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What’s to come is still unsure;

  In delay there lies no plenty;

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.’

  “Wow! You could recite that in one go!” Rahul whistled in appreciation, lost in the echo of her voice in his mind. She let out a humble smile.

  “Well, by the way, you are not yet twenty, so I ...anyone can’t kiss you yet,” Rahul said, feeling the knots come back in his throat.

  “It’s just a poem,” she said, embarrassed.

  “Tell me more, what else do you like?” she asked.

  “Apart from you... r... your poem, the one you just recited, I like singing sometimes, acting sometimes ...”

  “Acting?”

  “Yup, I undertook professional training at the Star Academy during last year’s summer vacations. We had so many actors of yesteryears coming and teaching us, once even Salman Khan came!”

  “Salman Khan? To teach acting?”

  “No, he taught us body-building!”

  “Oh, ok. Let’s have a small showdown of your acting skills, please.”

  “In the bus? What do you want me to do? The Bombay to Goa song!”

  “Can you do mimicry?”

  “Yeah, a little!”

  “Please, please, I just love mimicry. Do it just this once!”

  And he consented. Out came Dev Anand; as he crossed his hands and moved rhythmically, Paresh Rawal; as he made faces and spoke in a rustic Marathi accent, Rajesh Khanna; as he bent his head and closed his eyes to wipe away fake tears, Govinda; as he twirled his tongue to speak at pace, Big B; as he folded his legs in the narrow space and stuck out his hand to rename himself as Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, Nana Patekar; as he sniffed his nose, going hyper and beating his own head, and finally Shahrukh Khan; as he spaced out his hands and stammered a little more than necessary! He merged the mimicry with clever one-liners that he often practiced in front of the mirror and formed a mini-dialogue between all the characters. She almost could not control her giggles on seeing the last ludicrous act.

  “Don’t mimic him, he’s my favourite superstar,” she warned him, amidst rising bouts of laughter, slapping him on his wrist playfully. He wondered then whether he should have replaced a Khan with another, when he told her about his acting academy, but her gentle touch made him numb. Her fingers were cool and smooth. He watched her luscious lips as they moved in perfect synchrony with his heartbeats. He wanted to kiss her lips and steal all the worries from her life. He decided that for an ounce of that laughter he could sacrifice an entire lifetime of happiness. He stopped his act to take a snapshot of that instant he would so treasure – her delightful laughter that could make him do anything, anything at all, in the world and beyond!

  “So, you love to act?” she asked, with the smile still playing in her eyes. He nodded with his own smile.

  “Have you ever acted in front of the camera?” she questioned, trying to sound like an interviewer.

  “Yeah, I have,” he answered almost instantly.

  “Oh, really! When… where?” she asked, surprised.

  “At my cousin’s wedding. Sometime when the hired cameraman was shooting the proceedings with his video camera, I did a little gig,” he stated.

  She twitched her lips to one side and seeing him fight to control his laughter, she initiated the process, and what followed could have best been described by the passengers on board the bus. They laughed and laughed until they had tears in their eyes and they laughed for no apparent reason. They doubled over with laughter just by looking into each other’s eyes, clasping their stomachs, not caring about the angry stares and disturbed reactions they generated around them. Whoever had said that laughter was contagious had surely visualised their rolling human forms.

  Amidst the laughter, he extended his palm towards her and she clapped his outstretched hand. Evidently, Seema was enjoying the company of a guy for the first time in her life. They talked about their childhood, their parents and their neighbours’ pets. They talked about the warmth of the sun, the beauty of the moon and the pristine fragrance that originates from the ground in the monsoon. Rahul sensed a similar fragrance but only more indescribable emanating from her brown locks. It made him aware of her existence beside him, when he had just lost himself to her in his thoughts. As the bus swayed on the unkempt roads, the soft brush of her skin against his deliberately angled elbow seeped all the way into his chest. He remembered something and almost reluctantly shook himself out of his pleasant state.

  “Here, this is for you,” he offered, searching for it in his bag and extending the greeting card.

  “What is that?” she asked even though she knew it was a card.

  “It’s a token of the onset of our friendship,” he said with a lovely smile.

  “Thanks,” she said looking down.

  She slyly saw the cover of the card by peeking in the envelope. It depicted two cute teddies sailing on a boat named ‘Friendship’. She smiled to herself and then to him.

  “What are you smiling at?” he asked raising an eyebrow.

  She shook her head while continuing to smile.

  “You should smile more often… you look really great when you smile,” he complimented.

  “Thanks!” she said. The flush on her pale cheeks was like the blush of sunset on snow.

  The long route in reality seemed like a minutes’ walk in each other’s company, the conductor had to shoo the ‘kids’ off who, by now, had come to the attention of not just those who were travelling along with them but also to the other ‘eavesdropping’ passengers. It took another shrill scream from Jess to bring them to their senses that they had reached their destination and it was time to get down. The conductor shouted at them again in his chaste Marathi, “Stop aala… pudhe chala lavkar (the stop has arrived, move ahead quickly!)”

