by Durjoy Datta
I paused and stuttered. It nearly sounded spontaneous!
‘How sweet, Deb! I love you too. You are not as bad as my friends tell me. You are so sweet,’ she said and ran her hand over my cheeks. A little lower, a little lower, just a little lower, damn it!
We talked about unnecessary things for what seemed like an eon. To be frank, it wasn’t entirely boring; she was much more interesting than the average girl. It was just that I wasn’t looking for interesting conversation—that’s what married people do. I was just an average bloke praying to get lucky with his girlfriend. Sex was too far-fetched—Obviously!—but I could have done with a little kissing and little groping. Not too much to ask for, I suppose. Of course, I loved her too. True, untainted love.
Somewhere between the interesting conversations, I dropped off with my head resting on her shoulder. It had been a long and expensive day. I slept, wondering if I would feel awake enough the next morning to attend the mechanics of solids class. This date wasn’t worth missing it.
Suddenly, I felt something against my cheek, something nice and delightfully wet. Oh, man! She was kissing me. For real! I tried hard to stay still, to see what she would do. I opened one eye and saw a bit of my cheek disappearing inside her mouth and being slathered all over by her tongue. I woke up wondering what I had missed.
‘Deb, you look cuter when you are sleeping.’
‘I am going right back to sleep, don’t you dare stop.’
She started all the nice stuff, crossed one of her legs over mine and sat on my lap until her neck was within licking distance. And then she let go. She kissed me as if it was her last kiss, grabbed my hands and placed them over her breasts as she moaned ecstatically, and ran her hands all over my chest and even lower. It had started to feel real good; I slipped my hand inside her T-shirt, and trailed my fingers up her back to whatever she was wearing inside. I was just about to unhook the joys of being a man, when she stopped me.
‘Nuh-huh … not that quick, boy,’ she said as she pulled my hands out.
‘Why not?’ I asked, as I pulled my hand out and placed it beneath her skirt and, convinced that she would not notice, moved it up slowly. I aimed for the stars. Clothes can be a pain. Why the hell couldn’t we just be dressed like prehistoric cave men with neither clothes nor any source of entertainment other than … you know …?
‘No, not that fast, Deb. We will save the rest for later. It’s not fun doing everything at once.’
‘But—’ I said dejectedly. I had a major physiological problem in my pants but she was no longer interested.
‘I don’t feel like doing anything else right now,’ she said as she grabbed my hand and pulled it out from its silken abode.
Now what was I to make of it? I had done reasonably well, to think of it. It was officially our first night-out and the fifth date and to have managed all that I had until then was commendable. It came at a price, but who cared? I was no longer angry. I loved her.
I took heart from the fact that she had said that we would not do everything at once. That probably meant we would do it but not at once.
It was getting easier to love her. She left me with some big mosquito bites on my neck. If mosquitoes ever grew up to the size of dogs, that is. The kisses were great, so I decided I would continue loving her. And I did. After all, it is easier to love a busy, smart girl—who’s a good kisser—rather than loving somebody you love. Smriti was turning out to be amazing in all the visual and tangible assets and I loved it.
As I drove home, I tried to think of an explanation for those love bites. Mom would definitely ask about those marks if she saw them. I tried my sister’s concealers and they helped a bit. I roamed around in ancient turtlenecks for the next few days.
I was shallow and I knew that. I loved being so and I knew many guys who would have loved to swap places with me.
Chapter 2
‘How much did you score?’ she asked. The fifth semester results were out. This was January 2007.
‘Fifty-two per cent,’ I replied.
‘That’s not bad,’ Smriti said.
‘It’s not bad? My class rank is eighty on hundred. It’s not bad, it’s terrible. I am done. I’m so screwed this time,’ I said.
‘You didn’t study, so you couldn’t have done any better,’ she argued.
‘Thanks for the support. I could have done without that,’ I said.
It’s strange how people can’t lie when they have to. I knew I hadn’t studied, but I could have done without being reminded of that again. But she had always been like this—straightforward and ruthlessly undiplomatic. It was fun when we had just started going out and she would pamper the man in me, saying things like I was the best guy she had ever kissed (which is probably the same thing guys she’d dated before me would have heard), but of late she had started saying pretty irritating stuff. Like, ‘My friend Virangana … her boyfriend is so brilliant that he has got a seven-figure job.’ Or, ‘You are not great-looking but yes, I still love you very much.’
Had I said anything remotely close to what she did, I would have been dead meat. And yes, it had been two months, and things were not the same any more. Relationships deteriorate; mine just did a little faster. Every relationship has an expiry date.
We did a lot of things together but much of it fell short of my expectations. She wasn’t as dream-like as I had imagined her to be. She had started acting like a little kid in a big city with no one else but me. We did have numerous night-outs, thanks to Lady Hardinge Medical College’s non-existent hostel rules. However, the charm had fizzled and instead my classes became too important to miss. I hated her prolonged kisses that exhausted her beyond twenty orgasms. Yes, we had stamina problems. From her side.
‘Are we meeting tonight?’ she asked.
