A Walk to Remember ForeverShe slowly walked up to me and the closer she came the more helpless I became. The deeper I drowned in the depth of her eyes. “Hey,” she said when she finally reached me.
I replied my customary hey.
“So get off the bike,” she told me.
“Huh?” I asked in confusion.
“We are going for a walk, aren’t we?” she asked me.
“Ummm…yeah,” I replied, “but we were going to walk at KMC Greens. Not to KMC Greens.”
She looked at me and smiled. “So now,” she said, “we are going to walk to and at KMC Greens.”
“Ummm…but why?” I asked.
“Because I want to,” she told me. “So you can either get off that bike or,” she said taking the keys of the bike, “I can throw this somewhere in those bushes.”
“Wow…Anjali Shah and blackmailing,” I said. “Who would have thought?”
“Oh I am full of surprises Mr Rahul,” she replied.
“Oh, I really am looking forward to be surprised,” I said winking at her.
She came really close to me, our faces almost touching. “Don’t look too forward to it. You might not like what you don’t know,” she said breathing down me.
As she stood there, just inches away from me, I had a strong urge to kiss her. She was this close to me, literally breathing down me, our lips a few millimeters away and I just couldn’t help but think of kissing her. ‘Kiss her now and tell her how you feel. Do it,’ a voice said inside me. But I held back. Maybe two weeks ago I would have done exactly that. But not anymore. This was different. This feeling was different. It wasn’t about a kiss-it never was. I really didn’t know what it was about but I wanted to find out. And I didn’t want to ruin it by taking a step that I might regret for the rest of my life. So I held back.
Yet I felt the beads of sweet on my forehead. She was so close to me, she could probably hear me perspiring. She was looking directly into my eyes waiting for me to do or say something. How I wished she would back off. Her staring made me feel so uneasy, I felt I could have another panic attack any moment now. I could feel her breathing, and all I wanted was to hug her, hold her in my arms and keep staring into her eyes like this forever.
“Ummm…alright then,” I said wiping the sweat from my forehead, “let’s walk.”
She smiled at me. A knowing smile. As if saying ‘if that’s what you want.’ Then she moved a bit away from me and started walking towards the direction of the college. “Let’s go,” she said.
The walk from her hostel to KMC Greens was about 15 minutes long but it took us a good 25 minutes to reach there. We walked slowly, without a care in the world for under the moonlight and the shimmering stars her company was the only thing that my heart desired. There were moments when as we walked, I felt like holding her hand, just a touch away and yet too nervous to show any indication of how I felt about her, I refrained from doing so. The night seemed perfect in that moment under the gazing stars as if they would stand testimony to this walk forever. A walk to remember. Forever.
“Why is it that,” she asked me as we walk past the Innovation Centre of our college, “you feel such comfort even in silence with a few people and yet with others, silence seems to prey on your mind all the time?”
“Which category do I belong to?” I asked out of curiosity.
She gave a small laugh. “So far,” she said, “the former.”
“So is that good or bad?” I asked still not sure where I belonged in her life.
“You ask too many questions,” she replied.
“Usually I just ask the time and place,” I said jokingly.
She laughed and the ploy worked. I smiled at her laughter, which seemed to fit so perfectly on her beautiful face. A few moments later, when she had stopped laughing, she said, “You still haven’t answered my question you know?”
I looked straight ahead at the path going down to the main entrance of our college thinking about the question she had asked. “I don’t know,” I said a few moments later. “It could be because when you are trying to make an impression on someone, you start feeling uncomfortable if there’s silence around because then that means the person isn’t really impressed with you.”
She looked at me for a few fleeting moments and then turned straight again. “Interesting thought,” she said. “But then I always thought it was because when you don’t really get along that well with a person and you are in conversation with him, then when silence comes, you tend to feel uncomfortable because you begin to realize that you don’t really have anything to talk about with that person. You immediately start searching for a topic or even thinking of ways to end the conversation but the silence is disturbing because neither of you is saying anything and neither of you is ending the conversation either. On the other hand,” she continued, “when you know someone really well, then you don’t mind silence for you know a topic will come up sooner or later.”
I looked straight ahead at the path going down to the main entrance of our college thinking about the question she had asked. “I don’t know,” I said a few moments later. “It could be because when you are trying to make an impression on someone, you start feeling uncomfortable if there’s silence around because then that means the person isn’t really impressed with you.”
She looked at me for a few fleeting moments and then turned straight again. “Interesting thought,” she said. “But then I always thought it was because when you don’t really get along that well with a person and you are in conversation with him, then when silence comes, you tend to feel uncomfortable because you begin to realize that you don’t really have anything to talk about with that person. You immediately start searching for a topic or even thinking of ways to end the conversation but the silence is disturbing because neither of you is saying anything and neither of you is ending the conversation either. On the other hand,” she continued, “when you know someone really well, then you don’t mind silence for you know a topic will come up sooner or later.”
