Freakishly Faithful - Chapter 4 : From Dawn to Dusk

Part 5

Love me now, for I may wait no longer…”
Something I came up with

Karan’s calls became far less frequent after that glass of Coke in the Great Punjab. His responses to my calls were laconic and vaguely apologetic – “Sorry, dude. Can’t meet you today. Gotta take Akruti to a doctor,” – and the like. I couldn’t complain, after all I had an idea of what the guy was probably going through. Of course, the time away from Karan allowed me to try and concentrate on my books (although as my Semester 6 marksheet would suggest, it wasn’t nearly enough).

One of the unique features of Symbi Law (and there were quite a few) was it’s insistence on conducting semester examinations approximately a month prior to all other faculties. That way, we got to curse our luck when we’d be nose-diving into our books while others would be making party plans in the NCC Canteen, and conversely, we’d be playing up the fact that our exams were long over by the time the others got their respective GPLs (full form loosely translates to ‘kicks in the posterior’). Fortunately for me, I was what was derisively referred to as a ‘localite’, with a home and family in Pune, so the effect of having to study while others continued gallivanting was far less on me than for my unfortunate peers whose hostels presented no entertainment or seclusion. And so it went on till the last day of my exams.

After my final paper, I sat chatting in the NCC with one or two batchmates, amidst the throng of smoking law students getting set for the all-night ‘booze-n-more’ parties. The prospect of puking my guts out at 4 a.m. was never a cause of much excitement for me, and somehow the charm of having women around, dancing and moving as only women do, would quickly and drastically diminish at the thought of them puking their guts out at any hour. At that point I was really looking forward to shaving off a hideous goatee that had managed to grow onto my face, a product of a few weeks of no shaving, and a good night’s sleep after ages. I was suddenly reminded of Karan (whose shaving habits were highly irregular) and I gave him a call.

When he answered, his voice had some of the cheerfulness of old. That was a relief, as ever since his conversation with Mo so many days earlier, he had always sounded rather strained. We decided to meet at Scorpio Net near Akruti’s place.

When I saw him, his face looked somewhat weary, but he greeted me with his usual enthusiasm. After the obligatory general chit-chat, I asked him about Akruti and was relieved to know she was doing quite well of late. She’d stopped assaulting herself, and was hanging out with friends, doing routine things again. Karan was still spending a lot of time with her, but she was a lot more stable now.

I then asked him about MJ. He looked at me with a wistful smile and said that she was fine, although he hadn’t seen her in a while. He had told her about Akruti’s condition, and she’d asked him to do what he had to do. I felt bad for him, but I wasn’t sure of how deep his involvement with Akruti had become of late, so I didn’t say anything. She was, after all, an object of intense emotions for him. Perhaps, if they were to ever be together, this was the starting point.

One often spends large amounts of time with a person without ever getting to know his true feelings on something that might affect him. We spend years with our siblings, our friends, maybe even our spouses, thinking we know all there is to know, and all of a sudden, something happens that opens a whole new aspect of their minds to us, one that might catch us completely by surprise. Several years later, I was to find Karan’s battered old notebook in which he used to write poetry, prose and thoughts while still in college, lying buried somewhere amidst other nostalgic paraphernalia. On one page were written the following lines in his handwriting:

“Karan, I’m glad I never said ‘yes’ to you. You showed me that I still can’t trust men. But you also showed me that I can’t expect someone to wait too long for me to say ‘yes’ - MJ”

Below it were written the words “No failures, no regrets”.

But the two “No”s had been scratched out.

Freakishly Faithful - Chapter 4 : From Dawn to Dusk

Part 3

February 15, 2005. It was Ruksana’s birthday. Two days ago, on February 13, it had been Maya’s birthday. Two women whom I have loved tenderly, passionately, in whose memories I have revelled, in whose company I have lost and found myself, in whose essence I have felt the meaning of love. Perhaps it is ironic that a day of love finds itself between their birthdays, neither one seeming any less important than the other, the day before and the day after. Some might call it poetic, and some might say I’m just a sucker for romanticism, either way, Valentine’s Day was a day full of emotion for me. And this time, the Day brought cruel tidings for another.

Karan had asked me to be there next to him, while Mo told him about Akruti’s condition. I felt distinctly awkward, and I knew I had no business being there. I didn’t know Mo, and my idea of Akruti had been limited to Karan’s sporadic reminiscences. I, therefore, chose to shut out whatever was being said by Mo to Karan, and endeavoured to pass the time in happy thoughts of Maya, and to a lesser extent, Ruksana (my break up with Maya had only happened 2 months earlier). But the mood was sombre, and there was a suggestion of a crisis in Karan’s body language as he spoke to Mo. Time was beginning to drag itself, and my position was becoming a very difficult one. At last Karan stood up and said, “Please tell her to stop being… like that. Call me once you reach over there, okay?” His words were somewhat broken and he was quite visibly shaken up.

