Will She Be Mine (3 page)

Thus, I usually felt trapped between the mother and sister whenever I visited their house, but went all the same. How could I forget I’d spent restless days and weeks in the distant city of Kanpur planning my encounters with Shalini during my vacations? I couldn’t be shaken off so easily. It was important to sow the seeds over time. I realized it’d demand all my patience and determination in the face of her stony silence. Her father was usually more courteous whenever he was home during my visits, though he suspected nothing of my amorous intentions for his elder daughter.

Talking to the younger sibling, Ragini was a good way to justify my prolonged presence in their house, as she was way younger than me. Being Shalini’s kid sister, in a sense she was like my kid sister too. She wanted to become a singer and I’d cajole her along as she crooned and sometimes also ventured to say I’d compose the music for her albums in the distant future, casting hopeful sidelong glances at her elder sister once in a while. But even if Shalini heard, she didn’t show any interest in my musical abilities.

Ragini on the other hand would laugh heartily at my suggestions. Both sisters seemed poles apart. It was never clear to me whether the younger sibling laughed at my jokes or my musical skills. I considered my fledgling tunes and the boisterous accompaniment music I arranged on my small synthesizer keyboard, catchy. Whenever she broke out laughing it hurt me.

I took my music seriously. I might never become an R. D. Burman, but my melodies were sweet in their own way. However, in the end, it didn't matter how the other members of that family behaved, so long as I got an opportunity to be near my Shalini. I was like a faithful dog, oblivious to all opposition to his devotion for his mistress. Kick me away, but I’d come back wagging my tail.

During one of my vacations home she evinced interest in my oil paintings that adorned the walls of our living room. I promptly took the opportunity to have her stand beside one of them and clicked her snapshot with an old camera, saying that I’d paint her portrait. I omitted to add that it would also enable me to carry her photograph in my wallet henceforth, allowing me to look at her whenever I wished.

I took my tubes of oil pastels and brushes to my hostel room after that lovely vacation, eager to paint her portrait. In our photography club, I developed the negative of the snapshot I had clicked and printed her photos in various sizes. The smallest one I carefully kept inside my wallet, while the biggest one, of an arbitrary size of 14 inches by 10, I used as the subject for my portrait. In this way I set about painting the masterpiece of my life on a canvas I bought from a local store in the college campus.

When I brought back the finished painting and showed it to her, I daresay she was impressed.

“It’s really nice, RK,” she said shyly.

“I spent a lot of time on it,” I enlightened her promptly. “Usually, I complete my paintings faster. But not this one.”

She blushed and kept staring at the painting for a long time. “You should have become a painter,” she ventured at length.

After briefly praising my skills and choice of subject, she left. I felt elated! Had I found a way to her heart at last? All women had some vanity hidden away somewhere that desired attention, adulation and gestures of love. One needed to possess the ability to recognize the secret switch, discover where that yearning lay hidden and bring it out in time. The right kindling ignited the fire. The rest was easy. I felt on a high.

She said I should have become a painter! Coming from a practical girl like her, I took it seriously and regretted chucking the opportunity to paint the walls of the foreign embassy. I should have chucked my engineering course instead. Anyway, by painting her portrait I seemed to have corrected some of my earlier lapses and gaucheness. It seemed like our love was headed in the right direction at last. She appeared quite pleased by my artistic effort.

I had no idea at that time that the rest of the journey wouldn’t be as easy. She simply refused to give any hint subsequently of how seriously she thought about me. At one point I was even tempted to pluck out my hair one at a time, and guess if 'she loved me', or, ‘loved me not'. Thankfully I never engaged in the futile exercise otherwise I might have gone bald at a pretty young age.

Since I thought a lot about my love life and grappled with its uncertainties, it was natural to take my daydreams and worries into my lectures as well. Bunking lectures altogether was easiest in case I stayed awake late into the night thinking of her, but if I happened to attend them, walking out of them midway was trickier, though the size of L-7 made it possible to slip out unnoticed, unlike the lectures scheduled in L-1 or L-2 or one of the other smaller L’s.

