Of Course I Love You!: Till I find someone better…

by Durjoy Datta

  However, what fascinated me more was Tanmay’s sister. Going by Tanmay’s looks and his mom—who, when we had met her on her few visits to Tanmay, looked like his older sister—Avantika must be a definite possessor of some great genes.

  ‘Now that Deb is a little preoccupied with some small issues, I thought I would ask something on his behalf,’ Yogi said, as he settled before the front tyre and took a long drag. ‘Is she single?’

  The expected giggles had now started to rankle. I mentally thanked Yogi for doing the needful.

  ‘Yes, kind of. She has a boyfriend she has been trying to get rid of for quite some time now. From the moment she said yes, actually, but it’s not working out.’

  ‘So, Deb? Are you interested? Oh, maybe you won’t take the chance. Now that we know your little secret!’ Vernita said, mocking me. She climbed up the bonnet and deposited her body into Tanmay’s arms.

  ‘Not interested,’ I said, refraining from strangling her.

  ‘Good for you. She has a penchant for beer-swigging, fast-driving, rich assholes, anyway. The kind of guys you wouldn’t like to face unless you have a death wish,’ Vernita said.

  ‘You have a girlfriend, too, right Deb? Smriti? That cute medical student?’ Tanmay asked.

  ‘We are kind of breaking up,’ I said as I sat beside Shrey on the road. Such answers were always a reflex action for me. I was always either single or in the process of being so.

  There we were, a bunch of aimless kids in the middle of a deserted road, half of us knocked out either outside or inside the car. We were in a premier college that guaranteed a placement, and we cared about nothing else. We had four years at an engineering college to kill. And we were doing it with a vengeance, with a smile and a bottle of rum on our lips.

  Chapter 4

  I saw them, my schoolmates, looking for me in my college armed with rulers and stretched, wet, twisted handkerchiefs, smoking like chimneys, one arm around their girlfriends, who found something immensely funny in their boys chasing down a fat, crying Debashish Roy. I stumbled on a step and fell headlong. I looked up at them, and they looked down at me—mocking, laughing at what lay between them.

  I woke up, it was 6 p.m. No way! Machine design, tomorrow. I rushed to the bookshop.

  Life at DCE had been quite the same for the last three years. We were supposed be studying in a college that oscillated between the seventh and fifteenth rank when it came to countrywide engineering-college rankings, but academics were a joke in our college.

  The DCE campus was a huge one, definitely not as big as an Indian Institute of Technology or the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, but big enough. Located on the outskirts of Delhi and Haryana, the hostel students had the opportunity of counting real cows when going to sleep. However, being close to the Haryana border meant guys could get high like airplanes every night on cheap liquor and weed.

  Beyond all the alcohol and the desperation to get laid, it was a college of Indian Institute of Technology rejects, who were just short of genius material when they entered the college. But four years of mind-numbing college had dulled their brains.

  ‘Hi! Which book do we have to study from, Pandey or Lahiri?’ I asked Vernita when I called her from the bookshop. I hoped she would say Pandey as I was in no mood to shell out an extra three hundred bucks for a book that would grace my table for less than eight hours. It was March and my sixth semester’s mid-term exams had started.

  ‘Lahiri is better. All the ghissus are doing it from that book.’

  ‘But the other one is thinner and cheaper.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s why the rest of the class is preparing from it.’

  ‘Which book do you have?’

  ‘Both. But I won’t prepare from the heavy one, except for a few important topics,’ she said

  Of course, she had both the books. The seniors were extra generous when it came to Vernita. She had never a bought a book. Ever. Her investment in gorgeous bras always paid off in seniors fighting over who would give her their books first.

  And Shrey had his friends in IIT, who gave him their books, so I was the only one buying them hours before the exam.

  ‘Okay, I am buying Lahiri. Text me the tentative course,’ I said, as I disconnected the call.