When she finished talking she turned towards me looking for a reaction. I continued staring straight ahead unsure how exactly to react. Then, out of nowhere, I said, “you think too much.”
She gave a small laugh again. “Well, Mr Rahul, for someone who talked about the blanket of love in his first conversation with me, you aren’t exactly the shallow thinker either, how much ever you may pretend it to be,” she said.
I smiled and continued walking.
As we reached KMC Greens, the rich flow of water from a deck like fountain welcoming us, behind which there was nothing but lush greenery of well cut grass and hence the name KMC Greens. Besides end-point, this was the one place in Manipal where silence and peace was king. But while the valley of End-point was often over crowded with joggers and the sweat of football and hockey players, nothing but solitude reigned supreme at Greens. The silence in the night was even more startling. As we walked past the fountain and onto the Grass, we saw that there was no one here but for a few couples whose lips were too busy in the act of making out to even notice us. As soon as our eyes laid on them, I looked at her hoping she would laugh. But when I caught her eye, she immediately looked downwards out of embarrassment. Public Display of Affections weren’t uncommon at all in Manipal so for a girl to look away in embarrassment at a couple making out surprised me. And it made me fall for her even more. Was this girl so simple, so beautifully naïve that even seeing a couple kissing made her turn beet shoots of red in embarrassment? She looked even more beautiful as her cheeks turned pink in that moment when I caught her eye hoping for a laugh but only getting an embarrassed smile. Why? I asked myself. Why did the simplicity of this girl affect me so much? Why did the naivety of Anjali made my heart skip a beat every time I saw her?
When Virat had said to me in the canteen that they don’t make girls like Anjali anymore, it wasn’t just her beauty that he should have been referring to. It was the personality of Anjali itself. For this pretty girl walking with me at 1 in the night was in every way the epitome of beauty. She believed in simplicity. She believed in the existence of true love, that one day her prince charming will come, that the story of Cinderella may be a fairy tale but it did not mean that it couldn’t happen in real life. Fairy-God mothers may not exist, but God always finds a way to bring her in some form or the other to Cinderella and turn her into the princess that she deserves to be. That glass slippers can indeed be left behind by accident so that your prince can find them and hence find you. That making out in public did not signify your love in any way but only embarrassed others around you. That love was something that was to be cherished only by you and your heart for only they really understood what love meant and to indulge in public making out sessions was only making a mockery of your own love. Her belief in love, more than anything else, her belief in the simplest form of love was what kept me drawing to her so much. Her belief in this purest of emotions, like that of a 9 year old girl, yet totally convinced that she was right was what was so beautiful that I just couldn’t resist the lure of falling in love with her. Maybe I already was in love with her. I didn’t know but as Virat said, it was me who had to find out.
As we walked on the grass from one end to the other, neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I was unsure about what to speak after that making out incident and so felt it best to let her speak, to let her get over the embarrassment. In the mean time I just hoped I wouldn’t end up cracking a joke on that stupid incident and embarrassing her further. I had a tendency to do that. It was a bit cold so I kept my hands in the pocket of my jeans trying to keep them warm. I was wearing a jacket over my t-shirt so I didn’t feel all that cold. On the other hand, Anjali was clad in a simple salwar kameez and would soon feel the brunt of the cold. Manipal didn’t really have a winter but on some nights it was colder than others and tonight happened to be one of those nights.
A few minutes later Anjali folded her hands across her breast indicating that she was feeling cold. It didn’t hit me instantly that she might be hinting something. So I kept walking unaware of what a gentleman was supposed to do in this position. Then she rubbed her hands trying to some heat and folded her hands back and I realized that what an idiot I was being. I removed my jacket and slowly placed it across her shoulders. As I was doing so, her hand came back to take the jacket from me and for an instant our hands touched. It was a soft touch which normally wouldn’t have meant anything but I felt as if that touch of her hand told me that she wouldn’t let me fall, as if that mere touch of her hand had touched my heart. And as our hands touched, for an instant our eyes locked and I felt the world dissolving around me. I smiled at her telling her that I would always be there and she smiled back as if to say she knew. I then slowly removed my hand from her shoulders and she held onto the jacket. For that one mere moment it felt as if we would be together forever.
“So is this the way Rahul Agarwal sweeps the girls off their feet?” she asked when I had placed the jacket on her shoulders.
“Don’t know,” I said shrugging my shoulders. “Are you swept off?” I asked.
She questioned me back. “Were you intending to sweep me off my feet?”
I hesitated for a moment before I winked at her and replied, “I was intending to give you my jacket and be a gentleman. If anything else happened along the way, I am not really going to complain.”
