Truly Madly Deeply (5 page)

“Oh, how wonderful! Didn't he turn back and bite you?”

“Ah, he turned back almost immediately and growled fiercely at me but I had removed my hand by then and I stared at him in the eye, until he gave up, looked away and disappeared in his den.”

“That's a nice story!”

“Yup, isn't it? I tell you I didn't fear for a second, in fact I could see the fear in the tiger... hey, wait a sec... that's not a story. It's kind of a true adventure.”

“Right! And I'm the Helen of Troy.”

“No, you're more beautiful.”

She looked at him as if he had just set ablaze something in her eyes. He did not know how he blurted that.

“How can you say that? You weren't around at that time!”

“Oh, I was Menelaus at that time,” he replied saucily.

“I get this weird notion all the while that I was someone in Troy, so I might as well have been Menelaus,” he explained after a pause.

She regarded him for a while and decided to play along.

“You could've been Paris. How can you be sure?”

“Oh, I might have been Paris. Oh heck, I was Paris and hence I could not stop myself from abducting you. Ah, the crimes
you made me commit!” Rahul exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air.

Seema chuckled shyly.

Rahul continued his charade as Raj had advised him the previous evening, making her laugh and then forgetting his lines. He had absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in bragging about seven girls going gaga over him in school. He asked her casually the same kind of question, before taking a gulp of water, to which she replied in an equally casual manner, “I remember the harsh Head Master bringing out fifty-five guys in a human chain, to his cabin last year.”

The reaction was instantaneous, Rahul shot out the water that went down his throat in an instant that seemed like he was gargling out his intestines, basking the biker, riding by the side of the bus in an early summer rain. Just a minute ago he had been bragging about why he was the most handsome hunk in school and here she was, casually remarking her modest fan following!

“You like reading you said. Which books do you recommend I should read? Don't tell me to read Harry Potter and Vampire books, I hate them,” she said.

‘No wonder she is different from other girls her age. She has to be because she's my choice' he nodded to himself.

“Tell me,” Seema requested.

“Hmm... reading is a private activity. A book fits a reader like it fits its cover. It depends on your interests but you can try out Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll and even Dickens before you move to Shakespeare,” Rahul advised.

“Oh, I already read some of Shakespeare's plays. I like his sonnets, especially, ‘O Mistress Mine',” she said, looking out of the window and before he could say something like a nightingale, she chanted a part of the poem.

‘What is love? ‘Tis not hereafter;

Present mirth hath present laughter;

What's to come is still unsure;

In delay there lies no plenty;

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.'

“Wow! You could recite that in one go!” Rahul whistled in appreciation, lost in the echo of her voice in his mind. She let out a humble smile.

“Well, by the way, you are not yet twenty, so I ...anyone can't kiss you yet,” Rahul said, feeling the knots come back in his throat.

“It's just a poem,” she said, embarrassed.

“Tell me more, what else do you like?” she asked.

“Apart from you... r... your poem, the one you just recited, I like singing sometimes, acting sometimes ...”

“Acting?”

“Yup, I undertook professional training at the Star Academy during last year's summer vacations. We had so many actors of yesteryears coming and teaching us, once even Salman Khan came!”

“Salman Khan? To teach acting?”

“No, he taught us body-building!”

“Oh, ok. Let's have a small showdown of your acting skills, please.”

“In the bus? What do you want me to do? The Bombay to Goa song!”

“Can you do mimicry?”

“Yeah, a little!”

“Please, please, I just love mimicry. Do it just this once!”

And he consented. Out came Dev Anand; as he crossed his hands and moved rhythmically, Paresh Rawal; as he made faces and spoke in a rustic Marathi accent, Rajesh Khanna; as he bent his head and closed his eyes to wipe away fake tears, Govinda; as he twirled his tongue to speak at pace, Big B; as he folded his legs in the narrow space and stuck out his hand to rename himself as Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, Nana Patekar; as he sniffed his nose, going hyper and beating his own head, and finally Shahrukh Khan; as he spaced out his hands and stammered a little more than necessary! He merged the mimicry with clever one-liners that he often practiced in front of the mirror and formed a mini-dialogue between all the characters. She almost could not control her giggles on seeing the last ludicrous act.

“Don't mimic him, he's my favourite superstar,” she warned him, amidst rising bouts of laughter, slapping him on his wrist playfully. He wondered then whether he should have replaced a Khan with another, when he told her about his acting academy, but her gentle touch made him numb. Her fingers were cool and smooth. He watched her luscious lips as they moved in perfect synchrony with his heartbeats. He wanted to kiss her lips and steal all the worries from her life. He decided that for an ounce of that laughter he could sacrifice an entire lifetime of happiness. He stopped his act to take a snapshot of that instant he would so treasure – her delightful laughter that could make him do anything, anything at all, in the world and beyond!

“So, you love to act?” she asked, with the smile still playing in her eyes. He nodded with his own smile.

“Have you ever acted in front of the camera?” she questioned, trying to sound like an interviewer.

“Yeah, I have,” he answered almost instantly.

“Oh, really! When… where?” she asked, surprised.

“At my cousin's wedding. Sometime when the hired cameraman was shooting the proceedings with his video camera, I did a little gig,” he stated.

