2 States - The Story Of My Marriage | Page 9

right?’ she referred to the marketing case. I had been staring at her lips, researching ways of kissing her. ‘Huh? Yes, I agree with you,’ I said. ‘Your mind is elsewhere. What are you thinking of right now?’ she snapped her fingers. ‘Nothing, sorry, I was thinking how…..how insightful you are in marketing.’ ‘Thank you,’ she smiled, believing me. ‘Yes, I like this subject. I think I will be good at a marketing job. So I will go with this recommendation tomorrow.’ We finished the case at midnight. I stood up to leave. ‘Tea?’ she said, suggesting we go to Rambhai. ‘No. I can’t fall asleep then,’ I said. ‘Maggi? I will make it in the pantry upstairs.’ ‘No, I’d better go,’ She came to the door with me. ‘You are so serious these days. What do you keep thinking about? Grades?’ ‘I can’t study with you any longer,’ I blurted out.

‘What?’ she said surprised. ‘We’ve figured out a rhythm for ourselves. We don’t need to study together anymore.’ ‘Yeah, but we like to study together, at least I do….What’s up? Did I do anything wrong?’ ‘It’s not you. It’s me,’ I said. ‘Don’t do an “it’s not you, it’s me” on me,’ Ananya screamed. Her loud voice woke up a girl in the next room who switched on her light. ‘We are not dating, OK? Stop behaving like we are having a break-up,’ I whispered. ‘And go to sleep. There’s a quiz tomorrow.’

I didn’t speak to her in the class the next day. She came up to me twice, once to return my pen that I had left in her room and another time during the mid-morning break to ask me if I wanted to go for tea. Once you start liking someone, their mere presence evokes a warm feeling in you. I fought the feeling before it took control of me. ‘I’d rather read up for the next class. You go have tea,’ I said. She didn’t insist as she left the room. She had worn a long maroon skirt and a light brown top. I wish she’d turn back and look at me. But she didn’t. she joined her dorm-mates and went out for tea. I dodged her for the next five days. I came late to class and left first so there was no time for greetings. ‘You are not talking to her?’ the Mohit right next to me asked while the other four craned their necks to listen. Even Kanyashree paused from her frantic notetaking and turned her profile ten-degrees towards me. ‘You seem quite concerned?’ I said and everyone promptly backed off.

6

Ananya knocked at my door at nine in the night. I had just sat down to study after dinner. Girls rarely visited boys’ dorms. She had come to my room only once before. It had excited my dorm-mates into an impromptu Frisbee match set to loud music in the dorm corridor. ‘She reminds me of Bhagyashree,’ one of the boys had screamed outside our room. Even I couldn’t resist a smile. He went on to play a song from Maine Pyar Kiya that urged a pigeon to play postman. ‘That’s it. We are never studying at your dorm again,’ she had fumed as she packed her books. She opened the door to eight boys playing Frisbee in the corridor. ‘For the record, I Hate Bhagyashree,’ she had said and stormed off. But here she was again. And the firmness in her step meant my dorm-mates didn’t act like Neanderthals and had disappeared into their rooms. I opened the door. She stood there, wearing the blue and white salwar kameez that she wore the first time I saw her. When you are in campus, you can figure out a pattern in people’s clothes. Her blue salwar kameez repeated itself every three weeks. She had brought two Frootis with her. ‘Can I come in? Can I distract the scholar for ten minutes from his studies?’ Unlike her room, there was no aesthetic appeal to mine. I had left the red bricks bare, and they looked like prison walls. My originally white bed-sheet had turned grey after being washed in acid in the IIT hostels. My desk only had books, unlike Ananya’s who always had cut flowers from campus lawns or arty incense holders or other objects that men never put on their shopping lists. ‘Wait,’ is aid. I turned around to do a quick scan. No, there was no underwear or smelly socks or porn magazines or old razor blades in sight. I held the door open. ‘Mugging away?’ she asked as she sat on the bed. ‘No choice.’ I pulled back my study chair.

‘Your grades will improve as you don’t study with me anymore.’ ‘It’s nothing like that,’ I said. ‘Then, what is the