Pursuit

Pursuit

 

Summer brought in heat alongwith hope. The heat and humidity in the city cursed by recurring power-cuts was suffocating. In Tezpur, trees around our house offered shade and kept us cool with intermittent breeze even when the mercury soared as high as 40° Celsius. In the six hundred and fifty square feet railway quarter where Ma, Nisim and I had moved in Guwahati had no trees around. There was an adamant stillness in the air. The heat felt more with every passing day owing to a pursuit that I hadn’t chosen, but had been pushed into.

That was the year when my intellectual prowess was to be tested against the best in the state, and in a broader sense, with each one of those in our country who either had chosen, or were prodded like me, into that pursuit. It was like war-time preparation. Everyone who knew me, wanted me to win it for them, and for my own self. The success of High School Leaving Certificate exams were to decide, as it appeared then, all our successes thereafter.

Ironically, success appeared with so many imperceptible dimensions. To those who passed in all previous classes with grace marks, it meant, giving their best to cross the threshold of pass marks. To those who managed decent averages year after year, the goal was to prove themselves above average. To those who were accustomed to getting ranks in their tiny circles of classmates, sometimes, even with decent first division marks, success was to secure Distinction. And to those who effortlessly got Distinction in their previous exams, well, again within the tiny periphery of their school, now the challenge was to secure a rank across the state. The arena was same, but the game was different for each of the players, and there were over a million players. And so the perception of failure also differed for each of us. The only common thing was that failure was an imperceptible, unanswerable, out-of-syllabus question. For me, anything less than a rank would mean failure, not because I had managed a respectable 85% over the last three years, but because, I was the last living representative among our extended family of paternal relatives – basically the legendary Bhattacharya Clan of Tezpur town – to sit for the exam. All previous representatives in our clan, including Nisim, had secured ranks. The stakes were so high that I couldn’t see life after the results, if I let them down.

Love with its yearning to be accepted in the first place, and to remain accepted thereafter is good as long as it doesn’t get entangled with pursuits like exams. Spontaneous as love is, I couldn’t do anything to subdue it. Snippets of moments imagined with Maina kept coming back at weird hours: while making Social Studies notes, while trying to figure out the theorems of Geometry, while reading La Belle Dame Sans Merci from the Alternative English textbook. I felt more inclined to write poems myself, rather than structuring the answers to reference-to-context questions from the poems in syllabus. Progressive as love is, every passing day, I realized the yearning grow exponentially. So much so that I was acquiring irrelevant, time-consuming and drastic rituals. Rituals like writing long, and oftentimes, inconclusive letters to her, watching the same films over and over again whenever they were aired in cable TV (in the following seven months I had watched Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge at least sixteen times). Linear as love is, my journey to her had become almost unstoppable, irresistible and piercingly straight. It pierced through and did everything to shatter the biggest pursuit of the year into tiny unrecognizable pieces. I felt I would be able to get beyond the hourly struggle of re-aligning myself to the year’s greatest pursuit only if I got a Yes from Maina.

What did I see in the imagined moments with Maina? It mostly depended on the hour of the day and the song that echoed within. Sometimes, I would see myself walking up to her, not caring the surroundings and politely asking her if she loved me, while Dhire dhire se meri zindagi mein aana played at the back of my mind. Sometimes, I would dream of walking hand-in-hand with her in Nehru Park, reciting one or the other poem I’d written for her with Tujhe dekha toh yeh jana sanam at the backdrop. Sometimes, I would see myself fighting goons sent by her rich and famous parents and eloping with her to a distant hill crooning all the way Akele hain toh kyan gham hai together. Surprisingly, sometimes I would be at their home too, trying to be a part of their splendid household, helping them with chores, and stealing out moments to catch a glimpse of her, share a word or two, give her a quick hug behind the kitchen door, or pull her inside the bathroom and kiss her lips. This last bit of imagination or rather a fantasy, I think now, was undoubtedly fanned by repeat-watching of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. At rare, but irresistibly powerful moments, I would see Maina and me, stuck in the rain in a thatched house, at an unknown place, our bodies yearning for each other, and we, oblivious of time and circumstances, giving in to the moment. Well, basically having a great fuck.