  He noticed that she threw away the crumbled bus ticket on the street as soon as she got down. He picked it up and put it in his pocket along with his own – a memorabilia of their first date together – just like a strand of her hair that he had later found on his shirt and the broken pen cap that she was searching so desperately for once and so many other such small things.

  ***

  As he summed up the most eventful day of his life today, a volley of questions flooded his insides. Was her winking at him in the auditorium just another trick of the light? Was her awkward glance directed at someone else? Was her enthusiastic applause at his question just blatant respect for his seniority? Was she just bored of her friends or really enjoying his company while they were walking together on the promenade? Was the rose petal incident just a figment of his imagination? He was searching for the answers in her reactions and his sentiments as he could recollect them.

  Another shout bought him to his senses; the harsh reality came into view as he realised another irate conductor walking towards him and shouting, “The bus stops here, young man!”

  Rahul replaced the sporadic smile that bloomed on his lips with a despondent frown. The scenes were similar, yet so different. He put the treasured tickets which he was so lovingly eyeing, back in the corner of his wallet. Indeed, he had passed his stop five minutes back. He would have to walk back, taking a turn from Chandler to Teesdale Street. He got up slowly, not bothering to curse himself for forgetting the stop where he had to descend. But, did it matter now, he asked himself. He might as well accept the fact than carry on with arguing with himself, he would have enough of it anyways. He was not used to leaving things behind; he wondered how the bus stop escaped.

  ***

  A ‘FIVE STAR’ DAY ON ‘MARS’

  Last night’s rice had not been granted a decent welcome by his stomach. Therefore, Rahul was spending twice the time he would normally spend on the pot. The only problem with the first floor hostel loo was that all the walls of the cabins were crowded with all kinds of graffiti. If not pictorial representations of women’s breasts or erect penises, it would be some couplet on the horny warde
n or an imaginary, extraordinarily verbose revenge on some professor which would decorate the once white wall of the cabins. From pubic hair to raunchy lairs, there was everything on display like an open magazine to the idle eye on the pot, perhaps to keep him occupied long enough to avoid looking down at his deeds. It was like a big paper, only spread in each direction with all kinds of pictures and words strung together. It was difficult to decipher where one representation ended and the other began. It was even more of a task to separate the mammoth penises from the breasts that resembled hot-air balloons.

  Rahul was tired of visiting the toilet for the seventh time in the day. He did not like to miss school, because that was something that kept him busy or so, he liked to believe. But here he was emptying his bowels and casually reading the graffiti on the walls.

  He read the one to his left,

  ‘Here I sit

  Broken hearted

  Tried to shit

  But only farted’

  ‘Broken hearted? Did that guy get no other word to use his pen on?’ Rahul thought.

  He disapproved of the idea of abusing the heart somehow. Once it had been his saviour, it had given him pleasure which no amount of pain could displace.

  His eyes found a different handwriting, right beside the one the broken hearted farter had written.

  ‘You’re lucky

  You had your chance

  I tried to fart,

  And shit my pants!’

  Rahul let out a slight smile considering the wit of the versifier and his credence for positivity. He thought that this happened only in India as the cliché goes but then he remembered that the hostel had a high number of Indian occupants of which many were migrants. A lot of them, having done their early education in their motherland and completing their quota of lines and drawings in Indian toilets, had come here to pursue their further education and bedeck the walls of the States. So he had no doubt where the old habits came from. He guessed that waiting for the calamity to strike down literally, they enjoyed the time scribbling their creative thoughts.

  ‘I came here

  To shit and stink,

  But all I do

  Is sit and think.’

  Rahul guessed this must have been another work of some great philosopher and not surprisingly someone had added his own thoughts to the intellectual’s philosophy.

  ‘Some come here to sit and think,

  Some come here to shit and stink,

  But I come here to scratch my balls,

  And read the bullshit on the walls.’

  Rahul tried hard to stifle the laugh that came from within but ended up squealing a little in the manner of a child upon reading the lines of that rhymester. The seventh trip of the day to the loo had proved a bit refreshing and Rahul felt his stomach lighten a bit and settle down after some rumbling and grunting.

  This graffiti business, he had thought, only took place in schools back in India until now. He remembered reading vulgar abuses in public toilets, second class compartments of Indian local trains and even in the gents’ common room of schools. He remembered scribbling some abuses dedicated to his Physical Training teacher who had been the only teacher to have punished him until that day, and remained so forever till he completed his school. Naughty kids often ended up drawing their teachers on the toilet walls, as they saw them in their dreams, a fantasy having nothing to do with the subjects they learnt at school. Their artwork would be appraised by all those who used that particular spot for relieving themselves in the school’s drainage system.

  School! He thought as he zipped himself up and emerged out of the cubicle. School! The period of his life that brought him love and then snatched it away. School! He could think and think and never forget those moments of life he lived, never forget his growth from a boy to a man at sixteen. It was as if he had known her for a long, long time and before he knew her, he knew nothing because he felt he had not existed then, life had been absent. There was only one four-lettered word having precedence over life itself and it was LOVE. He wished for the knots in his throat to go away then, but he desired the same knots today even if it meant eyeing her beautiful face silently. As a poet had said, ‘let them those who seek God, find him but spare me a glance of my beloved, for that’s all I seek.’.

