Sheetal-Virat's LOVE“Hey Sheetal,” I said and got up to give her a hug. “Hey,” she answered as she wrapped her arms around me and whispered in my ears, “every time I try to think that you have improved, you just go back to being a jerk. We are going to talk.” “Yes ma’am,” I replied in mock respect.
“And you,” she said turning her attention towards her boyfriend. “Hey Sheetal,” Virat said as he kissed her on the forehead.
“Hey me later,” she said sitting on one of the empty chairs. “You have been ignoring me.”
Virat didn’t seem to care a lot about that accusation. “Yeah, well, 3rd year you know. Placements and stuff,” he said almost casually.
“Placements and stuff? Is that the best you can throw at me? Sheesh, that’s the lamest excuse you could use. I expected better from you Virat.”
Virat again seemed to care totally less about the direction of this conversation. “Yeah, well, what are you gonna do? Shoot me?”
“Tell me again why I am dating you, Virat Mathur?” Sheetal asked. This was going to be interesting. I had seen this conversation take place a few times before and every time Virat tried to act the cool dude, Sheetal played her trump card. That obvious question-Why did I start dating you? Virat just crumbled under the pressure of answering that question. It had been almost 2 years since they started dating, yet somehow Virat still hadn’t found the right answer to that question. There was no doubt who had the upper hand in this relationship.
Most Girls Do This,So "BEWARE"So Virat’s attempt to answer the question began. “Because you love me?” he tried. That had always been his opening statement. And every time the answer had been prompt.
“You kidding me, Virat?” Sheetal said almost mockingly, “I wasn’t in love with you when I started dating you, how many times do I have to say that? You were desperately in love with me.”
“Because I was a nice guy and you liked me?” This was such a cliché. I almost pitied Virat for saying that.
The answer was obvious. “There are so many nice guys, Virat. And I do like a few of them.”
And then she played out her final card. “You know Rahul,” she said turning towards me. “Sometimes I think if I had dated one of those other nice guys, they might have made better boyfriends than your roommate here.”
The response was swift. Virat grabbed Sheetal’s hand and holding it in his, in a desperate plea said, “Sheetal, I love you, I am desperately in love with you. Please don’t ever leave me. I will never ignore you again, never.”
Winking at me, she said, “I love being a bitch sometimes.”
“That you do,” I said and raised my glass of grape juice.
MY SCHOOL MATEShe smiled. It was a knowing smile. A smile I knew since 11th grade in school. Sheetal Malhar had always been beautiful and charming and well, very hot. Even in school, boys couldn’t stop ogling at her. I was one of them. When I had seen her first, I couldn’t take my eyes off her legs. Slowly, coming to know her, I realized she was a girl worth being friends with. Yet somehow it was hard to ignore her beauty. Or her figure. So much so that one day she caught me staring at her legs and said, “Rahul, I know I have great legs but you have been staring at them for 4 months now. You should be used to them by now.”
That was said in front of 8 other people. I can’t remember a more embarrassing situation in my school life other than that. But straight after saying that, while everyone else was laughing, she winked at me. There was no doubt she was flirting with me. It was there and then I decided I was going to hit on her.
So I tried wooing her. That embarrassing situation became my keycard. Whenever I would find her alone, I would try hitting on her. I would walk up to her and say, “So how are those beautiful legs of yours doing?” Or something related. She always flirted back. In fact, I had never enjoyed flirting with a girl as much as I did with Sheetal. Once I even told her that there were other parts of her bodies I liked staring at other than her legs. I almost immediately regretted saying that thinking that I had crossed the line. Yet somehow her reply was, “Yeah? Even I would like to see some parts of your body someday.”
THINK B4 YOU DRINK VODKAAnd that was in 11th grade. God! That was the most awesome bit of flirting I could think of. Sexual flirting was almost unheard of in school. It was almost unheard of in college as well. And here she was, openly flirting with me.
Yet every time I asked her to have dinner with me, she turned me down. I asked her out in the tone of a friend, yet she rejected me in the tone of a date. So I realized that she just liked flirting, that it was one of her talents that she enjoyed using and that she was never actually interested in going out with me. In fact she never had a boyfriend in school. So even though the flirting between us continued, I never asked her out.
Life took a turn. After school, all of us friends were headed to different colleges, not knowing when and if we will ever meet again. To my surprise, Sheetal wounded up at Manipal with me. She had secured admission in Bio tech. It meant that there was some one to talk to in this new and strange place and it also meant that I had my link to the female world of Manipal right at the outset. Not that I needed any, but just that I wouldn’t have to work hard to search for that link unlike the other boys.