We said our goodbyes to Mo and headed for the Great Punjab restaurant down the street. Karan walked in a daze, his eyes fixed on the pavement as if the road would show him the meaning of it all. We sat down at a table in the restaurant, and I ordered a Coke for him, his favoured beverage. The waiter placed the bottle before him, but Karan made no move to pour himself a glass. I poured one for him, and as I pushed the glass to him, I said, “Dude…”

Karan looked up at me, and I saw in his eyes a torrent of heretofore alien emotions. There was fear, there was pain, there was doubt, but more than anything else, there seemed to be despair. “She called me yesterday, Da,” he mumbled, “on Valentine’s Day. She asked me why hadn’t I called. She asked me if I was with her, with MJ. She… she asked me if I still cared.”

I caught a drift of hysteria in his words. His whole aspect suggested something vaguely horrible. His charming, carefree demeanour was dissolving into a morass of confusion and terror before my very eyes. This was a Karan Singh few would ever get to see.

“She said she hates me, Da,” he continued, “hates me for having loved her. For having dreamed of her. For holding her hand, for the flowers last year. She hates me because Mo and Rose keep talking about me, and she hates me because she keeps talking about me to Mo and Rose. But why, Da? Why does she need me now? I asked so many times, she always turned me down. There were times I felt like I was a clown doing a juggling act on a unicycle just to make her smile, but she hardly seemed to care. And now, this? Why now, Da? After I’ve finally begun to leave her behind, after I’ve become so interested in MJ, why now?”

The answer seemed obvious. “Because you’ve become so interested in MJ,” I replied.

He looked at me with that pained expression. “She’s cut herself, Da,” he cried, “she’s been pulling off pieces of flesh on her arm with nail clippers. She’s nearly slit her wrist!”
This was bad. The matter seemed on the verge of getting out of hand. For the first time in my life, I felt confronted with a problem whose solution gave away no hint at itself. All I could say was, “Holy shit!”

“What should I do, Da?” he said, “What the fuck should I do?”

But I could say nothing. The woman sounded crazy, but now wasn’t the time to venture a psychoanalysis. I said in a dry voice, “I don’t know man. Maybe you should tell someone in her family about this.”

But he wasn’t going to do that. I knew it, he knew it. It might have been the intelligent thing to do, but it might mean he would lose her forever. Even if he felt he might never have her, he still wanted to hang on to some sense of hope. He closed his eyes, and in a few minutes his face hardened, his lips setting into a thin line. When his eyes opened, there was a look of painful resolve. For the first time he noticed the glass of Coke in front of him. His fingers slowly curled around and gripped the glass, and as he took a swig of the drink, it appeared that his mind had found an instant of sanity. As he set the glass down, he looked at me and said, “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, but she needs me…” And with that he stood up and walked away.

Freakishly Faithful - Chapter 4 : From Dawn to Dusk

Part 2

"With every silver lining comes a black cloud of despair"

Archie Andrews

Karan had often spoken of Akruti. From that very first day when we met after the MUNA training session, and throughout our continued association, if Akruti’s name wasn’t at the tip of his tongue, it would most certainly be at the back of his mind. He had often described his impression of her when he’d first seen her. On such occasions, he would sit back with a dreamy look in his eyes, and the suggestion of a beautiful memory or two would descend around his face like a luminescent mist. He would tell me, speaking more to himself than to me, perhaps, about how she had seemed to be a woman with just the right level of attitude, arrogance, solidity, stolidity, strength and femininity. Of how he had once told her that her red bandana made her look like a pretentious ‘wannabe’, and how she would be so much cooler if she’d just be herself. Of how they spent several months seeing each other without seeing each other, and how he could never really have time alone with her because either Rose (name changed) or Mo would be hanging around like some kind of chastity and propriety ensuring neo-Nazi chaperone.

But Karan was in pain. I could well empathise, for I knew how harrowing it could be to love fruitlessly. For more than half a decade I had often found myself in a melancholy reverie of my intense and largely unexpressed feelings for Ruksana, the unhappy circumstances that led to our fallout, the innumerable occasions when my heart was bursting to tell her so much! Perhaps that is why Karan and I felt so comfortable together. I’ll lay it down as an axiom right now – the leading cause of male bonding is women.