The trail of those rare but irresistibly powerful sensual moments, left me dizzy, and I would feel relieved only after jerking off. And after I was done, an entirely different trail of familiar, irresistibly powerful and oftentimes fossilizing thoughts would overwhelm my mind: the thoughts around all the stuff that had remained incomplete or piled up as per the plan of studies for over a fortnight! The year’s greatest pursuit would slither into the brain tissues, just as the feeling of spontaneous, progressive, linear eunoia gushed out of my penis in the form of semen.

Cliché, right? What’s the big deal – everybody goes through these as teenagers – you might be thinking, right?

There’s no story in it. I completely agree. This situation is as much hackneyed as human race itself is. The problem was with me. I was at the edge of a cliff, about to fall, and I didn’t know whether I would ever be able to rise up ever again.

That Maina’s actual name was Junali, didn’t take long to find out. Almost all my new acquaintances, mostly the guys I played cricket with, knew her family. Hers was an illustrious family – The Rajbongshis. She studied at St. Mary’s – arguably the best convent school in the city. Her spoken English, people said, was the best in our locality.

Sharp at 7:35 in the morning, without fail, she would wait for her school bus to pick her up. She was in the ninth grade. She had more than a year to prepare for the greatest pursuit. I was a class senior! This was perhaps the most valuable information of the year! So, on some seemingly random mornings, I sneaked out of the room, took brisk walks to the bus-stop and passed by her in a way, as if I was in the busiest mission ever to reach somewhere. Her mother (who also was surprisingly beautiful for a middle aged woman) always held her by her hand, as if she was the most precious gem anybody has ever owned. Junali indeed was. And that’s why at 7:35 in the morning, leaving aside my greatest pursuit of the year, I would reach there, at the bus stop. Just with the hope of one flicker of a moment, when our eyes would meet.

In the first few days, I would be left unnerved, albeit scared whenever our eyes met, even if it was for a millionth of a second. As days passed by, I was, kind of, convinced that she too, relished the attention she was getting. By the time the pre-board exams were hovering over my head, it had become an irrevocable, involuntary, early morning ritual to wait at the Anuradha Bus Stop for a glimpse of Junali. This ritual robbed me off the most important hours of studies. I would be back in our apartment, in about fifteen minutes, but those post-meet moments were the tidal hours when the waves of imagination made their longest and most engaging appearances. The waves would disperse only with some sort of contemplative outburst, in the form of a poem or a letter, or after a highly imaginative, celestially crafted masturbating stint. I had no inkling that those moments would become the testimonials of all my life experiences.

The first of those life experiences, nevertheless, was a sharp dip in marks in the pre-board exams. The sympathy my clan showered upon me after that mishap, only burdened me with the weight of their legacy. I was sceptical whether they would continue to attribute all my failings during that year and thereafter to a trauma Nisim, Ma and I were sub-consciously struggling to get over. The trauma of my father’s death. He had died an unfortunate and mistimed death on a bone-chilling January afternoon the same year.

The truth I was gradually getting conscious of, was that, more than the trauma of my father’s death, it was the yearning for Junali that could lead to the failure to keep the legacy of my clan alive. Only I knew the truth. And so I kept it to myself.

With just about three months remaining for the board exams, I was then sunk in an inescapable dilemma. Whether to keep the yearning at bay until the exams were over and focus only on studies, or to rise up valiantly to the occasion and follow both pursuits. My friend, Biswa had experienced a similar yearning about a year ago when he fell for his neighbour’s daughter, Nitumoni Gogoi. I thought of him. How he must be doing, now that Nitumoni and her family had moved to Guwahati?

