Ritika didn’t reply. Aranya thought to sweeten the deal. ‘Fine. This is the most I can do. You don’t have to submit the next five assignments.’ Yes, now the dumb bitch was listening. Ritika nodded and wiped her tears.
‘I don’t know if I can forgive him.’
‘That’s a call you have to take, but don’t send me down another guilt trip.’
She ran an awkward hand over her head, looked at her like she gave a shit, and walked back to class. Ritika followed soon after and took a seat at the last bench of the class. Aranya could now go on with her life without a twinge of guilt or remorse.
A little later Raghuvir walked in in all his splendour, well not really, because he wore a tattered T-shirt from the technical fest last year, trackpants and slippers, but yeah, still too much gorgeousness. He had shaved so his smooth baby skin was glistening.
‘Today we are going to study Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in detail. You might have studied it in school but we will go down the nitty-gritties of it today. So brace yourself because this is tough and boring and I will make sure I put in a few questions in the examination from this topic . . .’
Write down everything he says.
But look how gorgeous!
WRITE. STUFF. DOWN.
But?
What but?
I said butt. Look at his butt.
And look at yours, fatso Aranya.
What about it?
It’s like a continent. And his is like a cute little island. There’s no way the tectonic plates of yours and his are going to meet.
Fine.
Fine.
Raghuvir wielded the chalk like a samurai and no one saw how it happened but the board was filled with equations so dizzying it looked like they had spilled over to the walls, slowly creeping up to the windows, and would soon engulf the students in their wake. He made physics trippy.
Aranya’s daydream of Raghuvir as a celestial DJ who spun out equations was rudely interrupted when the door was banged open and Dhruv crawled in, smelling like rug rat, face swollen, eyes bloodshot and his hand extended like sculpted warriors at traffic intersections. He was still in a pair of strategically torn jeans and white linen shirt with three buttons open, his muscular cleavage visible from afar.
‘Excuse me?’ asked Raghuvir.
With Dhruv’s hand still pointing in Ritika’s direction, he answered Raghuvir. ‘I love her.’ He looked at Ritika who was now crying. ‘I love you. Don’t try to run from me. I really do.’
Such a fucking drama queen, Aranya thought. This is a physics class, damn it.
Ritika stood up from her seat and said she loved him too, snot and tears obscuring her face. Beautiful, just beautiful. Aranya held her head, embarrassed. What was happening? How can this be a self-respecting college and why wasn’t Raghuvir aiming the duster at Dhruv’s head? Raghuvir stood there, amused, and Aranya felt like apologizing to him like it was her fault.
The bell rang and Raghuvir collected his books and walked out like it was business as usual.
Aranya watched him go, objectifying his butt and thinking what he must look like when he showered every morning and whether he and the PhD student, Smriti, were in a strictly physical relationship as the rumour went. Of course it had to be true. She was beautiful, just like the ones Raghuvir was often seen with in the past. She wished Smriti would die.
She heard people clap. She turned to see Dhruv and Ritika hugging each other, muttering apologies into each other’s necks, and the girls in the class were clapping and crying at the reunion of a drunken bastard and a wailing drama queen. When did people stop respecting sanity?
Aranya walked to the teacher’s table, banged it thrice with the duster, and announced. ‘Mr Tripathi’s assignment is due tomorrow. I need it in my mailbox by 11 p.m. tonight.’
She saw the happiness drain out from the faces and they were no longer clapping, instead they were discussing the assignment and from where they would copy it. Aranya had successfully ruined a beautiful moment, vile and disgusting to her.
I Love u Rachu
34
Sanchit had never had a girlfriend, which gave him ample time to analyse girls and relationships deeply and intensely, be it through porn or books which he did out in the open, or through glossy magazines which he downloaded on his phone and read while on the shit pot every morning.
