***
It became a habit with him to call on her for dinner dates or lunches. It was so much fun goading her, especially in front of her parents when she pretended to have reformed and couldn’t bite back.
He recalled clearly the first time he’d seen her in college. He’d been besotted with her dusky beauty, until she’d started speaking vociferously about her favorite causes—feminism, helping the marginalized and saving old buildings. And then she’d gone head to head with him in their first year of college, competing for the prestigious Punjab Student of the Year Award. It was to be judged by none other than his idol Shoaib Peerzada. Akbar considered him to be the greatest Pakistani architect of all time and desperately wanted to impress him.
Her architectural project had been impractical but ‘green’ and she’d snagged the coveted prize that he’d been after. Just swiped it clean from under his nose, and done it while openly criticizing him and his ‘loose ways with everything that should be sacred’. Just because he’d designed something that represented commercial contemporary architecture as a replacement of the old, dilapidated buildings of the city, which were practically a heap of stones and dust, even if they were historical. She’d come down on him and his project like a ton of bricks. It had been epic. It was a politically correct decision for the administrators of the award, but she’d taken it as a validation of her stance.
She sat across from him now, absentmindedly eating her salad. He recalled his lame-ass attempt to bury the hatchet at graduation. In her typical KK-way, she’d been arrogant and dismissive. His youthful fragile ego had been bruised badly. She shot him down in front of all his friends and all the girls who worshipped the ground he walked on. She’d called him quite a few epithets that were probably true and a few that weren’t but it was that last thing she’d said that still rankled.
‘Akbar Rasul, you’re a depraved, grossly over-confident, spoilt boy, without an iota of real talent! What you have is a pedestrian and cheap desire to make a name for yourself by razing to the ground what men greater than you have accomplished. And if you think your charming little act is going to work on me, you’re sadly mistaken. I’m not your average bimbo, and you’ll never be able to fool me, so why don’t you take your offer of friendship somewhere else, and start planning your vulgar high-rises?’
He bristled at the memory.
What better way to put an end to their feud other than right where it had started? He was going to have to intimate their old classmates with this latest development.