I thought of my father. If he was there, we wouldn’t have moved to Guwahati, I wouldn’t have met Junali and perhaps, I would be able to live up to the expectations of my clan. What seemed effortless a few months ago, now appeared insurmountable. I felt, even if I could manage a decent 65%, I would still be able to ride on my clan’s sympathy, and then sort out this thing…love…once and for all, after the exams. I even resolved to focus on making repairs in the Higher Secondary exams in two years. I felt, I could do my best in all pursuits of my life, if only Junali was with me.

The sympathy-rider was a delusion, and I realized it when I went to Tezpur for my father’s first death anniversary in January the following year. In fact, the sympathy-rider had vanished…well I now feel, it was deliberately made to vanish. I didn’t know who did it.

The afternoon I reached Tezpur with Ma and Nisim, my uncle called me to his side of the lawn and asked, “So, how’s it going, Xoru?” The it in his question referred to the preparation for the exams. Now there was just about a month and a half left.

“Good,” I said, making my best effort not to get busted while smiling.

“Good or great?”

“Yes, great,” I replied and smiled again.

“You’ll do great. Dada’s blessings are with you,” he looked up at the sky, lowered his head, smiled and wiped out the tear collecting on his lower eyelid. I just managed to nod my head and smile back at him. I felt his pain when I looked into his eyes. It was spontaneous. Spontaneous like love. He missed my father too.

“Anything you need, just let me know. Anything. Okay? Don’t hesitate.”

“Okay.”

Then it was Aita, my octogenarian grandmother. Her vision was weak ever since I became aware of her existence as a toddler, but she sensed people from their smell. Ma said that Aita was now also losing her memory. When I went to meet her, she was lying on her bed. It was her time of that post-lunch, afternoon nap which she might have never skipped in her life-time. As I entered her room, she turned to my side and muttered, “Have you come, Kanu?”

Kanu was the nickname of my father. Only Aita and Ma called him by that name.

“It’s me…” even before I could tell her my name, she quipped in, “Was the journey tiring? Go, freshen up. I’ll get you some food. Let me call Manju. I don’t know what has happened to me, I feel numb all the time.”

Manju was an invisible presence in our Tezpur household even thirty years after her death. My father, uncle and all their friends used to refer to that existence as Manju Mahi. She was Aita’s aide, confidante, caretaker and friend. Aita’s father had sent her along with Aita, when she came to live with our grandfather after their marriage. Manju Mahi died during one of the cholera outbreaks of the earlier part of twentieth century, but made her reappearance when Aita had started losing her memory. After my father’s death.

And now, Aita was calling her for help. I couldn’t quite understand, what kind of memory loss was it that brought the dead ones closer to remembrance than the living ones? What kind of memory loss was it that it transcended the affection for one’s near and dear ones beyond time, space and circumstances? The power of Aita's memory loss was so strong that despite her ill health, she mustered the energy to get up, look around and call out once more: “Manju.”

As I walked up to her, she tried to feel my face with her wrinkled, feeble palms.

“Didn’t get time to shave? Go and shave while you freshen up. You will look like your father.” Aita mistook me for my father, and was comparing me to our grandfather.

I wanted to correct her, break her reverie, but held myself back. She wasn’t living an old, forsaken life, burdened with woes and trauma of the present. With the awareness of Manju and her dead son’s constant presence, despite all her ailments, she was living a full life. A progressive one. One that was filled with love.

When I was leaving the room, after touching her feet, she called me from behind and said:

“Bopa, now that you’ve come back, make us proud.”

Aita died in June that year, a week before the board exam results were declared. But her last words stayed back with me.

And then, finally it was the congregation of all familiar faces on the day of my father’s death anniversary rituals. As was the custom, Nisim, being the elder son, performed most of the rituals, except for a few where I was also summoned to take part. All those who had come to attend the rituals, seemed to have one unified purpose for me:

MAKE US PROUD. FOR YOU ARE YOUR FATHER’S SON.

I felt guilty, without even doing anything. The recurring awareness of the lousy preparation I had, made me feel so. From where I was then, a Distinction was like travelling to Mars, let alone a state-wide rank.

