Durjoy Datta
Neeti Rustagi
OH YES, I’M SINGLE!
And so is My Girlfriend
Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Dedication
It Isn’t a Love Story!
The First Crush
The First Love
The First Pill—Part 1
The First Pill—Part 2
The First Pill—Part 3
The First Cheating—Part 1
The First Cheating—Part 2
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 1
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 2
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 3
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 4
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 5
The First True and Everlasting Love—Part 6
The First Book
The Change
The Second Book
Moving On
Of Strippers and Love
The Disappointment
A Healing Heart
The School Reunion
Just One of Those Nights
Manika’s Side
Manika’s Sob Story
Joy and His Sob Story
Manika and Joy
Epilogue
Another Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
PENGUIN METRO READS
OH YES, I’M SINGLE!
Durjoy Datta was born in New Delhi. He completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book, Of Course I Love You …, was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Now That You’re Rich …, She Broke Up, I Didn’t!, Oh Yes, I’m Single!, If It’s Not Forever …, Someone Like You—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India. Durjoy lives in New Delhi, loves dogs and is an active CrossFitter.
For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1) or Twitter (@durjoydatta).
Neeti Rustagi was born in New Delhi, and has worked in the hospitality industry for over ten years. Oh Yes, I’m Single! … is her first book. She lives in Australia with her husband. She can be reached on Facebook or email at [email protected].
Also by Durjoy Datta
Hold My Hand
She Broke Up, I Didn’t!
I Just Kissed Someone Else!
Of Course I Love You
Till I Find Someone Better
(With Maanvi Ahuja)
Now That You’re Rich
Let’s Fall In Love
(With Maanvi Ahuja)
Till the Last Breath …
Someone Like You
(With Nikita Singh)
You Were My Crush
Till You Said You Love Me!
(With Orvana Ghai)
If It’s Not Forever
It’s Not Love
(With Nikita Singh)
Dedicated to all the nerds who were laughed at in
high school … since I was one of them!
It Isn’t a Love Story!
People write love stories, and people write autobiographies. People write autobiographies that revolve around love stories. And more often than not, these love stories are picture perfect. Girl meets boy, boy eyes girl, girl looks at her friends for approval and gets it, girl reciprocates, silent sighs, sleepless nights, first kiss, a few more sleepless nights, they go against the world and everything falls into place. Boring.
I mean, wouldn’t you rather be lying in the arms of your loving boyfriend or girlfriend in the backwaters of Kerala or Mauritius depending on how lucky you are or how rich your partner is, than reading this book on a Friday night, curled up in your bed with no one to cuddle but your pillow.
But the fact is that you are here, and in all probability know that finding true love is as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. But then again, love wouldn’t be such a huge concept and Valentine’s Day would just be another day if love was something you could find walking on the subway, or over the counter. Love is not something which you can receive by an email whenever you need it; it is tough finding love. For guys, it’s a little easier—give them a nice smile on a nice body and they can fool themselves that they are in love, for a little while at least.
Anyway, as we go finding true love, we all experience turbulence, speed bumps, ugly turns, tears, tonnes of ice cream, assholes, bitches … but do we stop? We do not. We fall in love repeatedly, hoping that things will turn out just fine this time, and more often than not, they do not. However, if they do, it makes for a great love story. What if it does not?
This book is about when it almost doesn’t. And some other unrelated things. Is this my story? No. But it’s the story of someone I know, in his own words. He has been around for six years, and has led one of the strangest love lives I have come across. He has rarely been single and has always been a sucker and a staunch supporter of true love. He has dumped and been dumped countless times. This guy just keeps falling in and out of love. People get into flings knowing that it is going to be a fling. This guy gets into it thinking it’s a relationship and only when it’s over, he comes out, scratches his head and says. ‘Oh, it was a fling!’
He always believes that love is waiting right around the corner! It will come when it comes; the possibilities are endless.
For him, it has come. Lucky bastard.
This book is his story. That lucky bastard is Joy, my best friend.
‘Joy … So, now that you finally know what you had been looking for, let’s go for it.’
‘Go for what?’ Joy said as he casually sat with his legs up on the coffee table.
‘Tell me all of it. Everything. From the first girl,’ I said. ‘You had promised you would!’
‘NEETI, for the last time around—Firstly, it is boring, not to mention—embarrassing. And secondly, find some other scapegoat for your book!’ he said as he pushed me aside to watch a repeat of a soccer match. I snatched the remote and turned it off, inviting a nasty look from him.
‘It’s the first time that I have asked you for something,’ I said, with my puppy face look. We, girls, are lucky to have such a weapon, aren’t we? Moreover, Joy usually fell for it. As he did that day.
