The Other Girl

All characters, persons, places and events in this story are real and bear strong resemblance to people living, not dead. Any relation to readers casually stumbling onto this blog is deviously planned and articulated. Had it not been for the persistent attempts of passive prodding by the protagonist of this curious tale, an Unkempt Sophomore would not have cared enough to put his bum on a chair for something as crass and twisted as this. Readers who can’t care less can close the tab and go back to the porn.

“Xtrmly sry yr! Hope u undrstnd! Pls dnt tel it to nyone”, fretting and sweating profusely, he could almost hear her voice ringing in his head now, as he scrolled down the peculiar message on his cellular phone. The number was not on his contacts but he knew exactly who it was.

“I understand. Don’t worry”, he texted back clueless, puzzled by the most prolific WTF moment of his freshman year at college, as he locked and steadied his bicycle on the stand and marched into his hostel.

“Thnx a lot yr! N m sorry agn”, his cell buzzed, moments thereafter. The blatant use of slang and abuse of the short hand was not half as perplexing as those weird circumstances.

“It’s OK”, he replied and pushed the phone into his pocket- enough for a day. It was the other girl and until barely 10 minutes ago they hadn’t even spoken to each other, ever...

About 16 minutes earlier…

Those were days when he was juggling lives, skipping classes, scribbling exams, flouting rules and getting a hang of the circus people used to call the college. He had just made truce with the fact that 5 misplaced OMR dots were the only reason he was passing days saving his ass- from mosquitoes that floated over filthy toilet seats in the morning, to the loathsome warden whose awkward mood swings were over shadowed only by his hilariously croaky voice. There wasn’t much running well for him back then, apart from his bicycle, so he often used to spend the evenings mapping the shortest route between two random points in a university that boasted of the second largest campus in the world.

It was a warm summer evening in the wilderness and he was on a routine way back. He had almost traversed the blunt curve around an administrative building, when he saw the other girl (with an-other girl) on what seemed like a casual stroll back to her hostel- the exact geographical opposite to his destination. In the ‘eyes-meet-O-I-know-that-person-must-look-away’ drill that generally transpires within micro-seconds, every time you stumble onto a recent acquaintance of the opposite sex, everybody recognized each other from the same class. 

He had just raised the load on the paddle to cross the two girls on the street and almost completely negotiated the tight turn when he heard a soft, sweet call behind his back. It was the one word he’d heard the most in his life but expected the least at that point in time- his name!

Now, had it been the chaos of the classroom, where all sorts of proper nouns keep floating around, there could have been room for doubt. But in the silence of the empty street, the one syllable call was unmistakably him. He rammed the breaks hard as the accelerating ride came to an awkward halt and a few yards separated the girls and him. He looked back and realized it was indeed happening- two of his batch mates who had never shared a word with Mr. Virtually Nobody, in some rare feat of mid-summer madness, had apparently come up with an impromptu conversation starter!

“Can I talk to you for a while?” the other girl called out from that distance. 

Bewildered, he hopped off and turned the two-wheeler, struggling to put some sense into the scheme of things. Her friend followed her across the street, the ladies approaching him at twice his own speed. He had barely moved a few steps when the three came within an arm’s length of each other, the bicycle neatly separating the two genders.

“Hi… Actually… I wanted to talk to you about something…” she resumed instantly, as if narrating well rehearsed words with perfectly timed deliberate pauses, a pretty little smile- a cross between innocence and playfulness- illuminating her determined face. 

“Eh… Yeah sure…” he muttered, visibly perplexed and stupefied.

Now what transpired thereafter is pretty hazy and been reproduced from an amputated long term memory of the series of happenings.

“Yaar I love you …”

She smeared his brains all over the dusty sidewalk, punctured his wind pipe, smothered the last cc of air off his lungs, ripped the heart out of his chest, stuffed it into his hands, snapped the spine, plucked his entrails in one fluid motion, severed his limbs and watched in humorous amazement while the rest of his mortal remains disassembled into a conscious-less lump of carbon, calcium and iron. Or so it felt… Frankly, a direct request for a post-mortem would have been more comprehensible and less disturbing.

Not many understandable group of words sound like the above sequence of syllables. It was that peculiar combination of letters which seldom lead to very pleasant conversations or circumstances, especially between virtual strangers, and that too only in the realms of film fare, fancy or fiction. There was neither a follow-up myoclonic jerk nor any subsequent ‘kick’ to jostle him out of the confines of a misconceived dream space- this was as real as the sun setting behind his back!