She twitched her lips to one side and seeing him fight to control his laughter, she initiated the process, and what followed could have best been described by the passengers on board the bus. They laughed and laughed until they had tears in their eyes and they laughed for no apparent reason. They doubled over with laughter just by looking into each other's eyes, clasping their stomachs, not caring about the angry stares and disturbed reactions they generated around them. Whoever had said that laughter was contagious had surely visualised their rolling human forms.

Amidst the laughter, he extended his palm towards her and she clapped his outstretched hand. Evidently, Seema was enjoying the company of a guy for the first time in her life. They talked about their childhood, their parents and their neighbours' pets. They talked about the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the moon and the pristine fragrance that originates from the ground in the monsoon. Rahul sensed a similar fragrance but only more indescribable emanating from her brown locks. It made him aware of her existence beside him, when he had just lost himself to her in his thoughts. As the bus swayed on the unkempt roads, the soft brush of her skin against his deliberately angled elbow seeped all the way into his chest. He remembered something and almost reluctantly shook himself out of his pleasant state.

“Here, this is for you,” he offered, searching for it in his bag and extending the greeting card.

“What is that?” she asked even though she knew it was a card.

“It's a token of the onset of our friendship,” he said with a lovely smile.

“Thanks,” she said looking down.

She slyly saw the cover of the card by peeking in the envelope. It depicted two cute teddies sailing on a boat named ‘Friendship'. She smiled to herself and then to him.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked raising an eyebrow.

She shook her head while continuing to smile.

“You should smile more often… you look really great when you smile,” he complimented.

“Thanks!” she said. The flush on her pale cheeks was like the blush of sunset on snow.

The long route in reality seemed like a minutes' walk in each other's company, the conductor had to shoo the ‘kids' off who, by now, had come to the attention of not just those who were travelling along with them but also to the other ‘eavesdropping' passengers. It took another shrill scream from Jess to bring them to their senses that they had reached their destination and it was time to get down. The conductor shouted at them again in his chaste Marathi, “Stop aala… pudhe chala lavkar (the stop has arrived, move ahead quickly!)”

He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own – a memorabilia of their first date together – just like a strand of her hair that he had later found on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she was searching so desperately for once and so many other such small things.

***

As he summed up the most eventful day of his life today, a volley of questions flooded his insides. Was her winking at him in the auditorium just another trick of the light? Was her awkward glance directed at someone else? Was her enthusiastic applause at his question just blatant respect for his seniority? Was she just bored of her friends or really enjoying his company while they were walking together on the promenade? Was the rose petal incident just a figment of his imagination? He was searching for the answers in her reactions and his sentiments as he could recollect them.

Another shout bought him to his senses; the harsh reality came into view as he realised another irate conductor walking towards him and shouting, “The bus stops here, young man!”

Rahul replaced the sporadic smile that bloomed on his lips with a despondent frown. The scenes were similar, yet so different. He put the treasured tickets which he was so lovingly eyeing, back in the corner of his wallet. Indeed, he had passed his stop five minutes back. He would have to walk back, taking a turn from Chandler to Teesdale Street. He got up slowly, not bothering to curse himself for forgetting the stop where he had to descend. But, did it matter now, he asked himself. He might as well accept the fact than carry on with arguing with himself, he would have enough of it anyways. He was not used to leaving things behind; he wondered how the bus stop escaped.

***

A ‘FIVE STAR' DAY ON ‘MARS'

Last night's rice had not been granted a decent welcome by his stomach. Therefore, Rahul was spending twice the time he would normally spend on the pot. The only problem with the first floor hostel loo was that all the walls of the cabins were crowded with all kinds of graffiti. If not pictorial representations of women's breasts or erect penises, it would be some couplet on the horny warden or an imaginary, extraordinarily verbose revenge on some professor which would decorate the once white wall of the cabins. From pubic hair to raunchy lairs, there was everything on display like an open magazine to the idle eye on the pot, perhaps to keep him occupied long enough to avoid looking down at his deeds. It was like a big paper, only spread in each direction with all kinds of pictures and words strung together. It was difficult to decipher where one representation ended and the other began. It was even more of a task to separate the mammoth penises from the breasts that resembled hot-air balloons.

Rahul was tired of visiting the toilet for the seventh time in the day. He did not like to miss school, because that was something that kept him busy or so, he liked to believe. But here he was emptying his bowels and casually reading the graffiti on the walls.

He read the one to his left,

‘Here I sit

Broken hearted

Tried to shit

But only farted'

‘Broken hearted? Did that guy get no other word to use his pen on?' Rahul thought.

He disapproved of the idea of abusing the heart somehow. Once it had been his saviour, it had given him pleasure which no amount of pain could displace.

His eyes found a different handwriting, right beside the one the broken hearted farter had written.

‘You're lucky

You had your chance

I tried to fart,

And shit my pants!'

Rahul let out a slight smile considering the wit of the versifier and his credence for positivity. He thought that this happened only in India as the cliché goes but then he remembered that the hostel had a high number of Indian occupants of which many were migrants. A lot of them, having done their early education in their motherland and completing their quota of lines and drawings in Indian toilets, had come here to pursue their further education and bedeck the walls of the States. So he had no doubt where the old habits came from. He guessed that waiting for the calamity to strike down literally, they enjoyed the time scribbling their creative thoughts.