In L-7, the dais used by the professors for delivering their lectures faced seats arranged in ascending semi circular rows occupied by students. The seats were divided into sections with walkways in the aisles in between that led up a flight of stairs to the next level that was flanked by massive doors on either side. Beyond this there were further rows of seats ascending up to the projector room at the rear from where our movies were projected in the evenings after college hours. During the lectures, I usually preferred a seat nearer the first row of seats in the middle level, closer to the doors. It was at a fair distance from the professor’s podium and allowed me to walk out in the middle of the lecture unnoticed on most occasions.

One such day, as I got up absentmindedly in the middle of a lecture and started walking out of L-7, I heard the professor shriek.

“You there!”

My blood froze as I turned to face the dais.

“Yes, you!” he shouted. I swallowed. He was addressing me!

Standing in the midst of the huge hall with all eyes on me, I felt stripped to my skin.

“What do you take this place for?” he asked sarcastically. “Are you in a garden, taking a stroll by the moonlight?”

Snickers passed around till the professor glared at the crowd. Immediate silence followed. He turned back to me.

“Sorry, sir,” I stammered, my mind fast at work. “Actually I’ve a stomach upset,” I managed to say, passing a hand over my stomach.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you walk out,” he retorted. “Do you consider yourself invisible that you can walk out at will? Stop lying and don’t come into these lectures if you don’t have the patience to sit through.”

I meekly walked back to my seat and hung my head low. Thankfully, he resumed the lecture without alluding to my lie of a stomach upset any further. To get caught or not depended on my destiny, I decided.

I gradually grew to believe in destiny in everything. Love too, among other things, simply happened by the same stroke of destiny. There was a place for everything in life and a time for it.

My time with Shalini had not yet come. I was prepared to wait, but how long? When would my time come? Would it come at all in this lifetime? How long would I have to wait to know? So many troublesome questions, so much uncertainty- but no answers!

One thing was certain though. At MSIT most of my homesickness was on her account. I missed her nearness, the glow of sunshine on her wavy brown hair, the hint of smile in her dark, expressive eyes, and her frequent appearance at our door to seek help with her assignments. Given a choice, I’d rather have spent my life solving her mathematics and physics problems than studying engineering to solve society's problems or my family's economic ones.

I felt quite Shalini-sick over time and gradually reduced my visits to Lucknow to see my grandparents whom I’d visited regularly earlier. Instead I preferred to go home to Delhi whenever I could, literally on each weekend, and sometimes extended my stay on some pretext or other to be close to her. In this way I ended up missing quite a few classes in college, and missed the better grades as well.

What I found annoying was people’s inquisitiveness about why I went home so frequently and their snide comments. One day as I stepped out of my hostel to go the central library one of my batch mates slapped my back jovially.

“Where to, RK?”

“I’m going to the lib to re-issue a book. Coming along?”

“You go ahead, I’ve to go somewhere else,” he said, adding with a grin, “I thought you were on your way to Delhi.”

“Why?”

He laughed. “Don’t you know? Whenever you step out of the hostel, the boys feel you’re on your way to Delhi. It’s become a kind of joke.”

The only distractions in my Shalini-sick life were the pranks I and PS shared. PS was my best friend as a freshman and we continued to be close for a long time. His name was actually Saurabh Pal. It was a decent name which I’d abbreviated and flipped around to make it PS.

One winter night in hall 2, which was one of the undergraduate hostels at MSIT Kanpur meant for the first and second year students, on our way to the dispenser kept outside the dining hall to fill drinking water into our bottles, I pointed out to him the row of bicycles parked in our dormitory between a pair of pillars.

“Do you think all the bikes would fall if I kicked the last one?” I asked.

“It’s like one of those tricky questions in Physics. These are usually tough to answer,” he said with a mischievous smile. “Perhaps we should find out?”

“I’m always ready,” I said with a nod.

“Then go ahead,” he prodded, looking up and down the dormitory surreptitiously.

I looked around too. It was very cold and the dormitory was empty at that time of the night. With the mid semester exams in progress, most boys were busy studying behind closed doors following dinner while some had gone to the central library.

