Our Impossible Love Read online

  My mother laughed, reminding me of how I tore up my answer sheets and my science textbook because she had edged me out by five marks. My mother had spent the entire night putting the torn pages in order and then stapling them together. She asked, ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘I might have troubled her a little in the past.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘More paneer?’

  My mother left to get the paneer. I couldn’t stomach what my mother would think of me if I told her what I did to Namrata all those years back.

  14

  Danish Roy

  I was inappropriately happy on the second day of my new job. The first day had gone off smoothly, apart from that one moment where the girl, Aisha, made me want to crawl beneath the desk and stay there for a really long time. Today, will be better, I told myself. Last night, I had spent a few hours on the Internet and read up manuals on how to tackle sexual queries from young people (without making an utter fool of myself). My highlighted notes lay securely in my duffle bag. All I needed was a little revision and I would whoop some ass today. I reached on time and found Aisha waiting on the bench.

  ‘Hi, sir.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to come later in the day?’ I asked.

  ‘I needed to talk to you about something. I can do that, right?’ she asked, innocently.

  ‘Of course, just give me a few moments.’ I entered my room, closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

  Calm down. You can do this, Danish. She’s just a little girl. Just be confident and straightforward.

  I placed my pad on the desk and found myself fixing my hair in the reflection of my computer screen. Now why would I do that?

  ‘Sir, may I come in?’ she said from outside the door.

  ‘Come in.’

  She came in, closed the door behind her, and sat in front of me.

  ‘So, tell me, what’s the problem?’

  ‘Umm . . . It’s not so much a problem. It’s more of a question really,’ she said.

  ‘Go on?’

  ‘I wanted to tell Megha that you were really cute. But—’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m sorry. But that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. But before I could tell her that I found you cute, she told me the entire college had started calling you cute.’

  She waited for me to say something.

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re okay with that?’

  Okay? This was the best day of my life. What if they were half a decade younger than I was?

  ‘Can you tell me clearly what’s bothering you?’

  ‘I will try,’ she said. ‘So like you are cute to the entire school now, you will forever be only that. People won’t talk about how happy that eighth standard guy was when you let him off the hook with the weed-smoking incident but they will talk about your cuteness. And that can be sort of a good thing and a bad thing.’

  ‘Okay. So?’

  I dreaded a loaded question at the end of it all.

  ‘But what if people thought about you as a pervert? Like what if I had started telling people you had hit on me when you really hadn’t?’

  ‘What! But I didn’t—’ I panicked.

  ‘Of course, you didn’t,’ she smiled. ‘Okay, let me give you another analogy. What if there was a rumour that a student committed suicide just after he attended your session? Now there might be no correlation between your cuteness and the student taking his life but then everything you did before or will do after that would be looked through that lens of you being cute, right? Like people will say you’re cute, but clearly you’re not that great a counsellor because that kid died. Or like what do you expect out of him? He’s too busy being cute! Or like it’s okay if you just look at him, but don’t expect any counselling from him. And those two things have nothing to do with each other!’

  ‘You’re kind of right.’

  ‘And whose fault will be that?’

  ‘Whoever talked about it first, labelled me as just cute,’ I said. ‘Not my fault, necessarily. The best I could do is to try to move past it.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Language, Aisha. And can you tell me what really happened?’

  ‘You’re going to judge me.’

  ‘Of course I will judge you if you did something wrong. But I will also forgive you if you do something to undo it,’ I said.

  ‘So, I did something to a girl years back and I don’t think she has moved past it yet.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I put her in a little box like I was about to do to you. Only it wasn’t labelled as cute, it was labelled slut.’

  Aisha told me about Namrata, a girl who had joined this school a few years ago. A nice, talented girl whose life Aisha had single-handedly destroyed by labelling her as a slut.

  ‘So what are you going to do about this?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Talk to me again only once you finish talking to her,’ I said.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘You can go now.’

  ‘See, you’re judging me?’

  ‘I am. I now think you’re the kind of person who has the courage to accept she did something wrong and will prove to me that she has it in herself to apologize. You can leave now.’

  15

  Aisha Paul

  I waited outside the class for Namrata to show up. I knew her schedule. She was the first one to enter and leave every class; her entries and exits were carefully timed to maintain a distance from her my classmates—especially me.

  Years ago, when I was fourteen and in the seventh standard and growing breasts the size of pumpkins—and was famous for them too—I felt powerful. Everyone talked about me. I was poor and my mother was dying but at least I had the school by its balls, academically and otherwise, and I was not going to let that go. I could spread gossip through my influence on the girls who hung out with me, and get boys to do anything I wanted. I had quite a time. It faded away slowly as rumours of my non-existent promiscuity started making the rounds, but during the few months it lasted, I was pretty mean to some people and one of them was Namrata.