But somehow I lost my interest in pursuing her once we came to Manipal. Maybe it was because she never really seemed to be interested in me. Or maybe it was because I had a girlfriend within the 2nd week of reaching Manipal. One bird in hand is worth more than two in the bush, right?
And thus we decided that we would forever remain in the ‘just friends’ category. But things are never really that simple, are they?
A month afterwards, my new best friend Virat told me that he had feelings for Sheetal. And as I was the connection between the two I was naturally asked to help out. This wasn’t so easy of course. Sheetal happened to be one of the hottest girls on the campus, almost every guy had a beeline for her and being a freshie, all the available seniors were looking to claim her as well. And Virat was no Brad Pitt. Not that Virat looked bad, no, he was pretty decent looking and quite a few of the girls would have been quite happy to go out with him on the basis of just his looks but this was Sheetal Malhar we were talking about. She was way above his league as boys would put it.
My advice to Virat was simple-play the sincerity card. Because if he tried to play the cool stud, then there were a thousand guys who had him beat in that department. So I asked him to be the simpleton guy who she could take home to her parents and not to a cheap motel room. In simple words, I told him to act like he was ‘the one.’
Oh, haven’t you heard about ‘the one’? See, this whole concept was probably introduced by a girl. Juliet is my best bet. It could be Laila or Ranjha as well, but the point is it was definitely introduced by a girl. ‘The one’ is defined as the person whom the heavens has sent just for you to spend the rest of your life with. Where the sun, the moon, the solar system, all the constellations, the entire galaxy, in short the whole universe (don’t know about meteors) unites to just bring the two of you together. Where your every chromosome matches with ‘the one’ and the world is perfect. Ah darn-girls can be so cheesy.
Now Sheetal Malhar doesn’t seem the type but I have a feeling that almost every girl actually believes in ‘the one’, whether they admit it or not. I mean every girl begins to dream about her Prince Charming the moment they turn nine. And if you dream about Prince Charming, then you believe in the one. Why? Because Prince Charming is the ultimate ‘the one.’ So next time you want to woo a girl you now know whom to approach.
So well, the story continued. Virat had a go at the impossible-to make Sheetal Malhar fall in love with him. If in the first week of college some one had told me that Sheetal Malhar was going to date Virat Mathur, I would have laughed my guts out. Yet today it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
Not that this was the easiest of tasks. Sheetal hardly seemed interested in having a conversation with Virat initially, leave alone actually thinking of going out on a date with him. But perseverance pays. There was no doubt Virat had hopelessly fallen in love with Sheetal. And all we had to do was make Sheetal realize exactly what that meant. Once she fully understood the gravity of the situation, I was convinced that Sheetal would at least think about what a relationship with Virat could mean. And so it happened. And honestly-there couldn’t have been a worse or a better way to make it happen.
One evening- me, Sheetal and Virat were hanging out at DT. And Virat in a fit of adrenaline got himself drunk. Imagine a guy who has just started drinking a few weeks back and then decides to gulp down 400 ml of White Mischief. With soda of corse. Or else he would be vomiting throughout the night. So there we had Virat, completely drunk and not aware about anything else in the world but himself and his feelings. And what better way to let out his feelings than now, when he won’t remember a thing in the morning. So while Sheetal and me were dancing, Virat pushed me off and said those famous words of his-“Lay off my girl you bastard.”
There-it was out in the open now. Virat, the guy who would take 3 months to ask a girl’s phone number even if he had been talking to her every single day had just declared his love for Sheetal Malhar in front of 100 odd people and in an open disco. Seriously, some of the best incidents in the world happen when people get drunk.
Sheetal looked complete bewildered. Her immediate response was, “Virat!! What the heck??” While me~I just gathered myself and prepared for one hell of a show. I wasn’t sure if anything positive was going to come out of it-but hell, this was free entertainment. For Virat wasn’t done yet. Nope, in fact Virat was just getting started.
“Sheetal, you stay out of this,” he responded to Sheetal’s earlier posed question of what the heck!! “And you,” he said, turning his attention towards the hapless me. I straightened my collar and waited for Virat’s rampage to begin. “You,” he said again raising his pointing towards me. “You call yourself a friend?? You backstabber, ungrateful son of a bitch. I tell you I like this girl, I ask you to help me and this is how you pay me back? By dancing with her as if she were your girlfriend?”
And Finally Sheetal and Virat Started Dating.But the problem with a drunken man is that he never knows when to stop. Heck-they don’t even know that they shouldn’t begin in the first place but their bigger problem is their inability to realize when their entertainment show has turned into a bore fest. Virat suffered from the very same problem. For his outburst continued. But of course, we the audience, were now beginning to lose interest in this one man show.