  There were predominantly three kinds of people in my class. The first kind, the ghissus, attended all the classes, regardless of how dumb the professor was. Their exam preparations began a month before. They created the huge tentative course. The next group consisted of the ones who attended classes but never studied. These brainlessly copied what was written on the board just to remain in the good books of the professors! They would generally start studying around ten days before the exams. These guys created the final course. They would slash and cut out the useless or tough stuff from the course that was either too hard or had not reared its head in the question papers of the last five years.

  You can do without professors. You can do without classes. But life is tough without the previous years’ papers.

  The final course was finalized the night before the exams and this is what the last group waited for. We belonged to the last group. Though the first group people invariably topped, that did not mean the people from the other groups couldn’t do so. It always boiled down to the last day. However, it was more likely that someone who had been studying for the last month or ten days would put in more effort than the non-serious ones who bought their books the day before. It was all about the person who ran the last mile faster.

  ‘How much have you done?’ I asked Shrey on a conference call.

  ‘I haven’t started yet. I was out for a football match, came and slept off.’

  ‘Shrey, are you crazy? Eleven chapters. And its machine design, not some bloody elective,’ Vernita barked, as expected. Girls generally panic more in exam-time situations. How often had we seen Vernita begging for an increase in marks even for copying the questions down! She could afford to do that. She was hot and if I were a professor, I would have loved to have Vernita down on her knees, begging.

  ‘How much have you done?’ Shrey asked, as if it mattered to him.

  ‘Three chapters. I’ll sleep for a little now. Wake up at four and do the rest. Besides, the exam is at two in the afternoon. You, Vernita?’

  ‘You have done three? I am still stuck on the second chapter. Okay, bye.’

  The conference call ended, in the usual abrupt manner. Shrey showed no signs of concern about whatever had just happened. He would probably play FIFA on his PlayStation for a while. I was happy that I had finished more chapters than Vernita and she, as usual, was panicking. I knew Vernita would crack any question if it came from the portion she had studied. She was way more intelligent than me. I just memorized whatever I couldn’t understand and not many things got a coveted place in my minuscule brain.

  Shrey did neither. He waited until two hours before the exam and asked people to say out loud whatever they had studied and that’s where his preparations ended. It was nothing short of a miracle that he managed to pass in a few subjects.

  ‘Get up, you stinking asshole. It’s eight in the morning.’

  Vernita had been saying the same thing for the last minute or so and all I was doing was breathing heavily on her. This time, I had to react. And fast. I quickly did my mental calculation and checked if I could still pass with no major glitches if I slept for another half an hour. I couldn’t.

  ‘Hmmm … I am up.’ I wasn’t. ‘How much have you done?’ I croaked.

  ‘I am totally screwed. Just done five chapters. I feel like crashing right now. Wake me in ten minutes. I am leaving the last three chapters. Are you doing them?’ she asked.

  ‘Obviously, I am.’

  ‘And keep calling up Shrey, too. He has just done one chapter and is sleeping. Bye.’

  Being a day scholar is a tough job. You have nobody to shake you until you wake up, nobody to give you an idea about things to study and nobody to copy farras from. Yo
u miss out on exam-time bonding and you miss out on great friendships. But then you have a life outside the four walls of the college and crappy hostel food ceases to be your main concern. I had a life outside college. I had been too busy for most of the could-be-friends in college.

  Coming back to exams, Vernita always relied on quality and I on quantity. I knew my pea-sized brain wouldn’t stand me in good stead if the questions were a little twisted. It happened again as it did on every single exam day: Vernita snoozed through her alarms and I skimmed through the course in a tearing hurry.

  Though, I did dutifully take time out to rebuke Smriti for her irresponsible behaviour—calling me up only twice to wake me up when Vernita, who was just a friend, had called up some fifteen times. Finally, Smriti was giving me valid reasons to be pissed with her and doubt her commitment to our relationship.

  However, there was no trace whatsoever of Shrey, till he finally called to say he had gone for a jog and had left his cell phone at home. It was ten, he had still done just one chapter, which according to him was disconnected from real life machine problems, and hence he left it midway. Same old story.