It was the tenth year since he hit puberty and he had researched enough to know that Ritika and Dhruv’s relationship was a sham, there was no love, maybe a psychological warfare of a different kind but definitely not love. Dhruv wanted to possess her and then unwittingly suffocate her with his overbearing possessiveness and destroy her, and Ritika who was an intelligent girl had turned into a bumbling idiot in love. But then girls love to be destroyed by men who take them on a bad trip, make them feel loved and despised, keep them constantly on tenterhooks, and ruin them for everyone else. Dhruv was that mad love that forty-year-old women write about in their books while they are married to sedate office-goers with paunches and white patches on their wrists from wearing the same watch for decades.
But he loved Dhruv because Dhruv lived. He was always too angry, too happy, too agitated, too alive, too sad, like living four lives at once, like he was made of nerve endings. While the entire world was like a sleepy, herbivorous, gigantic argentinosaurus, ambling slowly, target in sight, the lush leaves on the top of a tree, Dhruv was an angry tryannosaurus rex, a complete fucking bastard with no sense of fear, absolutely aimless, ripping out trees and dinosaurs far bigger than his size and soaking in the glory of it all, remorseless.
For the past two weeks Dhruv had been chasing him and a near-impossible dream to top the mid-semester examination, an honour reserved for the nerds, the half-humans like Sanchit.
Dhruv had fumbled with the reason why he wanted to top the examination, concocting stories, but Sanchit wasn’t Ritika and he didn’t buy his shit. He would have pretended to be too drunk, too busy, too stoned to teach him but he had relented for Dhruv had some inherent niceness in him, you could sense it and you were sure it existed, but you couldn’t get to it, and he respected that. It was also the reason why girls made him a project and fell in love with him.
Sanchit saw through the stories Dhruv tried to sell him but he knew all too well why Dhruv was poring over books, wasting precious paper and missing his morning cardio. He couldn’t help but think that it had to do with Aranya’s meteoric rise in the social fabric of DTU in the past two weeks, which had been nothing less than legendary. Sanchit, the reigning King Nerd of DTU, had been surprised when he attended one of the classes Aranya held to help out the weak students of the class (she had started with teaching one girl in her hostel and the crowd had swelled to thirty-three at last count). The girl was good, better than most professors even. And the college was rightfully talking about it. Sanchit knew this girl would go down in history. People would talk about her long after she was gone. The professors already were.
Sanchit remembered the last time it had happened, he was at the centre stage of it all. He was a young, untouched boy from a small town, hard-working as fuck and sharper than three grandmasters put together. In a college that prided itself on its research, a student like Sanchit was a virgin gold mine. No sooner had he topped the mid-semester examinations than he was drafted into the projects of three top-notch professors and he couldn’t say ‘no’. Three months of sleep deprivation and mind-numbing research pushed him to the brink, and in that brink lay the undiscovered world of alcohol, cigarettes and weed. It consumed Sanchit completely, robbed him of his desire to blow his professors’ cocks to be in their good books, and he dropped out of the projects unceremoniously. The professors were pissed but alcohol and weed make you a hell of a good liar and when he told them, tears in his eyes, hands shaking, about his brother (non-existent) who had died in a gruesome road mishap, they decided he needed time to grieve. Since then, Sanchit had been grieving.
History was repeating itself and the girl
was being courted by covetous professors who wanted mules to carry out their dirty, dreary, tiring research work, but Aranya had held her ground. She had become quite notorious for rejecting projects from the bigwigs in the college. He had heard Prof. Mitra, the dean, wasn’t impressed by the rejection at all (no one had ever rejected the dean).
His dislike for Prof. Raghuvir, the genius, was never hidden. But Aranya had nothing to worry about, with Professor X, Raghuvir, behind her there was nothing to worry. And of whatever little Sanchit knew, he guessed she was looking for Raghuvir to offer her a research scholar spot.
All this made Dhruv uncomfortable.
Sanchit guessed Dhruv was a big deal in his school, a brat, a hooligan even, the perfect anti-hero who walks into the class ten minutes late with an open wound on his forehead, blood dripping on to a crumpled white shirt now untucked courtesy the recent fight with a senior. In college though, no one gives a fuck. So while Dhruv with his little skirmishes in the hostel and the campus was fading into oblivion, the girl was searing her name into people’s brains. The only reason people still talked about Dhruv in the college was because he was dating Ritika, who looked kind of okay and ‘kind of okay’ is a big deal in any engineering college.