She laughed. I absorbed her laughter as it reflected off into the silence of the night, echoing through the darkness, breaking the stillness that had seemed to set in at this hour of moonlight. For a few minutes we continued walking but then she once again folded her hands indicating that she was cold. I didn’t really pay heed to it at first for there was nothing more I could really do but then she held the jacket tighter to her shoulders and I was in a fix. “It really is cold today,” she said. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. Or what I was supposed to reply. Honestly-it was cold yes but a jacket should have been enough to keep her warm. I was in a t-shirt and jeans and I really didn’t feel the need for any extra layer of clothing. Yet somehow she probably did. At least that’s what she was indicating. So what was I supposed to do? Remove my t-shirt and roam around bare-chested? Not that I didn’t have a well shaped body but the idea of roaming shirtless at 2 in the might didn’t really appeal to me. So what else could I do?
PRECAPAnjali held the jacket even tighter now. She then looked at me with those beautiful eyes full of innocence and I knew that I was going to roam shirtless today. I asked her, almost out of foolishness, “ummm….that jacket not warm enough?”
She shivered a bit and said, “No. It’s warm, but somehow still feeling a little cold.”
“Ummm…anything I can do?” I asked. It was not really the best question but then again I wasn’t really sure.
She, almost out of embarrassment, slowly raised her finger and pointed it towards my t-shirt.
I looked around to see if anyone was watching and confirming that no one was, in one instant removed my t-shirt and handed it over to Anjali. In the very next instant Anjali stared at me like she didn’t believe what I had done and then throwing the t-shirt back at me, ran away laughing in complete embarrassment. I noticed that the couples who seemed to be too busy making out to notice anything else suddenly had their eyes on me wondering what I was doing standing in the middle of the Greens without a shirt on. Anjali was a few feet away from me and still laughing at me. I put on the t-shirt as soon as possible and walked up to Anjali, partially in anger and partially in confusion and asked, “What was all that about?”
Anjali, still laughing, said, “You know Rahul, you are quite the hunk.”
“Shut up,” I told her. “You just did that whole act of feeling really cold just to embarrass me, didn’t you?”
“What if I did?” she said taunting me.
“You know you have a habit of publicly embarrassing me,” I said trying to sound angry.
“Actually,” she said slowly, “I do. And what’s more! I really enjoy it too.”
“You are a sadist,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she replied, “and a beautiful one at that.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “And what has being beautiful got to do with being a sadist?”
She came close to me and raising my hands close to my face and shaping into them claws said, “I am an evil seductress,” and then started laughing again.
“Yeah, that I agree with,” I said while she continued laughing.
She continued to laugh and I stood there smiling at her, at a girl whose laughter was so beautiful that nothing else seemed to matter. All that mattered was that her laughter didn’t stop come what may and that any price would be too less to pay just to see her laughter. She caught me smiling at her and stopped laughing. “What are you smiling about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “You look beautiful when you laugh.”
She blushed. “Thanks,” she muttered looking down, her cheeks turning beet shoots of red.
I smiled at her again. Then looking towards the steps at the side of the Greens I said, “Think we should sit down.”
“Yeah! Let’s sit down,” she replied.
We walked to the steps in silence and when we set down she handed over my jacket back to me. “Why?” I replied as she gave me my jacket back.
“Because I am not really feeling that cold,” she replied.
“Alright,” I said. “If you say so.”
“So who’s Anjali Shah?” I asked after a while.
“Ummm….the girl sitting with you,” she joked.
“You know what I mean.”
“Hmmmm…” she said. “Anjali Shah is a dreamer. One who still believes in her dreams. Who believes that despite all the evils that seemed to exist in this world, this is still a beautiful place to live in. Who believes that despite all the heart breaks and all the pain that this life gives you, it is still worth living. Who believes that life is beautiful-not in parts, but in its entirety. Where despite all the setbacks and all the hurt, it all comes together in the end in one big happily ever after ending. For however low life may seem to be at times, she believes that that low point has come because destiny has something bigger in store for you. Something beautiful and something which will drive away that pain that you have gone through.”
“Wow!” I said stunned. “You really believe all that?”
“I do,” she replied simply. “Because I have seen it and experienced it.”
“What was the experience?” I asked.
“Well,” she began again. “When I broke up with Mohit I really thought that maybe all those dreams I had was just one of an innocent girl who hadn’t seen the real world. I was really falling apart and felt that my dreams would remain just that-dreams. But then because of that break up I met some one who instilled back my faith in those dreams and who made me realize that life may not always be beautiful but as long as you believe in your dreams then you can always move on and rediscover what smiling is all about. Who put a smile back on my face and made me laugh and even in those times when I was just so broken that I thought I wouldn’t recover from it, he, maybe unknowingly, managed to be my ride out of these tough times, literally.”
“Who?” I asked.
She looked at me for a few seconds and then she smiled and said, “You.”
I was taken aback. “Me?” I questioned in shock.
“Yeah! You,” she responded matter of factly.
“Wow! Thanks but I am not sure what exactly I did,” I said still surprised.