  I ended up finishing the course half an hour before time, sulking about the slipshod way I had done the course. Same old story.

  On the other hand, Vernita’s preparations ended as they always did, with a few chapters left out, fifteen minutes into exam time. She was always the last person to move into the exam hall. Once in, she became this goddess of concentration, never looking up for one moment.

  Exactly one and half hours into the exam, the inevitable churning started in the restless bowels of the third category of students. That’s when these people were most inclined to use the washroom. Going by the time they took to relieve themselves, it seemed as if after all these years they had finally discovered that they had a rectum.

  Vernita and I used to do that, too—what was called Toiletization of Notes—but we restricted it to desperate situations. For Shrey, it was a way of life.

  ‘You did this question? I did this and seems like nobody else did. I wonder if I did this right,’ Vernita said.

  ‘No, I did not,’ I said.

  This was the time which I never looked forward to—the after-exam time. Vernita was used to cracking the toughest questions in the exam and flaunted the fact all day long or until the time you acknowledged her genius. I doubt whether I had ever scored outside the theory questions in the four years of college. All I did in the exams was look for the Write-short-notes-on questions, the why and how questions and try to fill up pages answering them.

  Typically, Shrey did neither. He just created a new answer, a new theory for the age-old concepts based on some experience of his at the National Physical Laboratory. He spent the most part of his time after the exam engrossed in explaining his theories to the dumbest person of the class or a hapless junior or sometimes even the canteen boy. He had a life. Without marks, though.

  But his businesspeople parents hardly cared. Neither did he.

  Not that my parents were too interested in how I did in my exams. They had bigger troubles. My sister wanted to get married to someone from a different community. My marks could wait. So could the long due appreciation for my hard-earned sixty-nine per cent.

  ‘Hurry up! Orra kintu esshe jaabe je kono shomoy (They will be here any moment),’ Dad shouted as he started stacking at least twenty serving dishes with different food items neatly.

  Oh, didn’t I tell you? Yes, I am a Bengali. We talk a lot, we shout a lot, we argue a lot and we are a perennially hyper-vocal community.

  ‘They have just left. They will still take two hours to get here,’ my sister said irritably.

  But dads know it all and dads are always right. My dad, too, like all other dads in the universe and beyond, was just too paranoid about being on time. It was my elder sister’s aashirwaad. That’s the Bengali equivalent of the Punjabi roka. Unlike the Punjabis, it’s a homebound affair. In Delhi, it was treated as yet another opportunity to flaunt their immensely hard-earned money.

  Anyway, it was hard for me to imagine Sonali, my sister, getting married. I mean, she still hadn’t got out of talking to her imaginary friend and shouting at me in loud guttural Hindi, riling Mom and Dad out of their wits in the process. But I guess those things were not meant to stop, ever.

  Also, my sister was twenty-four. That wasn’t late for marriage and definitely not late by Bengali standards, but delaying it would mean risking suitable Bengali grooms. Bengali men have these strange tendencies to either fall in love and get married or not get married at all.

  Bengalis, as a rule, fall in love way too often. My sister had as well and that too with a Haryanvi Jat, who was by no standards the dream groom my parents had pictured. Not only did his Jat image not go down well with my dad’s academic outlook and my mom’s kohl-lined eyes and the big, forehead-covering bindi she was partial to, he earned less than my sister—a cardinal sin. Moreover, my other elder sister, Moushmi, had found a husband that every girl in this country dreams of—an Indian-Institute-of-Management-Ahmedabad graduate. They were settled in London and spent their free time sailing in Alaska.

  ‘Advertising?’ Dad exclaimed when Sonali put forward the proposal for the first time.

  ‘Why not engineering? Who on earth does advertising?’ My exasperated mom said, as if my sister had just decided to marry a leper. Maybe that would have been better.

  ‘Mom, I do. And so did didi!’

  ‘Yes, you do. But you are a girl. And I wasn’t keen on you doing it either. But Moushmi found someone who doesn’t! Her husband is from an IIM. What will people say if you get married to a boy in advertising? Why would a sane person ever do advertising? What kind of parents would allow that?’