During that four-day stay in Tezpur, I looked for Biswa’s company. He was there, helping us with the arrangement for the rituals, exactly the same way he had been there before, as family. However, we avoided each other. Rather, I must say, we skipped every opportunity of talking to each other. The wounds from a nine month old spat over cricket were still fresh.

Biswa had done better in the pre-boards, a giant leap from 74% in the half-yearly to 83%. His success was the most quoted example in our house. It was such a sharp contrast with mine. From a respectable 85% in the Class IX finals to 73% in the Class X half-yearly to 65% in the pre-boards, mine was like a free fall.

On the day of my father’s death anniversary rituals, I overheard a few of his colleagues suggesting Ma to take me to a counsellor. Counsellor? NO! I didn’t need counselling. I knew what the problem was. There were two pursuits: one, to do well in the board exams and keep our clan’s legacy alive; two, to get a YES from Junali and be in love with her for the rest of my life.

Nine months ago, both looked so achievable. And now, just three months to the exams, and after nine months of shamelessly stalking her, I was stuck at the same point. Same bloody point. I needed to tell Biswa all these, I needed to know how he was dealing with the separation from Nitumoni.

On the day we were to return to Guwahati, Biswa and I finally spoke, and I asked him about Nitumoni. He thought I was trying to add salt to his injury. He was in pain. He said that he had to do well in the board exams and all the exams thereafter for Nitumoni. Then he showed me a letter:

I won’t call you Bura, as everyone else calls you. I don’t even like your name Biswajit. It sounds so hyperbolic. No, I trust you. I know, you have all the will and strength you need, to win the world. But then, Biswajit is just so heavy. I fear, I may get crushed under its weight. Nitumoni sounds so light, so airy beside it. I will call you Moon. I don’t know what it means in our language. In English, you know what it means. But it’s not the English Moon that I will call you. I will call you the Assamese Moon. Perhaps it just evokes an emotion. An emotion to remain hitched to you. Because, here, in this big, noisy city with strangers of all shapes and sizes, I need this emotion so badly. I hope you understand.

We will meet soon.

Till then keep winning the world.

Yours unfailingly

Nitu

 

I was simply blown over when this letter of acceptance from Nitumoni. The lines were written in Assamese. I scribbled the English version of it from whatever I remembered from the reading. I was blown over, because, until then, I hadn’t come across anybody expressing their love so beautifully. I wished I could tell Junali about my feelings in the same mesmerizing way.

I told my friend, “Tamam dei!”

I wasn’t being sarcastic but I think Biswa thought so. On the other hand, I was being grateful to him, because I owed him the courage to take the next step in my pursuit of love.

Courage kills inhibitions swiftly, almost unawares. Once we were back in Guwahati, during one of those early morning rituals, I mustered the courage to wait at the bus-stop, rather than just pass by Junali and her equally beautiful mother. When she arrived with her mother that morning, I kept looking at her, straight into her eyes. My heart skipped beats every other moment, and I felt sweat beads gathering on my forehead on that cold January morning. But then, she was looking into my eyes too, at the stake of being busted by her mother. I kept looking into her eyes, until the bus moved. She was standing by the first seat of the already crowded bus, her eyes, still fixed on mine, and just before the bus left, she smiled. A quick Gioconda smile, like you see in the painting of Monalisa. I felt she was whispering into my ears: Aami tomaake bhalobashi.

In the weeks that followed, until the board exams started, our early morning ritual of exchanging quick glimpses graduated to long, confident, admiring gazes, often complemented with quick smiles that would go unnoticed to the rest of the world. By the time I returned to my study table, I would become restless and the long trail of imagined moments of togetherness would flow in. Another day of study would go unutilized. I tried to figure out what EXACTLY I needed from her. Nothing, but one small assurance that those unblinking, admiring gazes, the smiles, the early morning ritual were not delusion, that she loved me too. I needed that assurance because there were greater things I had to do to have her in my life forever.