“Buy you little richie richs,” Virat continued his accusations towards the crowd. “You little richie richs just don’t know what love means, do you. All you care about is getting some action in the night. Slam, Bam, Thank you maam. That’s all you want. I mean man has become such a pathetic creature that he has forgotten the first and most important basic thing that makes him above animals. And no, it’s not your freaking brain, you mint sized dodos. It’s your feelings. Emotions-the one thing that controls your heart. For any animal can indulge in the act of reproduction. But that act means something to us humans. That’s why we call it making love. But you don’t care about making love. All you care about is sex. All you want to do is fuck. And for that I spit on you.” And with this Virat actually spat on to the floor of the disc in front of a crowd who were still as dumbfounded at Virat’s outburst as they were at the beginning of it. Heck-even I had my mouth open. And I swear if something else hadn’t happened, we would actually have given him a resounding applause.
But then, as soon as Virat spat onto the floor, we heard the sound of a hand whipping across Virat’s cheek. The slap was so hard that a still staggering Virat immediately fell on the floor. Sheetal, the person who was responsible for the bright red marks on Virat’s right cheek, ran out of the disc, covering her mouth and in absolute tears. I immediately went to help Virat who was unconscious by now. “That was some slap,” I whispered to myself. Me and another person in the disc helped Virat to his feet but still being in an unconscious state we had to almost carry him on our shoulders to a nearby sofa where we laid him down. Making sure he was alright and still unconscious, I asked the waiter to give him lemon with salt, a usual remedy to help the hangover that people have when they wake up from a bout of heavy drinking, and then ran outside to look for Sheetal.
I found her sitting on the parapet just outside the entrance of the disc, still in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. I sat right next to her and kept quite for a while, letting her cry a little longer before I said, “You know, I never thought of you as one of the crying types.”
The tears didn’t stop completely. But still she managed to say, “So now you want to tell the world that Sheetal Malhar, supposed to be an attitude bitch, can cry as well.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it. At least now I can blackmail you with. The fact that Sheetal Malhar isn’t really all that strong and some things do get to her, well-that’s an asset I could use sometime,” I said.
There was a small bit of laughter from her as she punched me on my arm. The tears had almost stopped now. “Yeah right,” she said, “as if anyone would believe a guy with a reputation like yours.”
“Ah yeah-damn! Why didn’t I think of that before? Maybe I should have flirted a little less with the girls.”
My attempt at humor almost always worked. Sheetal didn’t say anything but the fact that her tears had almost stopped now and that she was laughing at my stupidity knew that I had managed to cheer her up to an extent. But the job was only half done. There was the impending talk of Virat’s outburst still left. Luckily it was she who brought up the topic.
“That was the most embarrassing moment of my life, in there” she said in reference to the incident that had just happened a few moments ago.
I wasn’t sure how to go about this. I knew I had to defend Virat and make Sheetal understand that maybe Virat hadn’t chosen the most pragmatic method to express his feelings for her, but those feelings were still genuine.
“He’s right in a way you know,” I said.
“About what?”
“About the whole man becoming a pathetic creature and love making part.”
I waited for her reaction. I wanted to make sure that she understood what I meant before I said any thing more.
Her reaction was this. “So you want to start a discussion on sex with me now?”
I guess my reputation precedes myself. Even one of my best friends tends to think that all I am interested is a hop in the sack. Slam, Bam, Thank you maam, as Virat would put it.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said in an attempt at defending myself. “I meant we don’t get to see those genuine emotions anymore. Love has almost taken a backseat in our lives. We tend to be in a relationship out of default, because it is what most people tend to do rather than because we really do have feelings for that person.”
“Speak for yourself,” she replied.
That was another stab at my reputation. I guess a guy with umpteen break ups in his resume isn’t exactly most suited for a talk on genuine emotions. I still tried though.
“Look, what I really meant to say and I know coming from someone like me, this sounds strange, but Virat does really like you. And probably loves you as he said. Whatever he said in there was cent percent true. I could completely identify with every word he said. He would talk to me about you day and night but not once did he mention about how hot you were or how great your figure was. All he would talk about is how beautiful you are, how amazing your eyes were. I guess he didn’t care about the materialistic things. All he could really see was this Sheetal Malhar who according to him is the most amazing woman on earth.”
I am not used to poignant moments. Not of the romantic variety anyways. I am not used to people actually thinking about what I had just uttered. Most of the times they would either laugh or just curse me or both. But to notice that a statement of mine had been followed by quiet silence and not some innocuous curse or laughter meant that I had, at least to an extent, got to Sheetal. Maybe not completely, but she was definitely thinking about what I had just said.
After a few moments she said, “And that justifies what he did inside?”