  Unconsciously, he rewound his watch, eyeing the hands go back at a furious speed. Each passing second begged to be released; each movement sparked a gathering thought. The thoughts carried him to his room and somewhere they led him to a leather bound diary hidden within his drawer beneath the mantle. He opened it in a sacrosanct manner. The ramblings in it were inviolable. His fingers found the pages themselves and turned them around to 30th of April of that particular year.

  I love you as a valley loves

  The river through its fields,

  Or as a note upon a page

  The music that it yields.

  I love you as a hawk loves air,

  Or a sailor loves the sea,

  Or as a strong wave seeks the sand,

  But ah! do you love me?

  -I Love You as a Valley, Nicholas Gordon.

  ‘I held her hand for a long time today and it was almost electric, even better than the first time in the bus. Whoa! I was almost unwilling to let it slip from my grip. Am I sounding too excited? Ofcourse, I am. She’s a 640 volt talking-walking, mind-fucking beauty. What do you expect from a mortal like me when fairies like her go around casting their spells? Oh, did I just say fairies? I’m sorry for using the plural. I could not think clearly for at least two minutes after touching her. The touch of her fingers still lingers, haha! That almost became poetry but I guess that’s the way love is supposed to be—from what I have heard, turns even the dumbest of people into poets and I am too good to be dumb, so I would make a nice poet, I guess.

  Hmmm… Love and me? Never thought this would happen but life has other plans I guess. It almost seems like what they show in the movies; the music in my head everytime she’s around, the butterflies in my stomach when I try to converse with her, the entire world seems to slow down and pause when she looks at me, the electric current of her touch I just told you about... Oh, sorry! She’s like petrol if I’m the vehicle, makes me run once I start about her.

  I am still shivering from that touch. God! Ok, Ok, let me go slow and get to that part when it arrives. Control for now!

  As I said yesterday, it was result time today and I was kind of worried, particularly because of the equation that I thought I had solved incorrectly in the Algebra paper and some points that I had skipped in the brief summary of the Quit India Movement in the History paper. But I need not have bothered, I scored full in both. Can you beat that? Because no one else did, hehe! Well I am first, but I wish I could have still scored some more. Ninety-two percent somehow sounds too banal now and to add to my woes the gaps between the second ranker and me are shrinking too! Jay got eighty-two percent! Though I’m happy for him, I am under serious threat. I have to gear up for next year’s boards.

  Anyways, after collecting my report card, I was waiting near the door of the classroom for Dorothy ma’am to finish her work as I had to wish her happy holidays and make some enquiries about the next year’s head boy’s post, but that idea took a backseat as she walked past with her friends. I eyed her like a thirsty

  man in a desert eyes a pail of water and she looked at me ever so slyly that her friends could not comprehend. She smiled, just the corner of her lips twitching upwards. And suddenly

  wishing Dorothy ma’am did not really seem the most important thing to do then, nor did worrying about threats to my numero uno position.

  As they turned up the corridor, my legs decided to follow and then I was only a puppet to the beatings of my heart. I almost slipped near the science lab but managed to find a grip on the saviour of a desk outside. Some idiot had poured oil on the floor and I even forgot to curse him. I saw her and Sapna move towards the

  auditorium with Jess, but mid-way they turned again, only to
disappear in the library.

  Bingo! My intelligent mind got an excuse to go in and there they were right in front of my eyes, Jess and Sapna reasoning with her that the results had just come out and she should take a

  break before touching the damn books again. I slipped by quickly and made my way to the bulky racks of the General Knowledge section as they started browsing in the Literature section opposite to where I was. I could just about make their shapes from the gaps in the books, pretending to browse through volumes,

  patiently hearing their talks behind the huge stack that divided us. The pesky librarian was not at her place as usual, so there was no one to hush them up. Seema was quiet; the other two were doing the talking.

  “Seemz, we should be celebrating the results, instead of wasting time here,” Jess reasoned.

  “I agree with Jess. I guess, we all got more than what we bargained for,” Sapna cut in.

  “Oh please, I don’t know about you both, but ninety-two percent is not what I would be satisfied with,” Seema said.

  ‘Wow! Ninety-two percent! That’s something man! She’s so intelligent!’ I thought.

  “For God’s sake Seemz, you got the first rank and there is a difference of ten percent between you and Vinay, you should be celebrating dear,” Jess said.

  My ears almost popped out on hearing that.

  ‘She stood first again and that too with a difference of ten percent between herself and the second ranker! That girl is something of a miracle, man!’ I heard myself say, bending my back to catch more of their words.

  “Fools celebrate so soon! My classes would be starting in fifteen days and ninth is no easy matter, it is the foundation for the boards and I don’t want to take it easy,” Seema said referring to her next academic year.

  “Fifteen days is a lot of time dear! Calculating every two minutes for fifteen days, you could make a lot of Maggi noodles. Tell you what, let’s meet up in the evening today and then hang out at Hot Ovens to celebrate and...” Jess prompted.

  “...and you people expect me to treat, don’t you?” Seema asked twitching her nose.

  “Obviously!” both of them replied together.