Of all things I had to do, one thing showed up its loud presence every day of our lives. It came in the way of covering the distance of a few yards from where I stood in the bus-stand to where she and her mother stood, bring up the Aami-tomakey-bhalobashi-moment at the Bihutoli, and politely confess that I longed for her friendship. This was so common, wasn’t it? Every other boy of my age would have at least that amount of courage. And why friendship? Because it was the gateway to love. Isn’t that we got to see in the films of the time? But then something came between us.

Junali was the daughter of a businessman who owned a fleet of six mini-buses and a grocery shop. My entire family’s yearly income would be her family’s expenses for a fortnight. In Guwahati, our shelter was a two-bedroom railway quarter in an apartment of twelve such quarters, whereas she lived in a plush Assam-type Bungalow in a hillock by the colony. Her house was literally a fortress, with huge boundary-walls and a mammoth iron gate that would allow two SUVs to pass side by side. The difference in what she had and what I had not, made for a clear economic gap. I had no hope of bridging it any time soon. It was just another rich-girl-poor-boy fairy-tale that was shown in every two out of three of our films. After watching Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (which was a welcome digression from the theme) I had started hating the theme of clear economic divide. And now, I had become a part of it. Irony at its best.

Also, she was the most beautiful of all human beings I had seen until then, and I was just about an average-looking guy. I could neither boast of Nisim’s tough-built torso or the mesmerizing grey eyes of my father or their height of six feet one inches. At five feet five, I had inherited the height of my mother’s fish-eating clan. In my best of appearances, I looked shamefully unfit, and frustratingly thin. Why on earth would Junali even in her weirdest nightmares think of me?

Worst of all that came in between us then was the language I had, over the years, fallen in love with – English. Junali, as I had come to know, with her convent schooling background, spoke impeccably good English. You would get a fair idea of how my spoken English was then, if I tell you this small anecdote.

About a month before his death I showed my father a story I had written. It was a rags-to-riches story about one of the many friends of he had. He read it and then said that my writing skills were good enough for a Class X student, but I might find myself in a moment of embarrassment, if I didn’t work on my spoken bit, especially pronunciation. He said, “When you learn a language, you’ve got to speak it the way it is supposed to. Just being able to write it is half-learning” I did start working on my pronunciation and spoken English, with his guidance, although I found it hilarious to ape the BBC news-readers’ accent. Things came to a creaky halt with his demise. And now, there I was, suffering from an inferiority complex because I was still not confident with my sha and cha sounds.

Courage kills inhibitions. Another information scoop a week before the board exams, unveiled things that surprisingly rejoiced me. But at the cost of my beloved’s sufferings. I was surprisingly rejoiced, when I came to know, as it was the talk of the colony then, that what Mr Rajbongshi flaunted and what he actually had, were completely different stories. All the six buses he said he owned had long since been taken over by his friend, Mr Khogen Tamuli as security against the loans the latter had given him to repay the huge sums he had lost in gambling over the years. This came to light when the other priceless possession of the family, the one thousand two hundred square feet grocery shop, had most of its shelves empty.

According to this latest information scoop, this same store was once what we would call now a one-stop-shop. Mr Rajbongshi couldn’t keep it replenished due to lack of funds. And he had no funds because he had been categorically losing them to gambling over the years. Rumours were also rife that he was himself dying a slow and painful death due to cancer. Most of the time, he would be home, lying on his bed or drinking or yelling at someone in his family. What was heart-breaking to hear was that he kept his family in the dark about his actual condition for years until he could no longer resist it from being exposed. Junali’s mother, a woman in late thirties, so far merrily engrossed in delivering her familial duties, mostly supervising the maids and servants while they did the family’s household chores, was now in a precarious situation. To run the family’s expenses and to pay for her husband’s treatment, she had now started running the shop, often parting with her jewelleries to pay off past debts or to replenish the stocks from suppliers. What came as a bolt from the blue was the news that Junali’s mother had sold off their fortified, plush Assam-type Bungalow and the shop; that the family would soon move to some other place in a month’s time!