‘Are we? Yes, why not? Let us celebrate; I just blew up my semester exams. I may not get a job after college. That’s definitely something to celebrate,’ I replied, sarcasm dripping off every word I uttered.
‘Deb, we hardly talk for twenty minutes in a day … can’t we meet, at least?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Smriti. We talk a hell of a lot more than that. And what about the messages I send? The missed calls? We are on the phone the whole day, damn it,’ I shouted.
‘No, we never are. You never reply to my messages. You have time to talk to Vernita. You have time to reply to my friends’ messages. You never call; I do. You have time for everything in the world, but not for me,’ she said. Her voice shook. Her tear glands were on their mark.
‘Smriti, I am really pissed off right now and don’t need your nonsense. You will never understand this. My college marks are important, damn it. I am close to being screwed and all you think about is yourself, your dates and your calls and the goddamned messages. I can’t believe you would be so selfish. I am hanging up and please don’t call back unless I call you,’ I said agitatedly and disconnected the call. It is better to shift blame than try to fight it. It also meant a licence not to take her calls for the next few hours.
As expected, my phone kept buzzing with her texts for the next half hour and she apologized for things she wasn’t responsible for. Most of the messages didn’t make any sense, but they were long and that is what generally matters. Smriti loved long, never-ending texts and expected them to have the same effect on me. I hardly read those messages.
I knew I was being harsh on Smriti. But something had to be done. I couldn’t just walk out of her life, leave her crying and be spat on again. If things were breaking down, she had to take the blame for it too. She had to be bad in some way. The break-up had to result from mutual frustration and incompatibility.
It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t find anything interesting in her after all these months. It was a congenital disease. I couldn’t help it. For heaven’s sake, nothing was changing for the better, it was just becoming worse! I had to talk to her for four hours a day and give her the minutest details of everything I had done in the course of the day. It had s
tarted to get on my nerves. She had shut out all her friends and begun devoting every minute to me! Worse, she wanted me to do the same.
She wasn’t even sexy any more. Those glistening, marble-white legs now seemed to have stretch marks marring them and her petite breasts seemed to have retreated into her body. I noticed all that. Too bad if nobody else did. And to top it all, she was wrecking my college performance too. The relationship was killing me.
Going on like this was against the very laws of nature. Only the fittest and the sexiest survive (don’t ask how I did). She was neither. I couldn’t have possibly gone against the laws of Darwin. I’m not the church. I’m not even Christian.
‘Hey, what’s up? How was the result?’ said a voice from behind me.
It was Shrey, his imposing six-foot frame dressed in a Manchester United tee (he liked the colour, not the team), faded blue jeans that were soiled to brown now and chappals, not the jazzy ones but the ones meant to be worn strictly within the confines of one’s home. Shrey, with his tanned complexion, as he put it, and curly, bushy hair, which according to him had been perennially in vogue since the seventies, was immensely cool. He had gone to the hostel to catch a nap between classes but had not returned for any.
Shrey was the kind of guy who gets on your nerves the first few times you meet because of his theories about life, IQ, education, poverty, progress, engineering, even girl psychology! They are all bullshit. Shrey had stopped caring about his semester marks long ago. To be precise, it was the day we took our first semester exams. The reason? He had already studied enough.
That was sad, as he had several high-powered processors embedded inside that noodle-hair-covered head. The big problem with him? He wanted to be everywhere and be everything. To make things worse, he didn’t think there was a scintilla of a chance of that not happening.
‘Average, I guess,’ I said.
‘I flunked two examinations. I am yet to check but someone told me that I did,’ he said without a touch of sadness or regret. I think he even smiled. I so envied him. I would have shat in my pants had I scored like him.
‘Marks are material things. They are not something that’s going to affect our lives, man. We are meant for bigger things. Are you going somewhere tonight?’ he asked. Though a day scholar, he was often mistaken for a hosteller for he spent most of his time flitting from the JCB (Jagdish Chandra Bose) hostel to the BMH (Barah Mihir Hostel) to others, in search of a better bed to crash on or a better computer to crash into. He had flunked two exams and was short on attendance in the current semester, but that would change nothing in his schedule. He would still go out that night.
Not only did he manage to smile in the face of adversity, he had the balls to poke at it with alarming frequency and audacity.
‘I’m a little busy tonight,’ I said.
‘Smriti?’
‘I guess. Nothing is sure. I’ll surely come if it doesn’t work out.’
‘C’mon! Now’s the time, man! The girls are waiting. You’re still on with Smriti? That’s great going, man. Is there somebody else, too?’
‘It’s still just her.’
‘Okay. We’ll go out some other time then. I have to rush now. Vandana is waiting. We’re going to the place I told you about with those great kebabs, man! I bet they are the best in Delhi.’
Vandana was his girlfriend of three years whom he loved dearly. But that certainly did not stop him from exploring newer, fresher vistas. He had dated a few girls on the side, too, while he was in a serious relationship with Vandana. It was a simple equation for him—keep one constant, and vary the others. Girls were his second love. His first love had always been engineering science, particularly big laboratories and Wikipedia!
‘I have been there once, Shrey. It’s nothing great,’ I said and almost immediately wanted to take back my words.