‘Fine. Fine,’ he said. ‘But I will change names. I will change things as I deem fit. And no details. Maybe I will even lie and exaggerate, and make myself to be a stud instead of the raging nerd that I am. And I will rush through it. She’ll be coming any moment and we are going out. And I am not doing this again.’
‘Why? That’s unfair. You have all the time for your girl and not for me. I knew you before you got to know her, you were my friend before you became her boyfriend. Hmmphff …’ I faked anger. ‘Take it or leave it!’ he said.
‘Whatever.’
Though my displeasure was evident, he did not budge from his decision, and frankly speaking, I didn’t really have much of a problem; I had his attention now.
With a couple of coffees and bagels at hand, he started on the story.
‘Tell me everything,’ I said.
‘Fine. Neeti … It was 1996. And …’ Joy started. ‘It’s a long time back, so I may miss some things and make up stuff that I don’t remember …’
And then Joy started narrating the story. His story. And hers.
The First Crush
It was 1996. And I was in the eighth standard. Girls wer
en’t pulling down socks to flaunt their legs yet. Guys were still to discover the wonders of hair gels. And girls were still not their top priority. We were all busy sprinkling ink on each other’s shirts and sharing lunches. The happy pre-puberty days.
And that’s exactly when I met her. I saw the face, which imprinted itself on my brain for many years to come. Well, to be true, I didn’t meet her, not exactly. I just saw her across the room full of rowdy and shouting eighth-standard students.
‘Nisha?’ the teacher had called out.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ she had responded in her chirpy voice.
How did she look?
She was like the first breeze of autumn, like the sparkling sun after a long cold night; she was a midsummer night’s dream. She barely came up to my shoulders, her eyes were darker than the blackest night, her soft pink lips seemed to be made out of candy, her cute steps across the floor, as she walked around, would make my day. I still remember her perfectly well in our school uniform with a pink muffler around her neck. And the reddish winter glow on her cheeks. Ah!
How did I look?
I was fat, dark and ridiculously ugly. Like. Totally. Ugly. It was as if God had something against me. If he had to make me so ugly, he should have played with my mind too and made me have a crush on someone as ugly as I was, someone with freckles and unruly hair, maybe a lazy eye! Why her? Why Nisha? Why the cutest, chirpiest girl in the class?
Anyway, seven years later, in the winter of 2003, I had just turned eighteen. It was my last year in school and somehow, I had managed to grow even fatter and uglier, and she had only grown prettier. She was no longer the girl I had first seen seven years back. She had grown positively womanly, if you know what I mean. She was cute then, but she was irresistibly beautiful now. Her lips had grown pinker, her eyes were wider and they sparkled even more now, her hair was now long and worn in a style far beyond her age. All these years the gap between her social standing and popularity and mine had just kept widening. Although I had grown taller and she was still short and hopped around like a pocket-sized bunny, it didn’t make her any less un-gettable.
It was the last year and I was in the S.A. dilemma.
What is a Screwed Anyway dilemma?
It’s something that almost every guy has faced in his lifetime. It’s almost as common as the Asshole Boyfriend phenomenon.
What is the Asshole Boyfriend phenomenon?
It’s when every girl you like eventually ends up going out with the guy you hate. Simple, right?
Now back to the Screwed Anyway dilemma.
The girl is out of your league—but she is single—you ask her out—she refuses—you are screwed!
The girl is out of your league—and she is single—someone else asks her out—you are screwed!
Now the good news about the first one is that you don’t feel choked about your feelings and you don’t regret that you didn’t tell the person you love about how you felt about them. And I just had to tell her! Never give in to this feeling, nothing comes out of telling the person you love that you love him or her. It’s bullshit, it’s an urban legend. After doing it, you realize it’s better to live on the tiny hope that maybe she loved you, rather than being rejected and humiliated outright. But I was just an ugly, fat kid. What did I know about these complexities? All I knew was that she was the girl of my dreams and I liked her to bits.
Let’s just rewind a bit to tell you what had happened in the last seven years of my secret relationship with Nisha, a relationship about which Nisha herself knew nothing about.
I loved her like crazy.
Within the first week of seeing her, I knew her phone number, the street she lived on, what her parents did, what bus route she took, almost everything there was to be known about her! Though, getting all this information seems regular right now, the year was 1996 and things were different back then!
As time went by, my obsession escalated. After a year, and for the next seven years, I walked two kilometres every day after school so that I could share the same bus route. For the next seven years, I always took two schoolbags so that I could take a seat in two rows and decide later which row would give me a clearer view of her, after she took her seat. I did these things on a very regular basis, and now that I think of it, I guess I should have gone to a doctor instead.