  For my parents, the world was run by four kinds of people—engineers, doctors, lecturers and, lately, MBAs. All other professions ranging from lawyers to IAS officers were for stupid people, who either couldn’t clear entrance examinations or had the perseverance to stick around for ages till they made it to the civil services list.

  ‘Why not?’ my sister shot back.

  ‘How can you even think of marrying someone who earns less than you? There is no money in advertising and neither is it a respectable field to work in. All kinds of strange things go on there.’

  ‘Dad, I work there, and I know better.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You were just fooled by this Jat. I am sure he is after our property. You haven’t told him about our houses in Vasant Kunj and Gurgaon, have you? I am sure you have.’

  ‘No, Mom, he is richer than our entire extended family combined. He owns a lot of property and farmlands in Gurgaon and money,’ I tried to help. ‘Ohh! I get it. You are after his money!’ I regretted it as soon as I had said this. It would have been a great joke; I had just chosen the wrong time to say it. They stared at me, as if I had disrespected Rabindranath Tagore or Sourav Ganguly. Actually, that would have been probably much worse.

  ‘So, are you trying to say we will let you marry a good-for-nothing man just because his father is rich? What does his dad do?’

  ‘He worked with the customs department and now he has his own business in import-export,’ she said.

  Silly, I thought, knowing what my parents thought about customs and import-export. Both these professions topped my parents’ list of the most hated professions, giving stiff competition to pot-bellied property dealers and auto spare parts suppliers. I just knew it was over for her and the guy. Rich people cannot be just rich. They have to be corrupt too.

  ‘Oh, so now you want to marry the good-for-nothing son of a smuggler who is in advertising?’ my mom said and glanced at Dad to take it from there.

  ‘Why would anyone quit a government job and start a business? And where did he get all that money to start his smuggling business? He is a swindler and a smuggler. One raid from the vigilance department and both he and his father will be behind bars,’ Dad said.

  It had been thirty years since my dad b
egan working in a public-sector undertaking—in short, semi-government—and quite understandably, he saw no reason for someone to quit a low-paying but comfortable government job.

  ‘It’s not that. His father had acquired acres of farmland and he sold them off and bought some more and it went on.’

  ‘Okay, so now he is a good-for-nothing son of a smuggler, farmer and a drunkard,’ Mom said.

  ‘A drunkard?’ Sonali asked dejectedly, not wanting to fight his case any more.

  ‘I am sure he drinks … and beats up his wife, too. Would you like to marry someone like that?’

  ‘Mom!’

  ‘Ar kicchu bolte hobe naa (No discussions any more). It is decided. You will never talk to that guy again. I will not let an uneducated smuggler marry my daughter,’ Dad said.

  This, along with similar numerous conversations, catastrophic astrological predictions and examples of how love marriages had failed around them, sounded the death knell for Paresh Ahlawat. My sister finally relented. Slowly, she began to see the upside of getting married the conventional way. She realized that with her cute looks, she was a sought-after commodity in the Bengali marriage scene! That worked better than my parents’ incessant hard talk.

  What followed was my sister’s spree of trying out and rejecting different guys on grounds varying from ‘strange teeth’ to ‘mismatched footwear’. Every possible attribute was scrutinized in excruciating detail. She had some high standards to match up to. She would by no means get someone who was in any way inferior to Moushmi’s husband—the suave IIM guy. So it was bye-bye for the strangely named, rich Jat.

  Abhishek weds Sonali. That sounded nice.

  Abhishek was an electronics engineer with a hefty package who lived alone in Delhi. The last part made him extremely desirable in the marriage market. Constant bickering with your in-laws is the last thing you would want after a hard day’s work.

  Therefore, things fell into place in a jiffy. The guy was a little dumb or that’s how I perceived him, as he didn’t speak much. But the whole deal was nice overall. Cute, geeky-looking, hardly a problem handling such a wimp, my sister would have thought.