“I know,” she replied. “That’s why I said ‘maybe unknowingly’. When I first talked to you at frustration point and I came to know the real Rahul Agarwal, not the one who wears designer jackets and rides on a 200 cc Pulsar and seems to flirt with all the girl he knows and just kisses a girl he finds lying drunk in a lone alley but the one who has seen his mother cry in the middle of the night, the one who so passionately believes in the blanket of love, who cracks jokes funny jokes just to make me laugh and removes his t-shirt in the middle of a public place just to keep a girl warm, when I first met that Rahul Agarwal, he reinstalled my faith in my dreams when he so warmly told me this beautiful story of a young boy whose mother used to protect him with her blanket of love. When I heard that story I knew I would make it through this hurt and this pain that my broken heart had caused me. When he met me at end-point and gave me a ride on his bike, I realized that he was doing all those crazy stunts not to impress me but so that I could beat him up at the end of the ride and laugh about it. It was the first time that I had enjoyed myself so much after the break up and the first time that I had laughed without any hint of sadness. When he called me the first time today and then got so nervous that he couldn’t even speak to me,” at this point I tried looking the other way but she only smiled and continued, “and then lied to me about his room mate having an asthma attack when he was actually suffering from a panic attack himself,” I coughed loudly trying to divert myself from what I was hearing, “I realized that even a confident man like Rahul Agarwal can get nervous talking to a girl and that made me smile because I knew that slowly and steadily he was becoming a friend I could rely on and maybe, just maybe, I was the reason why Rahul Agarwal was not wasting his times trying to hit on girls who weren’t worth him.”
Her words hit me like a wall of bricks. I sat there, in silence, listening to her, trying to make sense of it all and when she finished, I had no idea how to react. For a few moments I thought about telling her how she had affected me, about how my world had changed so drastically or rather improved so drastically ever since she had entered it but then I realized that perhaps she already knew that. And if she didn’t then maybe just now wasn’t the time to let her know about it yet. I looked at her trying to understand why she had said what she had said and if her words meant more than what she had expressed them as. She looked at me a bit most eyed and smiled. I smiled back and after a long time slowly said, “I am glad I could be of help.”
She slowly whispered, “Thanks,” and my heart fluttered with every syllable of that word.
“You know,” I told her after a few moments, “I may not have known you for long but you deserve happiness Anjali. Of all the people I know, you deserve happiness more than anybody else.”
“Thanks again,” she whispered.
After a while with both of us not saying anything and just contemplating what we meant to each other, she got up and said, “Come on, walk me back to the hostel now.”
“Yes maam,” I said getting up.
We walked back to the hostel just talking and laughing about anything and everything under the moonlight. There would be times when I would taunt her and she would hit me and say “Shut Up!” After every 5 minutes or so I would tell her how beautiful she was and she would blush and look down and tell me to stop. “Rahuuuuuulllll,” she would say blushing, “stop it!” When we finally reached her hostel we slowed our paces for both of us didn’t want this walk to end. For a moment I thought about reaching out to her and holding her hand for the last part of this walk but then I hesitated and the moment was gone. We reached the gates of her hostel. “I guess this is it,” she said standing near the gate.
“Yeah,” I said.
A part of me wanted to tell her how I felt about her. If there was a moment to do so then it would have been now when we so clearly understood each other. But then she had just broken up and the thought that she might not be ready for a relationship yet held me back. Somehow from somewhere I still felt the urge to tell her everything. “Bye then, thanks for the walk,” she told me.
“Yeah, bye” I said without moving an inch.
She noticed that I was still standing there. “You want to say something Rahul?” she asked me.
“Say,” I said my hands in the pocket of my jeans and thinking of what to say next, “no…nothing.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. I wondered if she was hinting that she wanted me to say something. I had read somewhere that if girls don’t enter their homes immediately after saying bye then they probably want you to say something. Something like ‘I love you.’ But somehow I still wasn’t convinced if I should say anything at all. “Rahul,” she said, “you know you can tell me anything right?”
It was then that I decided that I wasn’t going to say anything at all. I smiled and said, “I know.”
“So do you want to say anything?” she asked me again.
I walked up to her, our face almost touching and said, “yeah.” She was looking directly into my eyes now afraid at what I was about to do or say. She moved back hesitantly. Her nervousness showed. I walked closer to her again and looking into her eyes I raised my left hand to her face and slowly moved the small strand of hair near her hair backwards and then as she grew more and more frightened, I took another step towards her and kissed her on the forehead and said, “Good night Anjali.” Then I turned back and started walking towards my bike parked outside her hostel. As I sat on my bike I saw her, still standing there, a bit dazed and bewildered. There was almost an expression of disappointment on her face. I smiled at her and she gave me a smile back still unsure as to what had just happened.
She then turned back and when she had almost entered the gates of her hostel I cried out her name. ‘Anjali,” I said getting off my bike. She turned back and looked at me surprised to see me walking towards her. I unzipped my jacket as I walked to her. “What?” she said when I had reached her. I removed my jacket and slowly placed them on her shoulders. When I had placed them on her shoulders she turned back to me and asked me, “But why?”
“Because,” I replied slowly, “you may not be feeling cold now but when ever you do, I just want to ensure you have something to keep you warm.”
