said she was a bit tired and wasn’t willing to study anymore.

  But I insisted. ‘If we move on like this, Geetika, we won’t be able to finish the syllabus in even a month.There’s so much to study. Let’s get over with this chapter at least,’ I said. First, she made faces, but then moved up the bed and, in want of options, complied with me.

  Even when the books seemed to separate us,yet connect us, a part of me was busy feeling good and thinking things.

  Wasn’t it special how she’d ordered the food before my coming? I found that pretty sweet. It was as though she had it planned, all of it.The devotion with which she’d served me was no less than that of a wife.