If I Had A Love Story - Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

My heart was pretty much with me throughout my first year and was beating for none but me. It took me almost a year to actually talk to a girl and also not face an impending threat of an anxiety attack (I said I was a slow learner, that's true). By the time, I was comfortable speaking with a girl; my roommates had already hooked up with one each. I didn't have much interest in love then. Love was just another word in my dictionary. The meaning read - An emotional disease with symptoms that include driving your roommate crazy and sleepless so that he runs away from your room. I had to go through the pain of constant whisperings and chuckles at 1 in the morning. Phone calls would start at 11 PM and would sometimes go on till 1 in the morning. I used to wonder what these people would talk all night long. I had tried using pillows to cover my ears but it failed to fetch me sleep. Sometimes I put on my earphones, play music at high volume and slowly sleep. I even had a playlist with melodious and soothing music for this. At times, I would lose my temper and would go to my friend's room to sleep (Glad that I had friends from other departments).

Also during that time, I was the class rep and had all the honours of fetching chalks (I had lost count of the times I was scolded for getting chalk pieces from the English department), cleaning the board, taking attendance, carrying the assessment test papers to the staff room, helping the staff in troubleshooting computers that suddenly went bizarre. Being a class rep had an added advantage (It was written in the Handbook of love, my friend had said). You get to have a default girlfriend (The girls rep. It didn't matter if you liked her or not). I had to bear dumb jokes and other stuff, my friends made out of us that went to the extent of adding my name to hers.

Near the end of year, I was adopted into a gang of seven including me with four boys and three girls. The next parts of college went really well with them. We roamed together and our sojourns at the Alumni hut for our daily chitchats were the very good times.

Time flew amidst the assessments and the semester exams. Lights used to be on till 2 AM or sometimes throughout the night. There were two kinds of people in my hostel - first were those who kept studying till they were satisfied that they had covered everything, the second kind were those who kept talking about the last ball six, Dhoni had hit in that day's match or how Rohit's decision to give the ball to Bumrah had influenced the match's outcome and I belonged to the third kind - the ones, who slept at 11 PM. Exams were the only times, I could sleep peacefully because I wasn't disturbed by my friends' regular phone calls from their love.

It was a Tuesday and it was just the beginning of a new semester. Our classes were over by 3 PM that day. So we decided to hangout at the canteen. We sat down to eat at the second table near the window. The thing about being in an odd numbered gang and being the "odd guy" meant I had to match with any of the existing pairs. Everyone was busy talking and none seemed to notice me. Left with no other options, I started using my phone (If not for the canteen WiFi, I wouldn't have surely survived most of our canteen hangouts).

"Hey, Hi!" Someone greeted from behind.
I turned back to see. It was Diya, our classmate (Diya is a good looking girl. This was everything I knew about her then).
I looked both sides to ensure that it was me she had greeted.
"Hi!" I greeted her back.
"Can I sit here? Is someone coming?" she asked me.
"No, nobody's coming" I stammered sensing a déjà vu.

She was wearing a similar pink tops and a matching dupatta. The rest of us greeted her. She ignored them and sat beside me. I seemed to be caught in a trance till she shrugged me out of it.

"Are you ok?" She asked me.
"Yeah! I'm good, just into some thoughts" I answered.
"Hey! Sorry if I had disturbed you, are you still ok with me here? I can leave if you aren't comfortable" She asked me.
"No, no. It's perfectly fine. We could talk" I told her trying to get hold of myself from stammering once again.

That was the initiative and I had no slightest idea that it would be taking me on a journey of my lifetime. We talked about college and staffs at first. Slowly we shifted to more personal ones.

"Here, have a bit of chola puri" she offered me a mouthful of the chola puri she was eating.
"No, I had mine. I am full" I turned it down lying that I was full.
She was persistent and before she could thrust it into my mouth, I took it from her and ate it.
My friends had finished their food by then and I had to leave with them.
"Bye!" she said smiling.

The "bye" that I was supposed to return never came out of my mouth. My friends dragged me out with them. I stumbled along with them without even waving a bye to her.