Saying that I walked back to my bike, stepped it into gear and zoomed off into the night. It had indeed been a walk to remember.
**************************
I replied my customary hey.
“So get off the bike,” she told me.
“Huh?” I asked in confusion.
“We are going for a walk, aren’t we?” she asked me.
“Ummm…yeah,” I replied, “but we were going to walk at KMC Greens. Not to KMC Greens.”
She looked at me and smiled. “So now,” she said, “we are going to walk to and at KMC Greens.”
“Ummm…but why?” I asked.
“Because I want to,” she told me. “So you can either get off that bike or,” she said taking the keys of the bike, “I can throw this somewhere in those bushes.”
“Wow…Anjali Shah and blackmailing,” I said. “Who would have thought?”
“Oh I am full of surprises Mr Rahul,” she replied.
“Oh, I really am looking forward to be surprised,” I said winking at her.
She came really close to me, our faces almost touching. “Don’t look too forward to it. You might not like what you don’t know,” she said breathing down me.
As she stood there, just inches away from me, I had a strong urge to kiss her. She was this close to me, literally breathing down me, our lips a few millimeters away and I just couldn’t help but think of kissing her. ‘Kiss her now and tell her how you feel. Do it,’ a voice said inside me. But I held back. Maybe two weeks ago I would have done exactly that. But not anymore. This was different. This feeling was different. It wasn’t about a kiss-it never was. I really didn’t know what it was about but I wanted to find out. And I didn’t want to ruin it by taking a step that I might regret for the rest of my life. So I held back.
Yet I felt the beads of sweet on my forehead. She was so close to me, she could probably hear me perspiring. She was looking directly into my eyes waiting for me to do or say something. How I wished she would back off. Her staring made me feel so uneasy, I felt I could have another panic attack any moment now. I could feel her breathing, and all I wanted was to hug her, hold her in my arms and keep staring into her eyes like this forever.
“Ummm…alright then,” I said wiping the sweat from my forehead, “let’s walk.”
She smiled at me. A knowing smile. As if saying ‘if that’s what you want.’ Then she moved a bit away from me and started walking towards the direction of the college. “Let’s go,” she said.
The walk from her hostel to KMC Greens was about 15 minutes long but it took us a good 25 minutes to reach there. We walked slowly, without a care in the world for under the moonlight and the shimmering stars her company was the only thing that my heart desired. There were moments when as we walked, I felt like holding her hand, just a touch away and yet too nervous to show any indication of how I felt about her, I refrained from doing so. The night seemed perfect in that moment under the gazing stars as if they would stand testimony to this walk forever. A walk to remember. Forever.
“Why is it that,” she asked me as we walk past the Innovation Centre of our college, “you feel such comfort even in silence with a few people and yet with others, silence seems to prey on your mind all the time?”
“Which category do I belong to?” I asked out of curiosity.
She gave a small laugh. “So far,” she said, “the former.”
“So is that good or bad?” I asked still not sure where I belonged in her life.
“You ask too many questions,” she replied.
“Usually I just ask the time and place,” I said jokingly.
She laughed and the ploy worked. I smiled at her laughter, which seemed to fit so perfectly on her beautiful face. A few moments later, when she had stopped laughing, she said, “You still haven’t answered my question you know?”
I looked straight ahead at the path going down to the main entrance of our college thinking about the question she had asked. “I don’t know,” I said a few moments later. “It could be because when you are trying to make an impression on someone, you start feeling uncomfortable if there’s silence around because then that means the person isn’t really impressed with you.”
She looked at me for a few fleeting moments and then turned straight again. “Interesting thought,” she said. “But then I always thought it was because when you don’t really get along that well with a person and you are in conversation with him, then when silence comes, you tend to feel uncomfortable because you begin to realize that you don’t really have anything to talk about with that person. You immediately start searching for a topic or even thinking of ways to end the conversation but the silence is disturbing because neither of you is saying anything and neither of you is ending the conversation either. On the other hand,” she continued, “when you know someone really well, then you don’t mind silence for you know a topic will come up sooner or later.”
I looked straight ahead at the path going down to the main entrance of our college thinking about the question she had asked. “I don’t know,” I said a few moments later. “It could be because when you are trying to make an impression on someone, you start feeling uncomfortable if there’s silence around because then that means the person isn’t really impressed with you.”
She looked at me for a few fleeting moments and then turned straight again. “Interesting thought,” she said. “But then I always thought it was because when you don’t really get along that well with a person and you are in conversation with him, then when silence comes, you tend to feel uncomfortable because you begin to realize that you don’t really have anything to talk about with that person. You immediately start searching for a topic or even thinking of ways to end the conversation but the silence is disturbing because neither of you is saying anything and neither of you is ending the conversation either. On the other hand,” she continued, “when you know someone really well, then you don’t mind silence for you know a topic will come up sooner or later.”
When she finished talking she turned towards me looking for a reaction. I continued staring straight ahead unsure how exactly to react. Then, out of nowhere, I said, “you think too much.”