“She’s doing it!” the girl’s companion, hitherto a silent spectator, had regressed a few steps and engaged an unknown third party in a voice call on her cell phone. “Yes! She said it!”. She was a designated witness cum correspondent providing live telephonic coverage of the attempted assassination to yet another stakeholder.

“This mustn’t register on an emotional level”, he recalled an RDJ line from the iconic ‘improvisation fight sequence’ in the first Sherlock Holmes flick he had watched a few nights ago (kidding, he didn’t!)- 

Reboot vital functions- assess immediate surroundings- investigate chances of mischievous scheming- re-establish eye contact- devise a pragmatic conciliatory response- break awkward silence- reinforce argument with persistent verbal follow-ups- acknowledge sidekick- exit scene with closing verbal social niceties. Physiological recovery- 7 minutes. Full psychological recovery (after regaining self esteem) - 7 hours.

“At least say something…” he snapped back to reality. Her lengthening smile and the mind-numbing cacophony of noises amidst the heightened dosage of feminine attention damped any vestigial sounds that emanated from his voice box. (With dozens of eyes of female models, printed on ‘beauty packets’ stacked all around the room doting incessantly on his startled form, the closest he’d ever been to female attention was at any barber’s shop!)

“It’s a yes isn’t it?” she exploded with belittling pitch and scathing determination in her voice. ‘Trick question?’ he thought, still struggling with a response. For reasons, that will always come to bite him in rare fits of awful flashback, he couldn’t utter a ‘Yes’, or ‘No’. Instead he nodded in such sheepish reconciliation that would make even an emasculated Rajesh Koothrapalli seem like Hugh Hefner.

“Yes, it is. See…” she proclaimed to her much enthused companion who had over-exhausted her day’s quota of entertainment.

“Thanks a lot yr and I am sorry!” she said as the curtains were burnt down.

He gathered his scattered psycho-emotional remains from the pavement, one bit at a time, piled them up in a useless lump and stuffed them in before balancing himself on the ride. Those last 6 minutes had just wrecked and shoved all his Disaster Management lessons right out of the window. 

He clumsily climbed on the bicycle and let the paddle do the talking- What the hell was that! Several questions ravaged his mind as he kept rewinding the sequence of events to tie them to some discernible logic. It was an exercise in futility- some of life must be for ‘Once upon a time…’ experiences. He shrugged them all off his mind while a relaxed smirk played on his lips. 

He felt he could almost hear the loud jeers of the other girl behind his back, as the speeding two-wheeler caressed through the evening breeze…

ख़याल - I

थी ऐसी बरकत अंदाज़ में उनके,

के इक फ़कीर को अपना कायल बना दिया

अब हर फुर्सत में करते हैं शुक्रिया उनका,

गुमशुदा ख्यालों से शायर बना दिया...

नज़रों से खता इक रोज़ हुई ऐसे,

अब और कोई हमसे शरारत नहीं होती

क़बूल हुई दुआ, अधूरी ही सही,

तकदीर से अब कोई शिकायत नहीं होती

उनके दर पे सर झुका दिया जबसे,

और कहीं यूँ ही इबादत नहीं होती

आईने में दीदार उनका कर लिया जबसे,

अक्स से भी अपनी तब से हिफाज़त नहीं होती

बेहक जाता दिल आशिकी की रवानी में,

अदा में उनके वो ज़ालिम नज़ाकत न होती

महफ़िल में भरी उन्हें थाम लेता गर,

बुज़दिल इस ज़माने में बग़ावत न होती

इश्क के कारोबार में नफ़ा-नुक्सान बड़ा देखा,

कहीं और दिल लगाने की अब हिमाकत नहीं होती

पूछे बिना उन्हें रज़ा में मांग लेता पर,

इश्क में खुदगर्ज़ी की इजाज़त नहीं होती

चार दिन की जवानी हँसते गुज़ार लेता,

गुस्ताख़ दिल को कमज़र्व् ये मोहब्बत न होती...

Roadways

I believe to arrive is better than to travel. I guess that makes me a pathetic traveler, and I am one. To me, the journey always seems as an inescapable endurance I must succumb to in order to accomplish the seemingly banal task of reaching from Point A to Point B. That’s of course not to mean that I wouldn’t like going places. But it’s just that the widely appreciated charm of travel, adventure and excursion has forever eluded me, making me a ‘party killer’, ‘uninteresting companion’, ‘uninitiated’ and ‘lazy’ among several other things I can’t recall right now.