  She was a new student on a full scholarship in our school, freshly transferred from Ryan International, and had taken the school by storm! Now normally I wouldn’t have minded but it was my time. I was doing well in my studies, led the march past for my house, had a permanent first row spot in the choir, and was a probable candidate for the House Captain. But this girl had rained on my parade. She made it to the dramatics team and the shot-put team and charmed everyone. My dizzying fame was slipping like sand through a closed fist.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Megha had asked. ‘I heard she’s nominating herself for the House Captain position.’

  ‘No one cares about her. She’s so fat! She’s disgusting,’ I had said, quite cruelly. ‘And everyone will see that.’

  A fat, ugly girl wasn’t going to take away my thunder. Though I should probably mention here that I, too, wasn’t beautiful as per conventional standards but I had the height (I was 5’3” when I was in the seventh standard), the breasts and the thighs of an adult, and that obscured everything else.

  Late one afternoon, after a physical education period, I found Namrata changing in the washroom, and I struck up a conversation. We talked about her old school, the friends she’d left behind, and whether she liked my school. She was a nice girl and even liked Room on the Roof, my favourite book of all time, but I had a reputation to protect, and one to destroy. So while she talked and laughed, thinking I was her friend, I slyly recorded a video of her changing into her uniform, her naked chest on blatant display.

  ‘What bra do you use?’ I had asked innocently.

  The funny girl had cradled her breasts and said, ‘Nothing that gravity can’t beat!’

  The next day, a grainy clip, minus the audio, of Namrata’s saggy, cellulite-ridden chest was on every other phone. Since my voice could not be heard, everyone thought Namra
ta had sneaked in a boy to the changing room and was stripping for him.

  ‘Did you see that video? Namrata was changing in front of a boy! Such a slut!’ Megha exclaimed.

  ‘I feel sorry for the boy. I would rather claw my eyes out than see that,’ I said.

  Someone else had added. ‘Look at those breasts. Those are ugly!’

  ‘I know, right!’ I had said. ‘And those love handles. God. She should stop eating men for lunch. I heard she got kicked out from the last school because she slept with someone in the classroom.’

  And then the shaming began. She was the ugly, fat slut from Ryan International.

  The video never got out of the school or Namrata and I both would have been in trouble. Namrata never confronted me. She missed school for a month, her grades dipped, she dropped out of the shot-put and the dramatics team, her scholarship was taken away, and by the time we got to our eighth standard, she was a nobody.

  It had been four years. I knew what I had done to her. I would always sidestep whenever I saw her walking in the corridors. I shirked and shifted the blame on to her, thinking that she should have fought the rumour. But, of course, deep inside of me, I knew I had destroyed her when I passed on that video and firmly tagged her as a fat, ugly slut. And now, I had to make amends. No more tags. No more labelling people on how they looked.

  When she finally showed up that day, I walked up to her, smiled my widest and said, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you.’ I had hoped in my heart that all had been forgiven already, that time had healed her.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ she said and walked right out of the class.

  Clearly time was lazy!

  ‘Hey, listen,’ I ran after her, collecting my things. ‘I really need to say something to you.’

  She turned and asked, ‘What?’

  ‘About earlier?’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’ she snapped, her eyes already little pools of tears.

  ‘Plenty.’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ she said.

  ‘Namrata, I’m sorry for what I did all those years back. I shouldn’t have done—’

  And the next second my face stung with a resounding slap. I stumbled backwards and lost my hearing for a few seconds. She deserved to be in the shot-put team. People stopped in the corridor and stared. ‘I’m okay, I’m okay,’ I told the people who had rushed to help me.

  She had made her way through the crowd by the time the tinny sound in my ears abated. I ran after her.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked, almost crying. ‘It hurt.’

  ‘Because that’s what you deserve, Aisha! That and much more.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I said I’m sorry,’ I said, crying.

  ‘I’m never forgiving you for ruining my life. I had almost killed myself because of you!’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen, Aisha. It took me years to be happy again. Please don’t come anywhere near me, okay? I hate you!’ she said and ran away.

  I walked into the girls’ washroom, locked myself in the stall and cried my heart out for three hours, hoping to feel the pain I had made the girl go through. Since I couldn’t completely comprehend her pain, I recalled the face of my mother as she lay in that pool of blood, and I started howling.

  16

  Danish Roy

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked my brother dressed in grey sweats when he joined me at the breakfast table.

  ‘It’s okay. Quite strange actually, all we got in our school were slaps from our teachers. This is different,’ I said.

  ‘True that! Remember that time you didn’t polish your shoes and they made you run ten laps and you fainted? I really thought Dad would sue the school or something,’ he said.

  ‘Instead he slapped me. Good memories. Thank you for reminding me.’

  He chuckled. ‘Come, I will drop you to school today.’

  ‘There’s no need for that.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ he said, pulling me by my arm and dragging me to the driveway.

  ‘Fuck!’ I shrieked.

  In the driveway, behind our eight-year-old Innova and the three-year-old Honda City, stood a two-seater Mercedes SLK!