She gave a small laugh again. “Well, Mr Rahul, for someone who talked about the blanket of love in his first conversation with me, you aren’t exactly the shallow thinker either, how much ever you may pretend it to be,” she said.
I smiled and continued walking.
As we reached KMC Greens, the rich flow of water from a deck like fountain welcoming us, behind which there was nothing but lush greenery of well cut grass and hence the name KMC Greens. Besides end-point, this was the one place in Manipal where silence and peace was king. But while the valley of End-point was often over crowded with joggers and the sweat of football and hockey players, nothing but solitude reigned supreme at Greens. The silence in the night was even more startling. As we walked past the fountain and onto the Grass, we saw that there was no one here but for a few couples whose lips were too busy in the act of making out to even notice us. As soon as our eyes laid on them, I looked at her hoping she would laugh. But when I caught her eye, she immediately looked downwards out of embarrassment. Public Display of Affections weren’t uncommon at all in Manipal so for a girl to look away in embarrassment at a couple making out surprised me. And it made me fall for her even more. Was this girl so simple, so beautifully naïve that even seeing a couple kissing made her turn beet shoots of red in embarrassment? She looked even more beautiful as her cheeks turned pink in that moment when I caught her eye hoping for a laugh but only getting an embarrassed smile. Why? I asked myself. Why did the simplicity of this girl affect me so much? Why did the naivety of Anjali made my heart skip a beat every time I saw her?
When Virat had said to me in the canteen that they don’t make girls like Anjali anymore, it wasn’t just her beauty that he should have been referring to. It was the personality of Anjali itself. For this pretty girl walking with me at 1 in the night was in every way the epitome of beauty. She believed in simplicity. She believed in the existence of true love, that one day her prince charming will come, that the story of Cinderella may be a fairy tale but it did not mean that it couldn’t happen in real life. Fairy-God mothers may not exist, but God always finds a way to bring her in some form or the other to Cinderella and turn her into the princess that she deserves to be. That glass slippers can indeed be left behind by accident so that your prince can find them and hence find you. That making out in public did not signify your love in any way but only embarrassed others around you. That love was something that was to be cherished only by you and your heart for only they really understood what love meant and to indulge in public making out sessions was only making a mockery of your own love. Her belief in love, more than anything else, her belief in the simplest form of love was what kept me drawing to her so much. Her belief in this purest of emotions, like that of a 9 year old girl, yet totally convinced that she was right was what was so beautiful that I just couldn’t resist the lure of falling in love with her. Maybe I already was in love with her. I didn’t know but as Virat said, it was me who had to find out.
As we walked on the grass from one end to the other, neither of us spoke for a few minutes. I was unsure about what to speak after that making out incident and so felt it best to let her speak, to let her get over the embarrassment. In the mean time I just hoped I wouldn’t end up cracking a joke on that stupid incident and embarrassing her further. I had a tendency to do that. It was a bit cold so I kept my hands in the pocket of my jeans trying to keep them warm. I was wearing a jacket over my t-shirt so I didn’t feel all that cold. On the other hand, Anjali was clad in a simple salwar kameez and would soon feel the brunt of the cold. Manipal didn’t really have a winter but on some nights it was colder than others and tonight happened to be one of those nights.
A few minutes later Anjali folded her hands across her breast indicating that she was feeling cold. It didn’t hit me instantly that she might be hinting something. So I kept walking unaware of what a gentleman was supposed to do in this position. Then she rubbed her hands trying to some heat and folded her hands back and I realized that what an idiot I was being. I removed my jacket and slowly placed it across her shoulders. As I was doing so, her hand came back to take the jacket from me and for an instant our hands touched. It was a soft touch which normally wouldn’t have meant anything but I felt as if that touch of her hand told me that she wouldn’t let me fall, as if that mere touch of her hand had touched my heart. And as our hands touched, for an instant our eyes locked and I felt the world dissolving around me. I smiled at her telling her that I would always be there and she smiled back as if to say she knew. I then slowly removed my hand from her shoulders and she held onto the jacket. For that one mere moment it felt as if we would be together forever.
“So is this the way Rahul Agarwal sweeps the girls off their feet?” she asked when I had placed the jacket on her shoulders.
“Don’t know,” I said shrugging my shoulders. “Are you swept off?” I asked.
She questioned me back. “Were you intending to sweep me off my feet?”
I hesitated for a moment before I winked at her and replied, “I was intending to give you my jacket and be a gentleman. If anything else happened along the way, I am not really going to complain.”
She laughed. I absorbed her laughter as it reflected off into the silence of the night, echoing through the darkness, breaking the stillness that had seemed to set in at this hour of moonlight. For a few minutes we continued walking but then she once again folded her hands indicating that she was cold. I didn’t really pay heed to it at first for there was nothing more I could really do but then she held the jacket tighter to her shoulders and I was in a fix. “It really is cold today,” she said. I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do. Or what I was supposed to reply. Honestly-it was cold yes but a jacket should have been enough to keep her warm. I was in a t-shirt and jeans and I really didn’t feel the need for any extra layer of clothing. Yet somehow she probably did. At least that’s what she was indicating. So what was I supposed to do? Remove my t-shirt and roam around bare-chested? Not that I didn’t have a well shaped body but the idea of roaming shirtless at 2 in the might didn’t really appeal to me. So what else could I do?