‘Not great? Are you nuts? The softness, the melt-in-the-mouth texture … oh man! It is awesome, dude. You have to develop a taste for mutton kebabs and that takes time.’
It had been barely three months since Shrey had gone non-vegetarian, but he thought I, the hard-core non-vegetarian Bengali … I needed to develop a taste for mutton?
‘By the way, Vernita was looking for you,’ he said and left for the place he thought had the best kebabs. Poor Vandana, she would have to agree with him too.
Vernita completed the core trio. All three of us were nerdy enough to drag ourselves to a decent engineering college but non-nerdy enough (by choice or by nature) to be suffocated by it. However, it helped that the Delhi College of Engineering wasn’t loaded in favour of people who studied until their eyeballs popped out or in. All three of us perennially envied the lives of students in non-professional colleges. The grass is always greener, prettier and hotter on the other side of the fence.
The other side of the fence was Delhi University’s North Campus—the place with the highest number of pretty faces per square mile.
Vernita was my only female friend left who didn’t mind my presence. Usually, I either ended up dating or disgustingly hitting on my female friends with disastrous resuslts. Vernita and I had come close to doing it once but I realized it was just me! She never had those intentions. It’s the same story over and over again. Damn!
Vernita was really short and good-looking. She had a long face with sharp, pointed features accentuated by her creamy white complexion. However, what stood out was her loud and overtly sexy sense of style. She was like those seductresses in animated movies who wore black dresses with really long slits.
Let’s just say that nature had been very kind to her. The voluptuous Indian curves and gorgeous features that she was endowed with were the reasons why we became friends in the first place. Shrey, for the first few days in college, had stalked her like a maniac. She was too hot to be ignored. Eventually, both of us had stammered and stuttered our way into her life, though she made it clear that neither of us had any chance with her and that she thought we were jerks.
She had a history of boyfriends and a couple of pregnancy scares in the past. I tried to hit on her during first year but she was too smart for my unpolished charms and unflattering looks. It is always easy being the second or the third boyfriend. Making the girl shed her inhibitions the very first time is such a pain! The It’s-okay-everybody-does-it-you’re-not-a-slut routine takes a lot of effort and patience.
Nevertheless, I found her endlessly charming. Vernita had perfected the art of verbal abuse, which I still hadn’t. Since I didn’t drink, I just had to learn to abuse. Failing at both meant that you were socially ill-equipped.
‘Hey, going out somewhere, dick?’ she asked.
She wore a white Esprit T-shirt that clung to her best assets. A slight rip and the tee would have split all the way down the middle. Her skinny Levi’s showed off an ass a million girls would kill for. She hadn’t missed going to the gym a single day in the last three years and it showed—her body-fat percentage was abysmally low. I was lucky to see her every day and unlucky to have seen her only with her clothes on. A sight like her was a rare thing in an engineering college such as ours.
‘No plans for the day,’ I said.
‘Why so?’
‘My attendance is a little short, so I’ll attend classes. I am leaving for Mishra’s class. Coming?’
‘Obviously. You are not the only one with short attendance here.’
Strangely enough, every year the most worthless kids found their way into the mechanical department, and were tortured endlessly for even the slightest mistake, which they made with gay abandon. We attended all our classes while the students of other hallowed branches—IT, computers and the like—wasted away their time at the nearby coffee shops or on the college lawns. But at the end of four years, they were the ones who lapped up all the high-paying jobs.
It was gut wrenching to see guys who hadn’t risked being incinerated in an induction furnace or having a limb sawed off on a lathe machine end up having better lives. All they did day in, day
out was sit in front of the computer and write lines of code. No lathes, no welding shops, nothing.
No lecturers, even.
On the other hand, we were blessed with the most frustrated and sadistic lot of teachers, none of whom had completed their PhDs in less than a decade. They were the dumbest of the lot. Nevertheless, given their limited intelligence and knowledge, their urge to teach was exemplary. It takes a brave man to pretend he is wise when he is not. The combination of these teachers, the lack of girls (Vernita was the only one in our class!), and an uncertain future made the students of mechanical engineering the most frustrated in the entire college. The heaviest drinkers, smokers and dopers of the lot! And when some of us, defeated by life, go on to become professors, the vicious cycle goes on!
The class went as usual. The frontbenchers jotted everything down, the students in the middle rows pretended to write what the professor said and the backbenchers slept, talked, or texted on their phones.
‘Any plans with Smriti tonight?’ Vernita asked.
‘Not quite. Things have been a little rocky. It’s not going too well. We’re having some problems.’
‘Don’t give me that crap.’
‘Seriously.’
‘I know you better than that, shit face. You are playing, aren’t you? It’s your bullshit Let’s break up game again.’
Smriti and Vernita were one-time school buddies but at some point somebody bitched about somebody to somebody, and everybody came to know about it and things fell apart. I never went into the details because I have never completely understood what ticks off women. Both of them tried to make me understand but I never got it. Even the most intelligent men find it hard to understand why girls fight. And I was just a dumb guy.
‘No, believe me, I am not. I really want to be with her but things are not going well.’
