The day I proposed HER…

Read the whole series HERE.

You get up late. “Today is an important day”. You take a quick bath. Apply cosmetics on your face, hair, armpit and nails. You check whether the gift is still in your bag. “It is a pink tee which you bought from an exclusive showroom on an alleyway at CP”. You find that the front tire of your manual-bike is flat. Daddy agrees to drop you in his car. You wink. “Everything is happening exactly in accordance with what you have planned”…..

…I still remember that day. It was the month of august and I was in my eleventh standard. (Sweet sixteen you know!!) Those were some days… I used to literally crave to go to school. We just had had our long holidays and everybody was full of new spirit, new plans, new hairstyles, new books (?) and well, stories of new girlfriends or boy-friends… Yes, new was the air all around. We would play dumb sheraz in the school. We would play truth and dare and dare hitting our favorite teacher’s back when she was scribbling things on the board. I started breaking some of the school’s rules and some others of mine. In fact it was only then when I learnt to bunk school in order to watch movies…

Funny, that time is, in a person’s life. Isn’t it? You feel an inexplicable change occurring to your mind and your body. A strange freshness enters your lives and you yearn to do something new. Something different from others. You want to make up for all that time which you now think you wasted in all that mugging and crapping in tenth class. Suddenly you feel an urge to make more friends. You become more and more sociable. In fact it is the same time when most of us start taking interest in opposite sex….

A Flashback: KV Borjhar, Guwahati, August, 1994.
There is a ‘smart’ boy with neatly parted hair and a handkerchief strung over his shirt pocket. There is a cute girl with a pink smiling face, well groomed bobs and a yellow-red daisy duck bag on her back. With an invisible corner of his left eye, he tries to look at resplendent her. ”She is beautiful.” But his right eye is caught by a pair of squinty eyes. The teacher makes the new girl sit with him. The girl says hello and graciously offers her hand. “But she is a girl!!” He says hi and graciously refuses to accept them….

I have this very peculiar theory about boys that most of them want to have girlfriends only because they want to impress their boyfriends. Having a girlfriend is usually considered a matter of greater manhood. You feel ecstatic when your friends call your girlfriend their bhabhi. Having a girlfriend is also beneficial when it comes to parties, picnics and all that social stuff. When you have to prove how much sociable you are. In fact the more the number of girlfriends one has, the greater he is considered a dude…

…So, I was in eleventh and most of us were fed up of firstly the boards and then those endless holidays. Results were out a long ago and people were jubilant (as well as surprised) with their more than expected percentages. I was especially on a high. I had topped the school and had been continuously showered with ‘unnecessary’ praises ever since. But in spite of all that ‘highness’, there was something that I felt was missing. Something I was very unhappy about. I was considered a nerd. A bookworm. An introvert who seldom engages himself with others. And honestly speaking, I never liked that. I wanted to erase that image. I mean I was good at sports too. Why did people fail to notice that? In short, I wanted to be a hotshot, a dude… One who studies as well as enjoys life. And I thought having a girlfriend would make me one….

Another Flashback: KV Amla, near Nagpur, August, 2003
There is a ‘geeky’ boy with bespectacled red eyes, perfectly groomed hair and a badge over his shirt pocket, with class monitor carved on it. There is a girl with a radiant smile on her face, sitting across the boy on the same desk. The boy offers her a chocolate and she stands up, making way for yet another girl. There are many of them…in fact, the entire female population of the class, by the look of it… The ‘new’ girl ‘also’ ties a band on his hand. The occasion is simple: it is Rakshabandhan…..

…After a lucky start to the day, the protagonist lands up in school. With a blue-black rucksack, with a pink tee inside it. And as soon as he sees her, he decides to run away…

KAHANI ABHI BAAKI HAI MERE DOST…
THE STORY IS NOT COMPLETE, MY FRIEND…

please read the next part here: PART 2