Parchment ~ arzvi

It was the final exam during my senior  year in college. I completed the entire ‘Distributed systems’ paper in under two hours and had an hour to kill. Not being very keen to leaving the exam center as I won’t find any decent company outside, my pen became the object of entertainment. My mind entered the Game of Thrones. The sword fight against the enemy became so tough that I shook the pen so wildly once. It took off, hitting the fat ass Raj who sat beside me. He looked up at the offender and my sheepish smile was he could get in return. Apologizing with my gesture I asked for my pen. He took a look at it and noting it was a valuable piece, returned the sheepish smile after throwing it out of the window. I scorned. The next forty minutes was spent in pestering Prasad and Venky to complete their exams sooner so we can start the party in time. Eleven grand was invested on the party and I did not want to miss even a second of it. The studious nerd Prasad was, he started pestering me to check his answers when I  knocked his head asking him to shut up. “You won’t fail, alright? Think about the girls we’ve invited to the party now, will you? Pest.” I advised him.

It was about a quarter to nine when the party became decently crowded. Dj Ivan played trance and house and got a loud boo when he played my request of Du Hast by Rammstein.

“No body likes heavy metal” Prasad comforted me.

“It ain’t heavy metal dude, it’s industrial,” Venky clarified. He turned towards Prasad realizing his reply had become a soliloque and saw him staring at the entrance. It was Asha. “Ha, here comes the drama,” he said and turned towards the bar to refill his whisky.

“Macha, where is Venky?” asked Prasad still gaping.

“He left to the bar seeing you gawk”

“I need a wingman”

“You know I won’t be THAT”

“I know. So what do I do, there is no one to help me now.”

“Dude, this is the last day and you know she’s leaving to The States tomorrow, this is your last chance. Go get her yourself dawg.” I pushed him towards Asha.

After another five minutes of motivation, peek into his life if he doesn’t ask her out now, and a lot of references to romantic and tragic novels, Prasad finally went towards his pursuit of love. I couldn’t bear the drama and headed to the bar and got a shot of jager. Venky kept watching the drama and described in a running commentary while I stared the television that played music videos.

Prasad was raised in a south Indian village. The orthodoxy ways in his community prevented any conversations between an eligible adult male and a woman, didn’t matter if she was a lady or a girl. His father practiced religion very staunchly that an unmarried girl was not allowed into his home. His school did not help either. They fined everytime a boy and a girl spoke to each other. Considering that the entire school was run down by thugs when the village head’s daughter, a student eloped with a boy of a lower caste, they practiced the adage prevention is better than cure. He desperately wanted to run away from his home and college gave him the chance. After help from all of his six uncles and 7 aunts to convince his father that he wouldn’t be raped by city girls or would he turn into a drug dealer, he moved to Bangalore.

It was then Prasad’s life turned from a black and white movie to a colored one. Each and every girl dressed in tights with free flowing hair was his Demi Moore. He fell out of love the same speed with which he fell into. The side effects were poetry and lots of whisky parties(he considered them ‘opening up to friends asking for intervention’, while his friends considered them parties only to deal with a cry baby). After much deliberation and a new passion of cricket, Prasad finally grew up. I was happy to hear him rant about his boundaries and sixes in the day’s match anyday over the tear jerker outpour of his feelings of love towards a new girl every week. I got my afternoons back.

My peaceful world was shattered again when Asha entered his life. Prasad met her during one of the meetings with the organizing committees for the send off party for final years. He had fallen in love after just ten minutes of conversation. The dam that held the river of his poetry intact, broke and flooded my ears. Prasad would talk to her for hours about anything, be it anytime of the day. I usually threw him out of the room at nights but during winters he pleaded that I sleep with my ear plugs. He’d return the favor with costlier single malts. I liked them Scottish imports and so didn’t bother to sleep with the ear plugs on. It was only the nights we lost supply of electricity that angered me a lot as the ambient noise of our good old ceiling fan stopped helping me deflect the love birds talk.

The last day of the third year saw him finally collecting all his strengths to propose to Asha. We made a grand send off when he left the hostel. It was another three hours after he came back all drenched. He did not talk about it the whole night. I thought his trial ended in failure and slept with a little sadness as it would be some months before the supply of single malts would get restored. Prasad woke me up around four the next morning and explained what had happened. I was pissed but then he was my buddy, so I listened. It was when he went about the open water well he saw Asha and Ranjit kissing each other. He become so shocked that he gasped for breadth, which the lip locked love birds heard. Before they could turn, wanting to hide, he had fallen into the well. He climbed the ladder after confirming they had left. I was sad at this tragic event and wanted to write a novella about Prasad and Asha.

“Dude, look at him, twitching like a baby. He can’t handle it. He is going to faint,” Venky was enjoying what he saw.

“If you are so concerned, why don’t you go and help him instead of bugging me?” I was no more amused.

“Dude look. Asha doesn’t even reply or nod at him. Its as if she doesn’t care about his presence. Haha, I am going to record it and upload to youTube. This might be my big break”.

“Dei, go away man.”