Anyway, back then I wasn’t a big extrovert, but by the time 2003 came along, I had retreated so far into my shell that I had problems even engaging in everyday conversations with people. Why did that happen?
My obsession, now at dizzy levels, made me believe that Nisha would hear every word I say, and that I needed to measure my words before saying them out loud. And that is when, deep down, I knew for certain, that a girl like her, who hung around with cooler kids with gel in their hair and motorcycles parked outside the school, wouldn’t even give a passing thought to someone like me. She had a whole army of better boys who catered to her every whim and fancy; she was a pampered kid. Had it been left to me, I would have carried her around in my schoolbag to prevent her from the torture of walking.
Man! I did need to go to a psychiatrist back then. But it was around that time that I realized that I was getting a little overboard, that it was just a crush and I had to get over it, especially since my grades had started to slip to unacceptable levels. I started to concentrate a little more on my engineering entrance examinations, putting everything else aside for a little while. It did soften my preoccupation with her. Sometimes I thought it would have been a lot easier for me, had she started going out with somebody. But that’s just pure speculation; I might just have killed myself, metaphorically speaking.
I clearly remember; it was the last week of our school when I mustered up the courage to go to her, my heart in my mouth, readying myself up for rejection. It was mostly out of panic because I felt I would never see her again. Who knew Facebook would burst into the scene in three years and you would always be in touch with friends you never wished you had!
Anyway, she was almost set to go to some college in Delhi University, surrounded by boys and girls as cute as she was, and I was keeping my fingers crossed for my entrance examinations. I just had to tell her. I couldn’t have chosen a worse time, though. It was only later that it came to my knowledge that there were three more guys, all of whom were better than I was (because being worse than me was kind of impossible), who had asked her out around those very days; all of them were turned down.
‘Umm … err … hi …’ I said.
She smiled as she always did and said, ‘Hi, Joy.’
She fucking knows my name! She fucking knows my name! Obviously she does, you asshole. You have shared the same class since you didn’t even know what an erection was.
‘Hi,’ I said and shut up. I started rubbing my palms together which were sweating by now. I shivered. This was the best moment in our seven-year-long secret relationship. We had finally said Hi, our first real conversation.
‘Yes?’ she said, still smiling.
‘Umm … nothing … I just wanted to tell you that … that … I think you are very nice …’ I said. My face flushed red and my head spun.
Yes, in those days, nice and cute were the only words we all used. Asking a girl out was a really big deal and it took only a stud or a man crazed with love to do it. Having a girlfriend was unheard of, like a myth, something that only happened in movies, or in colleges.
‘Well … thank you,’ she said and smiled. ‘Joy, I need to go. I will talk to you later.’
‘S … sure,’ I mumbled as she walked away from me. I wasn’t screwed. She was still single. I had told her what I wanted to … almost, and she had smiled. I was a winner!
My happiness was shortlived; a few minutes later, I saw her talking to a few of her friends in the corner. I didn’t know whether it was just my mind playing games with me, but I saw her pointing at me and smiling, and her friends were laughing.
Maybe, they were right in doing so. I had been fool enough to have a glimmer
of hope that something would come out of me telling Nisha that I liked her. I turned away from them and spent the next two hours in the washroom crying like a little girl. And felt disgusted with myself.
I tried to erase the memory of that incident ever since. But it only deepened the inferiority complex and exacerbated my fear of talking to girls. The incident kept reminding me that I was ugly … and worthless, and that I wasn’t fit to be loved by any girl.
Though two days later, on the farewell night, I got a picture clicked with her, my first with a girl, and every time I look at that blurred picture today, I think of her. And the day she smiled …
And when her friends had laughed at me.
Things changed thereafter. Pretty drastically.
‘That’s it? That’s your first crush? You never even got to talk to her properly?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Joy said as he fished out the photograph from the school farewell album. He looked at it for a while and passed it over to me.
‘Oh … this is a terrible photograph.’ I said. The photograph had creases and thumb imprints all over it.
‘That’s because I have thrown and then retrieved it more than once from various dustbins over a period of time. I was in love with her even after we left school. I tracked her whereabouts for quite some time. But then, she started seeing someone, and slowly I lost interest,’ he said as he looked over my shoulder at the picture.
‘… and you look terrible here,’ I said. ‘You really were ugly, Joy!’
‘Thank you for pointing that out. You are such a great friend.’
‘She is very cute, though. It’s not your fault that you didn’t get her.’ I turned it around and read what he had written in his own handwriting.
When I see any couple, I see you and me … us, together until the end,
When I feel the wind on my face, I sense your breath,
When I feel the warmth of the winter sun,
Ohh Yes, I'm Single: And so is my Girlfriend Page 1