Initially I thought that’s got to do with the fact that I’ve spent the greater part of my life at a hill station. Not being the person with the strongest gut meant that motion sickness seemed a serious physiological problem that took some years to subside. That means when all my classmates were busy hiking on school picnics, I was the one realizing what anti-peristaltic movements of the alimentary canal feel like. It took some serious physical and mental reinforcements to get past this stage. 

But when I did get to move out and around in the last few years, I realized it was just one of the problems, perhaps the easiest. 

If you really want to feel what a menace over population in India is, take a Roadways bus anywhere in the UP-Uttarakhand-Delhi belt. Private buses would have consolidated my point even more but I don’t want you to risk getting a migraine. 

It’s like everyone wants to go everywhere all the time. And the irony is that everyone’s in a hurry but no one is ever on time! They say in India if you truly want to know a person, you make him sit through a sloppy internet connection on Internet Explorer with a video buffering on YouTube. I say if you really want to know him, travel with him in a Roadways bus on a busy July afternoon. A typical bus journey on these routes is a fuming dungeon- a spiteful cauldron of grappling limbs, yelling women, wailing infants, cussing men and the weak and elderly struggling for un-annexed foot space. Shoulders, elbows and knees become potential weapons as people start swarming into the bus as if it were the last ride out of 1945 Nagasaki. Count your blessings if you’re alone without much luggage else you may not survive the carnage. 

Consider half the job done once you’re inside the thing which, let me remind you, is no better a technological marvel than what the Flintstones drove. The tricky part now is surviving the amusement ride that is a long journey on Indian roads. God bless you if a pissed off elder woman is your nearest neighbor in the close packing- you might have to endure anything from belittling stares to the most mortifying way of asking ‘whether you have mother or sister at home’ when the driver (who thinks he’s on some high speed chase sequence) rams the brakes. You must love the feel of sweat dripping down from all parts of your body for there’s no way you’ll be able to take that hanky out of your pocket. Then someone’s bound to lose their temper on someone over something like 3 rupees (aka change), who gets the vacated seat, a torn currency note blah blah and suddenly fresh unbalanced forces start wrecking the unstable equilibrium. 

The music is the ultimate hallmark of a Roadways bus for it seems as if the industry just stopped producing songs after Kumar Sanu and Alka Yagnik redefined romantic melancholy in the 90s. And the super heavy base speakers hoisting the decibel level to concerning proportions will render your own earphones obsolete. Then there are the hawkers tempting you with the weirdest products in the most ridiculous tones and ways, ranging from multipurpose combs to instant constipation remedies. 

The site outside the window is no different with all sorts of advertisements of ‘hakims’ and ‘dawakhanas’ making you wonder whether you just travelled into an STD ridden African village-whorehouse. Traffic jams and vehicle damage are like complimentary greetings from Transport Corporation. The worst of my experiences involve a flat tyre several kilometers from Moradabad close to midnight and a blown engine 2 hours from Tanakpur- in the middle of nowhere on both occasions.

When the ordeal is finally over, you’ve become a believer- in heaven and in hell. But above all you truly realize, first-hand, what the country and its people are going through each day. All those news channels with their controversy centric or TRP oriented coverage fail to capture the all important and often heart rending reality of what we believe is a developing India. You are relieved to have survived the onslaught but your heart goes out to the millions who must make it a part of their repertoire. 

Actually, this is just a miniscule part of a massive machinery that is ridden with so many design flaws and working defects that it’s a wonder it continues to tag along billions with itself. We (have) become so easily accustomed to (even comfortable with) the scheme of things that its utter inefficiency and pathetic sufficiency is no more a concern to any of us. We have no qualms in littering every mode of public transport, stripping it off seat cushions or lights or fans or other such things which are installed to make the journey easy, even scribbling our feelings for our “soul mate” on the backs of seats, hoping that the girl will totally fall in love when she takes the same bus and seat tomorrow.

All this is what makes me a pathetic traveler. I never really got used to all this, therefore every bit of this and much more bothers me as much as it did the first time. And then there’s the inescapable lull- the mental stagnation of being in a confined space that disturbs my claustrophobic alter ego. But what do I do about it? The same that most of us do about the things we cry about each day- sleep out the entire journey.

I am only getting better at it over time.