I should have been devastated to hear about all these, wondering about the dark, unknown future my beloved was being hurled into, whereas I was feeling surprisingly rejoiced. This latest information broke the inhibition of clear economic divide. Junali seemed reachable.

Nisim had prepared a study-plan for me for the last phase of preparation for the board exams. With exactly a week for the exams to start, I was supposed to focus on the absolute grey areas in Advanced Mathematics, Chemistry and Biology. The first exam was of English, and I was fully prepared for it. The second one, Advanced Mathematics, was a nightmare. So, on the first five days of the penultimate week, I had to revise everything in Advanced Mathematics and utilize the sixth day for revising English. However, what I ended up doing was this: I discreetly practised, most of my waking hours, what we might now call pick-up lines in front of the mirror, focussing on my English pronunciation. But this wasn’t enough. I had to find a way to meet Junali alone, and the morning ritual of gazes and smiles at the bus-stop, didn’t allow any such opportunity.

In those eleven months, Junali had become a tenth grader too, as the state academic sessions for high schools used to start in January then. She was now into her own preparations for her biggest pursuit the following year. Right after her school hours, as I got to know, she went for her Science tuitions somewhere near Chandmari. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. These three days, she got down from her school bus at Chandmari bus-stop, took a walk to the tuition centre. One of those walks was my opportunity. Those were the only moments, when she would be alone, or may be with her classmates who wouldn’t be difficult to tackle. But then, there were other stronger inhibitions. Rather fears. The worst of all was the fear of local vigilantes (some elderly young men from the vicinity whose sole purpose in life seemed to trouble younger people for silly reasons, like love) – the moment they would see a boy and girl walking together, they would get into teasing or in worst cases, blackmailing the poor couple of busting them in front of their guardians. Honestly, at any rate, I didn’t want any noise about my affair. Not until my exams were over. Practically never. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge left a lasting impression on me, of experiencing love discreetly, without any noise, as long as noise was avoidable. So, I consciously put off my idea of approaching her during one of those three days until my exams were over. It was just a matter of three weeks.

The English paper went well. I would say better than I had expected. I could complete writing all answers within two and a half hours and utilize the remaining thirty minutes to check for silly errors in the answer-sheet. In fact, it went so well, that the benchmark of the year’s biggest pursuit started looking achievable, until I sat down to revise Advanced Mathematics in the afternoon. It appeared as an alien subject. I realized, I didn’t know anything of it. Nothing at all. I was shivering, as if I had high fever. Ma and Nisim had no idea what I had set myself up to in the last eleven months. I cursed my short-sightedness and inability to calibrate the weight of the pursuits. All those eleven months, there was just one thing I did persistently. Made a fool of myself. And what do fools mostly do? They give up. I gave up on Advanced Mathematics, on all the ensuing papers, on Junali, on life. I sat at my study hopelessly staring at the previous years’ question papers, waiting for dinner. That night, I think, we had the quietest dinner since we had moved to Guwahati about a year ago.

Nisim and I shared the same bed in the outer room, which we used as our living-cum-bed room. Nisim entered the room when I was making the bed.

“What happened Xoru? Why are you so quiet today?” he asked, giving a nudge. “Did he sense something?” crossed my mind. He was so freaking good at sensing things.

I nodded my head to mean ‘nothing’, but he wouldn’t take it for an answer.

“Should I call Ma? Anything that you are worried about?”

I nodded my head again, but he wasn’t convinced.

It was only when he was about to call Ma, that I asked him to stop.

We spent the next two hours on the terrace, sitting on the water-tank, sharing cigarettes for the first time. I spewed out all that I had in my mind for eleven months.

“What I’ll do now, is not meant to hurt you, but to bring you back to the moment. This moment, okay?” he said, with his eyes almost piercing mine.

