A Process Too Complicated To Explain

This story begins somewhere between 18^th July and mid August 2011; well the accuracy of the date is neither a matter of importance or significance. The protagonist and the fact that she has no clue of being the lead in this really short story, (if one can call it a story) is what matters more. When this story began I was living in a tiny one room apartment, in a crowded suburb in South Delhi, hoping to shift to a better place soon.

The summer heat mixed with a hangover and my inevitable process of perspiration made me lose my slumber sooner than I had expected, and what I have left of that morning are vague memories. It was one of the first few days of Freshman Year at the university, when I had arrived early like my usual self in those freedom filled, hung over mornings, when I saw her shimmering in ethnic Indian attire. It could have been, a red ‘kurta’ with white prints or a white ‘kurta’ with red prints. I am not sure. This could be the result of not wearing my dorky spectacles or maybe because I was not paying enough attention. It was a fresh face that I had noticed and it was different, I looked at a friend of mine and we exclaimed in unison, “Russian”! “Idiots,” we exclaimed again when we realized that she was completely Indian, but lived somewhere in the Middle East.

Days passed, and I found my head turning towards her often, frequency increasing gradually, along with it the time period too. Confidence kept building as moments passed and turned to months.

Soon the year came to a close. Winter had set in and it was vacation time already. I was sitting uselessly on my desk at home, and i found my finger guiding the mouse on my computer to the tab, which had her mane on it, click-tap-tap-tap..., these noises resulted in Hello Arabian friend being typed on the chat window

Enter.

Thus began a short conversation over the internet, which ended on a casual note.

I did not pay enough attention to her existence, then.

Few months after the winter vacation, the exam fever gripped itself on most of us, and there she was, sitting, behind me in the examination rooms. Three hours of pain through every exam would have been impossible to bear without her presence, as I stole quick glances at what she was writing and her manicured fingers holding the pen at its throat choking the life out it, and the strands of dark hair falling over her visage. The number of facial glances per examination exceeded the number of glances at her answer sheets. She made a few quick glances at my answers too. Soon her presence in the exam hall took shape not only become what I looked forward to, as it was the nearest that I could be to her. It was after this exchange of glances, that a process too complicated to explain, began.

The new academic year 2012-2013 took off at such a slow pace that it crashed our flights instantly. This was difficult to cope with; our young minds were hit with a feeling of boredom and irritation at this crash. It was the announcement of a Literary Festival that saved me from succumbing to the boredom posed by the year. She was an active member in the organizing team, of which I was a part too. Work progressed and so did the process too complicated to explain. We talked more often; we skipped classes often, together. When we attended class, we did together too. This time I spent around her took me close to understanding her beauty, external and internal, and yes I am not talking about her inner anatomy, that would gross the fuck out of me, and I’d probably expel my lung in an act of vomit. I love my lungs, though I soak it in smoke periodically, but that is not the only reason why I am not talking about her anatomy.

The nervousness I feel around her is a better subject to deal in this story: at times my knees tremble and my feet intertwine; I picture myself with a knot instead of a pair of legs.

There was a day when I was trying to enjoy a tasteless meal in one of the cafeterias on campus, when she gracefully walked up to my table with a bunch of her friends, and alienated me from their conversation as I was again paying zero attention to sounds, transported to my silent vacuum with her in front of me, lips moving noiselessly, curving into smiles, laughs, frowns, I felt extra terrestrial. I kept chewing like a cow, but on the food that I had stuffed my mouth with. Three, four, five minutes, I can’t be sure, I had lost all sense of time and space, she was there for; before she stormed out in a random search for ice-cream when I realized that my feet were busy in their process of intertwining. I felt miserable as i swallowed ‘the cud’ that i had been chewing on.

The day before I transformed momentarily into a cow, I had gathered enough motivation and balls to ask her if I could take her to lunch during the weekend, the plan flopped and resulted into a breakfast which was shoved into darkness post the incident at the cafeteria where I turned extra terrestrial.

“There are storms, then darkness. But there is spring and light. And moving on through it makes life!”

She says.