PRECAPAnjali held the jacket even tighter now. She then looked at me with those beautiful eyes full of innocence and I knew that I was going to roam shirtless today. I asked her, almost out of foolishness, “ummm….that jacket not warm enough?”
She shivered a bit and said, “No. It’s warm, but somehow still feeling a little cold.”
“Ummm…anything I can do?” I asked. It was not really the best question but then again I wasn’t really sure.
She, almost out of embarrassment, slowly raised her finger and pointed it towards my t-shirt.
I looked around to see if anyone was watching and confirming that no one was, in one instant removed my t-shirt and handed it over to Anjali. In the very next instant Anjali stared at me like she didn’t believe what I had done and then throwing the t-shirt back at me, ran away laughing in complete embarrassment. I noticed that the couples who seemed to be too busy making out to notice anything else suddenly had their eyes on me wondering what I was doing standing in the middle of the Greens without a shirt on. Anjali was a few feet away from me and still laughing at me. I put on the t-shirt as soon as possible and walked up to Anjali, partially in anger and partially in confusion and asked, “What was all that about?”
Anjali, still laughing, said, “You know Rahul, you are quite the hunk.”
“Shut up,” I told her. “You just did that whole act of feeling really cold just to embarrass me, didn’t you?”
“What if I did?” she said taunting me.
“You know you have a habit of publicly embarrassing me,” I said trying to sound angry.
“Actually,” she said slowly, “I do. And what’s more! I really enjoy it too.”
“You are a sadist,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she replied, “and a beautiful one at that.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “And what has being beautiful got to do with being a sadist?”
She came close to me and raising my hands close to my face and shaping into them claws said, “I am an evil seductress,” and then started laughing again.
“Yeah, that I agree with,” I said while she continued laughing.
She continued to laugh and I stood there smiling at her, at a girl whose laughter was so beautiful that nothing else seemed to matter. All that mattered was that her laughter didn’t stop come what may and that any price would be too less to pay just to see her laughter. She caught me smiling at her and stopped laughing. “What are you smiling about?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I replied. “You look beautiful when you laugh.”
She blushed. “Thanks,” she muttered looking down, her cheeks turning beet shoots of red.
I smiled at her again. Then looking towards the steps at the side of the Greens I said, “Think we should sit down.”
“Yeah! Let’s sit down,” she replied.
We walked to the steps in silence and when we set down she handed over my jacket back to me. “Why?” I replied as she gave me my jacket back.
“Because I am not really feeling that cold,” she replied.
“Alright,” I said. “If you say so.”
“So who’s Anjali Shah?” I asked after a while.
“Ummm….the girl sitting with you,” she joked.
“You know what I mean.”
“Hmmmm…” she said. “Anjali Shah is a dreamer. One who still believes in her dreams. Who believes that despite all the evils that seemed to exist in this world, this is still a beautiful place to live in. Who believes that despite all the heart breaks and all the pain that this life gives you, it is still worth living. Who believes that life is beautiful-not in parts, but in its entirety. Where despite all the setbacks and all the hurt, it all comes together in the end in one big happily ever after ending. For however low life may seem to be at times, she believes that that low point has come because destiny has something bigger in store for you. Something beautiful and something which will drive away that pain that you have gone through.”
“Wow!” I said stunned. “You really believe all that?”
“I do,” she replied simply. “Because I have seen it and experienced it.”
“What was the experience?” I asked.
“Well,” she began again. “When I broke up with Mohit I really thought that maybe all those dreams I had was just one of an innocent girl who hadn’t seen the real world. I was really falling apart and felt that my dreams would remain just that-dreams. But then because of that break up I met some one who instilled back my faith in those dreams and who made me realize that life may not always be beautiful but as long as you believe in your dreams then you can always move on and rediscover what smiling is all about. Who put a smile back on my face and made me laugh and even in those times when I was just so broken that I thought I wouldn’t recover from it, he, maybe unknowingly, managed to be my ride out of these tough times, literally.”
“Who?” I asked.
She looked at me for a few seconds and then she smiled and said, “You.”
I was taken aback. “Me?” I questioned in shock.
“Yeah! You,” she responded matter of factly.
“Wow! Thanks but I am not sure what exactly I did,” I said still surprised.