“What will you do?” I asked. I wanted to cry, but even then, at that critical point in my life, I couldn’t.

“Close your eyes. Slowly.”

I closed my eyes, while I could feel chaos inside my brain-tissues.

“Now take four deep breaths. Slowly.”

I did as he said. I was in a free fall. The chaos was subsiding.

Then, what I felt was a tight slap on my right cheek. So hard it was that I was about to tumble down the water-tank, but Nisim held my hand and brought me closer to his chest. Did he already anticipate that his slap would bring down tears in my eyes? That it would make me cry for the next half an hour, like a five year old? Or was he angry?

“Neelim Bhattacharya, my dearest brother, now you are a man. Now, you and I can talk.”

“What is there to talk about? I have broken your trust. I am going to let all of you down tomorrow.”

“Honestly, I don’t care. I don’t care whether you get hundred percent, Star, Distinction, rank or you flunk tomorrow’s paper. I really don’t. I think no one does. Yes, trust me, no one does. Not even Ma. If Deuta was alive, perhaps, he also wouldn’t care. Least of all, our relatives.”

He was lying. Everybody I had met in the last eleven months wanted me to do exceptionally well in the exams. In fact, Nisim himself had poked his nose so many times to set my study-plan. He was lying. I was about to lose trust in him.

“I’m not lying. I am being blunt and honest. Do you know why all of us kept pestering you about good results and all that?”

“Why?”

“Because, each one of us thought, this is exactly what you want to achieve this year.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did, Dada. I honestly did. And I still do.”

“No, you never did, and that is perfectly fine. Because, in all these months, if you look back, you had other important and greater pursuits. You said you love Rajbongshi’s daughter, and Puali, love is the greatest pursuit a living being can have.”

Was he being sarcastic? Was he trying to vent out his anger by trapping me in the maze of words? I couldn’t figure it out. He sensed it well.

“I’m not giving gyan, brother. All I am trying to say is that love is the greatest pursuit you can have in your life-time. But that’s not enough. Love is also the deadliest of all pursuits. It is the deadliest, because it constantly keeps asking ‘what can you do for me?’ So, tell me Neelim, what can you do for the one you love? Things that you won’t get tired of doing for the rest of your life. Things that you’ll do for her in an endless loop.”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet, you know. You have been doing things for her all these months, right? Things that you never really cared for before meeting her?”

What did I do? I just imagined moments with her and wrote some poems, letters describing those moments and just one story. That was it, if I discounted the whims of pleasure…masturbation. I told Nisim only about the writings.

“You are all set then, brother. Just keep writing. Writing is creation. And the best thing you can do for someone you love is create.”

“But what about the exams? Those are also important.”

“Now you are talking. You tell me what you should do…well, forget about what you should do. Tell me what you feel like doing.”

“I feel like sitting for the exams.”

“There you go. Let’s do it then.”

“But I’m not prepared for tomorrow’s paper.”

“Go with whatever you have prepared. I trust you. You are not a dumb-ass. You are not going to flunk.”

“But what if I do?”

“Will you still consider writing?”

“Yes, I will. It just happens so automatically.” I didn’t have to think.

“Then, how does it matter even if you flunk? As I said, nobody really cares about it. So, all that matters is what you really care for.”

I was still confused. But I trusted Nisim. He was my Time. With him by me, I always knew things would set themselves right in the end.

“Let’s go and get some rest now. Tomorrow, when you wake up, do two things. Go through the syllabus and remind yourself only of the chapters you are fairly comfortable with. I am not saying that you have to be hundred percent sure of them. Just fairly comfortable. That’s it. Scurry through the sums and theorems you are, kind of, familiar with. In case, you have doubts, come to me. I’ll skip college tomorrow. When you write the paper, attempt questions only from those chapters. Even if it constitutes only the passing marks.”

“Okay. But what’s the second thing I need to do?”