Or maybe, just maybe, he was falling in love with Aranya again. Sanchit believed Dhruv wanted to take her head-on. He was attempting to keep hating her because loving Aranya would mean a lot of pain for him.
I Love u Rachu
35
Ritika had dated before. Three boys to be precise, and with the last two she had gone all the way. With the first one because he was ‘oh my god, so hot’ and with the second because she thought she would end up with him. But she didn’t enjoy it much and thought sex was overrated.
But she wouldn’t dare discuss her previous sex life with Dhruv, who bristled at the mention of ex-boyfriends, forcing Ritika to modify the stories to sound like they were innocent puppy crushes and might well have happened when she was six and the boys were still shitting in their half-pants and picking food stuck in their braces when they were dating. She had since then deleted, blocked, threatened her ex-boyfriends. It was for their good.
Dhruv was different. He wasn’t kind or thoughtful or gentle or considerate, no Sir, instead he was ruthless. She used to imagine herself in a period drama where she’s neglected yet aggressively loved, taken for granted yet always The One, bored but infinitely aroused and prickled, wife of a merciless dictator with the world in his hands. Ritika used to love to revel in the fear and unabashed domination Dhruv used to exude. No boy or man had the guts to look at her more than the accidental eye contact. She was his girl. And no one messed with Dhruv’s girl.
In the past few weeks, she had broken up quite a few fights Dhruv had found himself in, always a few minutes too late though. It would start with a casual raise of an eyebrow from Dhruv to the target, warning him, and then he would clutch her hand tighter, look at her and tell her that he would be back, his face would be flushed, hair standing on his arms, and he would stride and without a second’s hesitation throw a punch right between the ears of any guy who dared to hit on her. Ritika would stand there, shocked, but secretly admiring Dhruv’s furious love for her, and then run to save the poor boy from Dhruv’s unrelenting assault.
‘I love you,’ she would say.
‘I love you, too,’ Dhruv would answer back, still panting but calmed, and she would feel like she were dating the Hulk. What more could she have asked for?
But the last two weeks had been less than ideal. Dhruv had been studying uncharacteristically hard and often at the expense of the time they used to spend together and talk about Dhruv’s unending hatred for his parents and for Aranya or Dhruv’s time in school which Ritika noted was riddled with stories of disgruntled parents of other kids, three-day suspensions, rustications, and bloodied noses of his classmates. Dhruv had failed thrice and changed three schools but not before leaving an indelible mark on the schools/students, his rate of disfiguring faces of young men higher than celebrity plastic surgeons.
The sheer amount of time Dhruv spent with Sanchit, the creep, discomfited her. Sanchit’s hatred for Ritika radiated from him even though they hadn’t exchanged a harsh word. Not that she liked him but it would have been good to have the approval of Dhruv’s only friend in college, no matter how dirty his bed sheets and his mind were.
Speaking of bed sheets and dirty minds, Ritika hadn’t been able to keep her hands off Dhruv. She often felt he was turning her into a nymphomaniac but there was something in the way Dhruv made love to her that kept her thinking about it for days, reliving the moments repeatedly. Physiologically and mechanically, everything was still the same, in fact sometimes it was uncomfortable because of his muscular arms and rough hands, but there was something incredibly sexy in the way he kept saying that he loved her, that he would never let her go, and that he would kill anyone who would try to wrest her away from him. Quite frankly, the first time he said these things she thought of him as a clingy psychopath, which he was, but slowly she started warming up to his fiercely protective demeanour. And then got addicted to the angry, scorching sex they had.
She had started missing it now; Dhruv was studying too hard and their stolen sessions in empty classrooms, the corners of the library and the far end of the football field had come down to a trickle.