“I know,” she replied. “That’s why I said ‘maybe unknowingly’. When I first talked to you at frustration point and I came to know the real Rahul Agarwal, not the one who wears designer jackets and rides on a 200 cc Pulsar and seems to flirt with all the girl he knows and just kisses a girl he finds lying drunk in a lone alley but the one who has seen his mother cry in the middle of the night, the one who so passionately believes in the blanket of love, who cracks jokes funny jokes just to make me laugh and removes his t-shirt in the middle of a public place just to keep a girl warm, when I first met that Rahul Agarwal, he reinstalled my faith in my dreams when he so warmly told me this beautiful story of a young boy whose mother used to protect him with her blanket of love. When I heard that story I knew I would make it through this hurt and this pain that my broken heart had caused me. When he met me at end-point and gave me a ride on his bike, I realized that he was doing all those crazy stunts not to impress me but so that I could beat him up at the end of the ride and laugh about it. It was the first time that I had enjoyed myself so much after the break up and the first time that I had laughed without any hint of sadness. When he called me the first time today and then got so nervous that he couldn’t even speak to me,” at this point I tried looking the other way but she only smiled and continued, “and then lied to me about his room mate having an asthma attack when he was actually suffering from a panic attack himself,” I coughed loudly trying to divert myself from what I was hearing, “I realized that even a confident man like Rahul Agarwal can get nervous talking to a girl and that made me smile because I knew that slowly and steadily he was becoming a friend I could rely on and maybe, just maybe, I was the reason why Rahul Agarwal was not wasting his times trying to hit on girls who weren’t worth him.”
Her words hit me like a wall of bricks. I sat there, in silence, listening to her, trying to make sense of it all and when she finished, I had no idea how to react. For a few moments I thought about telling her how she had affected me, about how my world had changed so drastically or rather improved so drastically ever since she had entered it but then I realized that perhaps she already knew that. And if she didn’t then maybe just now wasn’t the time to let her know about it yet. I looked at her trying to understand why she had said what she had said and if her words meant more than what she had expressed them as. She looked at me a bit most eyed and smiled. I smiled back and after a long time slowly said, “I am glad I could be of help.”
She slowly whispered, “Thanks,” and my heart fluttered with every syllable of that word.
“You know,” I told her after a few moments, “I may not have known you for long but you deserve happiness Anjali. Of all the people I know, you deserve happiness more than anybody else.”
“Thanks again,” she whispered.
After a while with both of us not saying anything and just contemplating what we meant to each other, she got up and said, “Come on, walk me back to the hostel now.”
“Yes maam,” I said getting up.
We walked back to the hostel just talking and laughing about anything and everything under the moonlight. There would be times when I would taunt her and she would hit me and say “Shut Up!” After every 5 minutes or so I would tell her how beautiful she was and she would blush and look down and tell me to stop. “Rahuuuuuulllll,” she would say blushing, “stop it!” When we finally reached her hostel we slowed our paces for both of us didn’t want this walk to end. For a moment I thought about reaching out to her and holding her hand for the last part of this walk but then I hesitated and the moment was gone. We reached the gates of her hostel. “I guess this is it,” she said standing near the gate.
“Yeah,” I said.
A part of me wanted to tell her how I felt about her. If there was a moment to do so then it would have been now when we so clearly understood each other. But then she had just broken up and the thought that she might not be ready for a relationship yet held me back. Somehow from somewhere I still felt the urge to tell her everything. “Bye then, thanks for the walk,” she told me.
“Yeah, bye” I said without moving an inch.
She noticed that I was still standing there. “You want to say something Rahul?” she asked me.
“Say,” I said my hands in the pocket of my jeans and thinking of what to say next, “no…nothing.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. I wondered if she was hinting that she wanted me to say something. I had read somewhere that if girls don’t enter their homes immediately after saying bye then they probably want you to say something. Something like ‘I love you.’ But somehow I still wasn’t convinced if I should say anything at all. “Rahul,” she said, “you know you can tell me anything right?”
It was then that I decided that I wasn’t going to say anything at all. I smiled and said, “I know.”
“So do you want to say anything?” she asked me again.
I walked up to her, our face almost touching and said, “yeah.” She was looking directly into my eyes now afraid at what I was about to do or say. She moved back hesitantly. Her nervousness showed. I walked closer to her again and looking into her eyes I raised my left hand to her face and slowly moved the small strand of hair near her hair backwards and then as she grew more and more frightened, I took another step towards her and kissed her on the forehead and said, “Good night Anjali.” Then I turned back and started walking towards my bike parked outside her hostel. As I sat on my bike I saw her, still standing there, a bit dazed and bewildered. There was almost an expression of disappointment on her face. I smiled at her and she gave me a smile back still unsure as to what had just happened.
She then turned back and when she had almost entered the gates of her hostel I cried out her name. ‘Anjali,” I said getting off my bike. She turned back and looked at me surprised to see me walking towards her. I unzipped my jacket as I walked to her. “What?” she said when I had reached her. I removed my jacket and slowly placed them on her shoulders. When I had placed them on her shoulders she turned back to me and asked me, “But why?”
“Because,” I replied slowly, “you may not be feeling cold now but when ever you do, I just want to ensure you have something to keep you warm.”
Saying that I walked back to my bike, stepped it into gear and zoomed off into the night. It had indeed been a walk to remember.
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