“What I told you now, was the second thing. The first thing is, when you wake up, take a clean white sheet of paper and your best pen. Write a one-page letter for Junali. Spend one hour on it. Just one hour. But make sure, it is the best thing you’ve written so far. Because, you are going to give this letter to her tomorrow.”

“What?” I thought he had gone crazy. He was asking me to dread the impossible.

“It is possible. You have your exam paper in the second half, right?”

“Yes.”

“After you come out of the exam hall, you will go to Chandmari. Straightaway. Meet her, greet her, give her the letter. That is all you have to do. As I said, love constantly keeps asking ‘what can you do for me?’ Tomorrow, this is exactly what love wants you to do.”

I can still see the images of the evening, I had dared to walk up to Junali at Chandmari bus stop. It took hell lot of courage just to call out her name from behind while her eyes were busy reading the route numbers of the buses.

As she turned, without even uttering a word, I gave her a neatly folded small sheet of paper:

Dear,

I won’t call you Maina, as everyone else calls you. I don’t even like your name Junali. It sounds so underrated. Your eyes have more light than moonshine. Honestly, they have. I felt it the first time I saw you at the Bihutoli last year. And I felt you can light up everything around you, with your smile. It has the freshness of Bohag. So, if you allow, I’ll call you Bohagi. I don’t really know what it means. Perhaps it means something related to the season of Spring. But, for sure it evokes an emotion. An emotion to remain hitched to the freshness of life forever. Just as I want to be hitched to your love, forever. Your love is my freshness of life.

Will we meet again, Bohagi?

Waiting for a full view of your eyes and smile.

 

Neelim.

 

The echo of my first English words I told her, comes back breezing in: “eksualee, I waant to geeve you dees”. I wasn’t prepared for the blank look she had given after I handed over to her the piece of folded paper. How would she know it was my heart rolled into words?

“What’s this?” she asked, her eyes expressing an infant’s curiosity, and I had no clue what to say next. Her voice was buttery, and from the instant look she gave with her hazel-eyes, I anticipated, she would be sharp-tongued. It was damn difficult to speak to a convent-school girl!

“Maane…aai meen…dees eez ay…letter. Pleez read it” I somehow managed to say. I am not exaggerating, not trying to build up things. I can still hear the echo of the sounds my ramshackle spoken English had created. Words were slyly hovering over my head, but seemed difficult to catch hold of, to form sentences. To top it all, there was this embarrassing realization of having mispronounced every word I’d spoken. I couldn’t help it.

Junali, however, accepted the note with a smile and left. Smile that was full and wide. Welcoming. Perhaps she knew this was to happen someday. She half-turned for a moment after walking ahead a few steps. I could take that as a confirmation that love had happened, and I was pretty much on my way to be adorned with a YES from her.

How could Shahrukh Khan’s prophecy from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge be wrong:

If she turns back to see you, she is in love with you!

As for the board exams, I scored a decent 71% overall, but managed to get a 96% in English. The overall was 17% less than what Biswa got, but it was good enough to get me admission in B.Barooah College for Higher Secondary. I was happy. Because, Ma and Nisim looked happy. Well, they didn’t look happy. They were genuinely happy. They gifted me a Complete Works of Shakespeare and signed it:

Congratulations on your first big achievement.

Blessings & Best wishes for the days to come.

Create like the Master, every day of your life.

– from Deuta,

Ma & Dada

But four days ago, when I was standing in front of Junali, in the claustrophobic smoking-room in Kolkata airport, and when these memories flashed back as moving, monochromatic images, there was no echo of happiness of that eighteen year old moment, no thrill at recalling the year’s biggest pursuit. The moment appeared like a small, lightweight, wooden box which could be blown away by the gentle, afternoon breeze of Spring.

In that smoking-room, it didn’t even matter that while battling my first conscious struggle while chasing the year’s biggest pursuit, I had discovered my life-long pursuits: Junali and stories. In fact, the entire episode felt like a rotten formula film script. Something that most of you are tired of watching, reading, conceiving, writing, re-writing and scrapping. Cliché.