  I tried to feel happy for my brother but all I felt was envy piercing through my veins. I started to calculate how much it would have cost him, how much he must be earning, and how many years, if not lifetimes, it would take me to have the same car sitting in my driveway. Will I ever have a driveway?

  I forced a smile.

  ‘It’s a gift from the investors. It’s not mine,’ he said, sensing my mood. ‘But I can drive it around till the time I can buy one myself.’

  ‘Congratulations, man!’ I said and hugged him so he couldn’t see how jealous I was. I thought about money a lot those days. My brother was successful, a paper millionaire, and would be rich for the rest of his life and beyond. When I will be forty, he will be buying cars more expensive than my house, and my kids will hate me because their cousins will always have better phones/PlayStations/clothes, and my wife will wish she’d married him.

  I thought about this a lot. About the power and the feeling of superiority money brings which I didn’t have and in all probability never would. A lot of my fellows from schooldays were already in big jobs, married to powerful women, settled abroad, people I wouldn’t want to meet ever again in life.

  He dropped me to school and wished me luck for the day. As he looked at the school while driving away to his meetings held in glass cabins inside buildings that rose up to the clouds, I wondered what he thought of his big brother.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘How are you doing today?’ The girl was waiting outside my room. I unlocked the door and took my seat.

  ‘She’s not forgiving me. And I feel like killing myself right now,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way. Then suddenly, she said, ‘Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that because I will not be like my mother.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘She tried killing herself. It’s a long story. But don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You can’t, there is client–patient confidentiality.’

  ‘No, there’s not. I’m a counsellor not a psychiatrist.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’

  ‘You need to talk to Namrata. You can make her forgive me. It’s pulling me back. Unless she forgives me, how will I be the woman I want to be!’

  ‘And what is that woman you want to be?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m still figuring that out, sir.’ Just then, the bell rang. She waited for it to stop before she spoke again. ‘I need to go for my class now. Mr Sharma will mark me absent even if I am a minute late. I’m counting on you, sir.’

  For the next hour, I downloaded and read articles about forgiveness, and how to move on if people refuse to forgive you. Frankly, the essays were a whole lot of bullshit. I had to do something for the girl, and it wasn’t only for her, it was for me. My job had started to make me feel important and needed, as if I could make a difference, like my existence wasn’t a total waste.

  So I got up and started to look for Namrata in the school records. Twenty minutes later, the peon explained to me that I didn’t have to look for students, and if I wanted a student to come, he or she would have to report to me—no questions asked. A bit like a dictator. I liked that. I called for Namrata.

  ‘Can I come in, sir?’

  ‘Yes, yes, come in,’ I said. I had a book in my hand, a thick one which I had picked up moments before Namrata had walked in, to look smart and knowledgeable, so she would take me seriously.

  ‘Is it something I did, sir?’ she asked nervously.

  Never had people been nervous in front of me. It was always the other way around. Even salespeople in stores and fast food joints made me anxious.

  ‘No, it’s, in fact, about what someone else did,’ I said. ‘Aisha. Do you know her?’

  ‘Yes, I do, sir. She’s the worst person I have ever met in my entire life.
I’m not going to forgive her.’

  ‘Namrata, you—’

  ‘I can forgive Dolores Umbridge but not her!’ she said, throwing a Harry Potter reference at me. She clutched the sides of her chair as if trying to grind them to dust.

  ‘But Dumbledore would have wanted to you to forgive her. Remember how he asked Potter to let Pettigrew go?’

  ‘But it was Pettigrew. Aisha is like Bellatrix Lestrange! She killed Dobby!’

  ‘Look. She’s trying to change and I can sense that. In my history of dealing with people like her I have noticed that a single apology from someone they have wronged goes a long way in helping them become better people.’

  ‘I don’t care about her! She destroyed me!’ she shrieked, spitting all over my face. I felt like those little kids in Jurassic Park who turn and find a baby T-Rex baring its fangs, dripping slush over their faces.

  ‘She’s trying to make amends. Give her a chance. Draw her away from the dark side,’ I said. If Harry Potter references is what worked with her, why not?

  ‘But—’

  ‘I understand she must have been really mean to you. But it’s your chance to be a bigger person and forgive her. Think about what she did to you and if you would want to weigh yourself down by holding a grudge against her for the rest of your life. Meet her halfway?’

  And within seconds, Namrata dissolved into a sentient puddle of tears.

  17

  Aisha Paul

  I rushed to the washroom.

  I ruffled my hair and quickly applied some mascara and smudged it. I had to look sufficiently bereaved for Namrata to forgive me. Now don’t think I wasn’t sad, it’s just that I wasn’t sad enough to cry at a moment’s notice. I had done my crying for the day earlier that morning and had fixed myself post that.

  ‘May I come in?’ I asked, head hung low.

  ‘Come in.’

  I was asked to sit right in front of Namrata who looked like she had just stopped crying.

  ‘You two need to talk,’ Danish said and leaned back in his chair. His casual demeanour told me that he knew what he was doing and there was nothing to worry about. That gave me a little confidence.