I had a bad experience with love myself, especially with the girl. It was Nichi, the woman of my dreams. She was the one who fulfilled everything I wanted my life partner to be. Independent, artful, loved books, loved movies especially science fiction ones. Man! I don’t know if there was even a single girl in this universe who liked science fiction. The first time I spoke to her she described the ring world so lucidly that I went and got Larry Niven’s and finished it that night. Also another thing, no one even in their dreams, can try to manipulate her. It was how mentally strong she was. There was an old saying that went like ‘what you see is false, what you hear is false, only investigating thoroughly will lead you to the truth’. She carried it with her every day.  Her tees always had some graphic I liked be it the Shrike from Hyperion Cantos or The Joker, the Batman’s nemesis. She was every nerd’s dream girl.

What begun as a continuous noon dialogues on books and movies traversed into previous experiences, childhood friends, idols, movie superstars. I liked Kamal Hasan while she loved Rajnikanth, I hated her for that. “How can you like someone who can’t even move his facial muscles, let alone acting” I asked her once. I was a huge mistake. “You know what is screen presence, the elated feeling you get when you see the actor on screen? The dialogue delivery? The twists…” she went on and on and it was the first time I begun to think the actor couldn’t be so bad.

That night I described the quarrel of movie super stars and got lost in it that Venky made me realize it the first time ever. I was in love. The only problem was she was a year elder than I and would complete studies a year earlier than me. I tried to collect my strength to tell her how I felt, but the alternate ending where I might even lose her friendship stopped me. I had cried inside me for not telling her my love every day after she left for her Masters. I didn’t want the same to happen with Prasad. Venky wasn’t helping my agitated mood either.

“I still think about what happened the last Saturday man,”

“Don’t even start dude,” I replied clenching his arm.

It was the scariest of nights. Electricity went off when Ranjit had entered the toilet. He had shrieked loudly which everyone dismissed immediately considering he did not have a pound of brevity in him. When the power got restored his roomies found him lying dead inside the toilet. He had written something indelible next to him with his felt-pen. No one could decrypt what it meant. The whole college except Prasad mourned the loss. He could have a chance with Asha. I warned him it could be too early.

What transpired in front of our eyes proved it. Asha did not want to talk to Prasad. She coarsely knew his feelings towards her from what her friends had told her time to time. She was more interested in Suresh as he was raised the same city as she was.

After fifteen minutes Prasad went out still holding his glass of whisky. I told Venky to leave him alone. The party had not started well. Asha and her friends went over to the bar and got themselves some lubrication to ease their heads. The music was fine. I was still watching the videos after my mood dampened thinking about Nichi. Where was she? What did she do? I did not know anything about her. I deliberately stopped myself from connecting with her through the social networks the entire time. A small thought of me writing the GRE and moving to United States had popped up then, and I did not like what my heart was thinking.

Mani sat next to me. He was one of the greatest cricketers I’ve seen play in front of my eyes. His long innings in the three day matches and the blitzkriegs during the T-20s had made even the national selectors take notice. He was about to be drafted into the next Indian Premier League.

“Come on man. Whats the point of organizing a party if you are not enjoying it?”

“Am just bugged dude.”

“Why, what happened?”

“Everything that happened to Prasad.”

“Yeah man, the well incident last year. It was sad.”

“Yeah. It turned his life upside down”

“True”

“My afternoons became boring without hearing his love speeches and poetry, you know. First it was Ranjit, now it’s Suresh”

“True that. How many poems he had hung in the notice boards. He became the leader of the drama club. He was one of the lively personalities after she came into his life”

“Yeah, the comical hero in King lear.” And we laughed aloud.

I went ahead watching Pitbull and the lovely ladies in thongs, and then Marc Anthony when Mani interrupted my thoughts of going to the USA.

“Yeah dude. Asha never had feelings for him. If only he had realized that earlier, we’d have had another great batsman in our team”

“Yeah.”

Then I remembered. Prasad still scored centuries and fifties. My evenings that year were filled with ball by ball commentary of his crucial knocks against Mishra Institute of Tech., our nemesis in cricket.

“What did you say? He never batted well? He has described many knocks this year alone man! The three hundred in the 2nd Three-day match against the Mishras?”

“He did what? How the hell can he describe you anything, when he died last year? Falling into the waterless well? Asha calling the cops?”

“What? He died? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Man don’t kid me. Are you joking? Is this one of your pranks in the party? I thought your only bullshit was talking to yourself during lunches, now this?”

“What the fuck man?” I became furious, “why did you say he died. He just went out after talking to Asha.”

Mani continued looking at me with a smile when his head thought something else. It all came back to me. The lunches when no one sat with us, me, Venky and Prasad. The unexplained giggles from everyone around. I then realized I’ve never went out anywhere with him, not a single hostelite met me when I was with him. He even had refused travelling with us for the final trip to Goa blaming on his grand father in death bed. He even declined to pair with me for the project and went to work with that sloppy nerd Gopal who no body would dare to work with. Gopal, yeah, I remembered him complaining to headmaster that all the code he had written got deleted one night and about the unexplained noises in the lab every night.

My heart started to beat faster, I could feel goosebumps on my whole body, my eyesight narrowed down. I started to palpitate with every incident that happened that year playing in front of me.

Just then the electricity got cut, it was total darkness. Then came the scream.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”. Someone cried from the toilet. I recognized instantly it was  Suresh.