With the background of his stop-go deal with Akruti and the toll it used to take on him, I was quite happy to see Karan’s nascent interest in MJ beginning to grow into a full fledged ‘thing’. There was a new glow to his usual cheerfulness, and his brimming energy found excellent expression in his interactions with her. There was something indescribably cute about the two of them, and most everybody who knew either of them (and between the two of them that meant nearly everybody in the Arts and Commerce college) were abuzz with the gossip that Karan is totally hitting on MJ. For the most part, the news spread with smiles galore, and even one or two other admirers of MJ resigned to their fate and congratulated Karan for being the closest to the ‘chosen one’ in her life then. Frequent references to MJ’s hanging out in the RSI Club and Karan’s oft expressed desire to be her slow-dance-in-the-spotlight partner became a favoured topic of discussion. Many people eyed me curiously, wondering who exactly I was, sitting on the same table as Karan and MJ. In the process, my popularity as ‘the unknown quantity’ made its own small place in the scheme of things, and I was often prodded by complete strangers on the latest goings-on of the ‘couple’.

But with the crest there comes the trough. Isn’t it so typical? Just when we thought things could only get better from then on, Karan’s cell phone rang. His expression betrayed some little confusion as he looked at the flashing name on the screen and answered, “Hello?”

“Karan? It’s me, Mo. Listen… I don’t know how to say this… It’s Akruti… She’s… You’d better see me right away.”

Freakishly Faithful - Chapter 4 : From Dawn to Dusk

“The way you make me feel,
The way you turn me on,
You knock me off my feet,
My lonely days are gone...”
Michael Jackson

Part 1

Another semester of law school was drawing inevitably to its close. The crowd in the college campus had begun to diminish, and within a few days, the law faculty declared a study leave. But impending exams were never a dampener to Karan’s spirits, especially if it were someone else’s exams that were looming near. By then, Karan and I were regularly hanging out together, and every morning at about 9 a.m., a call to or from him had become a staple. I was a little too carefree about the vast portions of my subjects to be covered for the exams, and somewhat too liberal with my fibs to my folks about getting notes from classmates when what I really wanted to do was share some puffs and laughs with Karan. Life was easy, reduced to a series of walks from the Symbi campus to the NCC and back, with intermittent smoking pit-stops that left my wallet lighter and my conscience heavier (I was, after all, supposed to be studying, and smoking is a bad habit). Then, when there were no longer any women on campus for Karan to talk with, we’d push off to his apartment, where he lived with his roommate Dilawar, and the incredibly sweet couple of Tandon bhai and Pede. In the evening, when I’d decide to push off home, Karan would walk me to the nearest tapri for yet another smoke, and (without fail) would ‘borrow’ one Rupee for a phone call. And so, our days continued.

Karan’s love-life was somewhat seasonal. A new crush would materialize sometime in the months of spring, lazy afternoons would be spent dreaming of cosy days with the said crush in the summer, arm-in-arm walks under a quaint old-fashioned curved-handled umbrella during the monsoons would follow, by autumn there would be signs of something of a rift, and by new years eve Karan would have had either a glass of lemonade flung in his face, or his girlfriend would go for another guy because she couldn’t take Karan seriously, or, if he was lucky, she’d break up with him without any unnecessary drama or intrigue. I guess he was just unlucky, or maybe he cared a little too much for his women. Whatever be the case, and however unfortunate the heartbreak, Karan always managed to scrape his heart off the floor and give it away again. This spring, his ephemeral heartbreak healer was a young 'army-chick' called MJ (Clarification: At least one of her parents were serving in the armed forces).

MJ had been one of the ‘models’ in a college fashion show in Aarambh. She was pretty cute, and was probably fun to talk to (Karan did most of the talking, as always). My role, or rather the role I took for myself at such times, would be that of an observer. However, small-talk between the sexes usually bored me, and I’d often find myself fighting off humongous yawns so as not to embarrass the cooing couple. That is not to say my silent vigils went unrewarded. It was always amusing to watch Karan trying to impress MJ, and her playfully stoic resistance to his efforts were admirable. In the presence of MJ, Karan would often become rather magnanimous, and a nice chicken sandwich, or at the very least, a cup of coffee would often find place on the table before me. A pleasant trade-off for the daily ‘one rupee’ offerings! My favourite moment remains the time we were sitting at a table in the Symbi Food Court, and Karan, while expressing genuine admiration for the entire feminine sex, declared, “I really love women; they have so much grit!” while clenching both his fists at chest-height at the precise point of saying “grit”! Despite my temptation to view the incident as a glorious illustration of a Freudian slip, I am inclined to believe that the hand-gesture was in fact an innocent faux pas (or am I?). But, although I laughed till Karan was red in the face and MJ was beginning to have an inkling that something embarrassing had just happened, I could not deny that Karan was genuinely interested in MJ, and his intentions, like most everything about him, were honourable.