“Be ready to run, before the boys start coming out of their rooms,” I cautioned. “There’ll be a big sound.”

“Don’t worry, just go ahead.”

I planted a hefty kick on the last cycle and made a dash for the next dormitory, aligned perpendicularly to ours. PS had already disappeared. I spotted him at a distance walking unconcerned and rushed to catch up. There was a generous sound of tumbling metal behind us as we walked the rest of the way to the water dispenser nonchalantly. On our way back after filling water into our bottles we noticed most of the doors in our dorm standing open, with boys busy extricating their bikes from beneath the pile. PS stopped near them uncertainly.

“Hey, I just remembered my bike is in that pile too,” he said with sudden realization.

“I know,” I said with a smile.

“You knew?” he asked suspiciously. “Where’s yours?”

“Oh, sometimes I can predict the future. So I took care to park mine in the other dorm today.”

He gave me a playful jab and I dutifully lent him a hand to fish out his bike.

But these were short-lived incidents, insufficient to offset the constant wear and tear of my mind that Shalini’s memories caused. My frequent visits to my parents were misunderstood by our neighbors and also my friends in college as a sign of my homesickness for my home and parents. I preferred to let them think that way. It saved uncomfortable explanations. They anyway had no business to know who lived in my neighborhood or for whom my heart throbbed day and night- though in my initial days I did confide to PS about how my heart was full of love for Shalini.

Why did love have to be so one sided, I sometimes wondered desolately? In this state of mind, it was difficult for me to enjoy my brother Sujat's wedding or my sister Madubala's, both of whom got married before I graduated out of MSIT. I went home on short vacations to attend their marriages, much like a reluctant outsider who is sometimes present at a function more out of a sense of duty than belonging.

Something deep within told me that I should have helped my father more sincerely, in terms of sharing his mental and physical burden, and the exertion surrounding the enormous preparation for the ceremonies. I should have also tried to ease my mother's pains around the wedding arrangements. But I consoled myself that my college schedule and academic pressures didn’t permit me the luxury of fulfilling these responsibilities or running errands during the weddings at home.

I carried a few textbooks and lecture notes along to justify my lack of interest in the family celebrations, and ostentatiously dug into them to prepare for the mid semester exams lurking around the corner after the weddings, while keeping a stealthy eye out for Shalini’s movements- but she didn’t take much interest in the weddings either and mostly kept out of sight, to my utter dismay.

Both siblings in our family thus got married in quick succession- first my sister, followed by my brother. My sister's in-laws stayed at a nearby town, while my brother married into a business household in a distant city. After their marriage I was the only one who remained unmarried in our house, I thought with glee.

I dreamily thought about my turn to marry next, and pondered about my future with Shalini. She seemed too cold about my interest in her. Didn’t she have any reciprocal feelings for me? There was still a lot of time to plan my moves to make her my own instead of feeling ignored. Till I heard from her directly that she didn’t wish to marry me, I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t afford to get bogged down by dismaying thoughts about a future without her. There was hope still. This was the only life I knew, and I couldn’t afford to miss any opportunity to make her my life partner.

Over time I had a suspicion my love story was getting too one sided. Did I alone harbor all the feelings of love? Did she feel nothing for me? Nothing short of an open admission of love from her side would satisfy me, or a clear denial that she wished to have nothing to do with me, in which case, of course, I’d die. I had to do something about the uncertainty urgently, otherwise spending the rest of my time in a distant hostel till my graduation would become impossible. Age old wisdom taught to fight poison with poison. The brave stood up against the brave, friends of the same feather flocked together, and so on. I too needed to work out a strategy.

Hence, to combat my tremendous pull for her, I hit upon a philandering strategy and let my eyes rove the college campus. If I could come close to another girl on the campus, it might balance the push and pull on my mind for Shalini, save me a few trips home and also allow me to focus better on my studies. Besides helping to make up for my sinking grades, it would also create in her mind a sense of uncertainty over the sudden lack of my seriousness for her. For a change, she might start chasing me instead. The thought was intoxicating- but unlikely, or at least unbelievable at the present.