Two weeks before the exams had started Ritika dragged Dhruv to the cavernous hall in the basement of the electrical department which doubled up as the table tennis room to a host of shirtless boys in boxers playing matches for money. But that day it was empty, and their voices echoed and it was a bit sexy and thrilling and wrong. Sitting on a bench in the far corner of the hall where it was the darkest, her arms wrapped around Dhruv, she felt shamelessly aroused.
But no sooner had she started to nuzzle against his shirt and into his rock hard pectoral muscles, trying to be adorable, than a screeching sound pierced through the silence and a yellow neon light flickered to life at a distance. She crinkled her eyes, and saw Aranya drag and push one-half of a table tennis table against the wall. Aranya stretched—she could touch her toes, Ritika would have never guessed that—eyed the wall as an opponent, threw the ball up and swirled her TT bat like she owned it. The ball spun and hit the wall and she smashed it on its return and smashed the return too. Aranya moved nimbly on her toes and soon the hall echoed like someone was firing an AK-47. She didn’t miss many shots, and on the rare occasion that she did, she cursed.
Ritika frowned when she saw Dhruv looking at Aranya shuffle like a pro, returning smashes to her own smashes, beating her own shots.
‘Let’s go,’ said Ritika.
‘But didn’t you want to be here?’ asked Dhruv, his eyes still on Aranya, who had broken into a sweat and whose deft feet reminded Ritika of a video she had seen of Muhammad Ali.
‘Not any more. I didn’t know the fatso would be here. Do you see what she’s wearing? Bleh. She should keep those legs hidden.’
Dhruv had nothing to add. A pissed Ritika got up to leave. ‘Are you coming or should I leave?’
Dhruv stood up and they walked across the hall; Aranya didn’t notice them leave, her Zen-like concentration unbroken. Outside, Dhruv and Ritika walked in silence.
‘What do you think of Aranya?’ asked Ritika.
‘I don’t think of her.’
‘You don’t? She’s the most popular girl in college right now. Everyone loves her.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘She’s holding classes for everyone, fights for extension of deadlines with professors and is the vice president of the debating team. She might make it to the Students’ Council as a first-year representative. Everyone’s talking about her and you want me to believe you don’t think of her. The entire college knows you loved her back in school.’
‘She made it up. She was just a friend. My parents were going through a divorce and she was around. That’s that.’
‘But didn’t she get you kicked out of scho
ol?’
‘Can we stop talking about it, please?’
‘I’m just saying. Didn’t Sanchit tell you? Guys from his batch have sent her letters and messages on Facebook and what not, proclaiming their love.’
‘I’m sure it’s Sanchit sending out all those messages,’ snapped Dhruv. ‘She’s just a nerd with a strange face.’
Ritika rolled her eyes. ‘Not really a nerd, is she? She’s making it to the TT team at least.’
‘It’s table tennis. No one gives a shit about TT.’ The way Dhruv said it, it felt like he did give a shit. ‘And will you stop obsessing over her? She’s nobody.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really,’ growled Dhruv.
They didn’t make out that day. Dhruv said he had to study and left Ritika thinking about Aranya, which she did with abandon in her free time. Since that day Ritika noticed the accidental but carefully orchestrated glances Dhruv threw at Aranya, who was being a curious mix of Mother Teresa and Cruella de Vil, strict and kind; friendly and professional. She had noticed the hatred in Dhruv’s voice whenever they talked about Aranya, which they had started doing a lot these days, and it bothered her. Dhruv would keep talking about how fucking populist Aranya was, a total attention whore, an average-looking girl seeking validation by being extra sweet, extra hard-working, needlessly intelligent. His words were harsher when he put Raghuvir and Aranya in a sentence, and he would find reasons to bunk Raghuvir’s classes.
‘You’re overthinking,’ Dhruv would say when she mentioned his obsession and wrap his arms around Ritika.
But that didn’t stop Dhruv from staring at her like she was a specimen, an alien, disgusting maybe, but also intriguing. She hated Aranya with a vengeance, and so did Dhruv, but the nature of their hatred was quite different.