“No, I am not saying that,” I replied. “I am not defending what he did inside; I am defending the words that he said. He maybe drunk but whatever he spoke was the truth and his emotions for you are very genuine. After that it’s all really your choice. You can get back to where you were before today evening or you can choose to go ahead with your life. It’s really your choice. No one can force you to like any one. You may not be interested in Virat but you can’t deny him the choice to like you. He likes you and that’s the truth, it’s not going to change. What could change are your feelings for him. And only you know whether you have feelings for Virat or not?”
And with that I ended my long monologue. We sat there for a while longer, me and Sheetal, just staring into space without saying a word. I didn’t expect her to reply and so she didn’t but I knew that she was going to think about it. Her silence said that much.
After a few minutes I got up from the parapet. “Chal then, let’s go pick up our drunk friend and get out of here,” I said and offered my hand to Sheetal and helped her get up. 10 minutes later, with Virat entowed between me and Sheetal in an auto, and still unconscious, we left the place.
A week later Sheetal and Virat started dating.
“What ultimatum?”“Yes, I know. Your esteemed boyfriend has already made that point,” I said, frustrated that everyone was actually expecting me to feel proud of my antics yesterday as if I had returned from winning a war. “Now can we get along with the story?” I pleaded with Virat.
“Yeah, the story.” Virat responded. “So the reason why Anjali Shah got drunk all by herself yesterday night at Thaloor’s was because Mohit Bansal gave her an ultimatum, one which she just couldn’t accept.”
“What ultimatum?” I enquired.
Virat looked at Sheetal. “Sheetal, please throw some light on this matter,” he said almost as if there was formal press meeting going on.
I prepared myself for Sheetal’s version of the story now. “Yeah, so this news actually just filtered through yesterday night right after your making out session with Anjali Shah,” Sheetal began. “Mohit Bansal wanted Anjali to stay with him.”
“Stay with him?? Meaning?” I enquired.
“Meaning have a live-in relationship with him, you idiot,” Sheetal responded.
“Huh? What??” I responded in complete shock. Now this was the first time I had ever heard of this. I knew India was getting quite advanced but a live in relationship was still unheard of during college life.
“Yeah, can you believe the jerk?” Sheetal continued. “I mean everyone thought that Mohit was this nice homely boy and here we come to know that Mohit Bansal wasn’t as homely as we thought him to be. Or perhaps a bit too homely. Pun intended,” Sheetal winked.
“And you,” she said turning her attention towards her boyfriend. “Hey Sheetal,” Virat said as he kissed her on the forehead.
“Hey me later,” she said sitting on one of the empty chairs. “You have been ignoring me.”
Virat didn’t seem to care a lot about that accusation. “Yeah, well, 3rd year you know. Placements and stuff,” he said almost casually.
“Placements and stuff? Is that the best you can throw at me? Sheesh, that’s the lamest excuse you could use. I expected better from you Virat.”
Virat again seemed to care totally less about the direction of this conversation. “Yeah, well, what are you gonna do? Shoot me?”
“Tell me again why I am dating you, Virat Mathur?” Sheetal asked. This was going to be interesting. I had seen this conversation take place a few times before and every time Virat tried to act the cool dude, Sheetal played her trump card. That obvious question-Why did I start dating you? Virat just crumbled under the pressure of answering that question. It had been almost 2 years since they started dating, yet somehow Virat still hadn’t found the right answer to that question. There was no doubt who had the upper hand in this relationship.
“You kidding me, Virat?” Sheetal said almost mockingly, “I wasn’t in love with you when I started dating you, how many times do I have to say that? You were desperately in love with me.”
“Because I was a nice guy and you liked me?” This was such a cliché. I almost pitied Virat for saying that.
The answer was obvious. “There are so many nice guys, Virat. And I do like a few of them.”
And then she played out her final card. “You know Rahul,” she said turning towards me. “Sometimes I think if I had dated one of those other nice guys, they might have made better boyfriends than your roommate here.”
The response was swift. Virat grabbed Sheetal’s hand and holding it in his, in a desperate plea said, “Sheetal, I love you, I am desperately in love with you. Please don’t ever leave me. I will never ignore you again, never.”
Winking at me, she said, “I love being a bitch sometimes.”
“That you do,” I said and raised my glass of grape juice.
MY SCHOOL MATEShe smiled. It was a knowing smile. A smile I knew since 11th grade in school. Sheetal Malhar had always been beautiful and charming and well, very hot. Even in school, boys couldn’t stop ogling at her. I was one of them. When I had seen her first, I couldn’t take my eyes off her legs. Slowly, coming to know her, I realized she was a girl worth being friends with. Yet somehow it was hard to ignore her beauty. Or her figure. So much so that one day she caught me staring at her legs and said, “Rahul, I know I have great legs but you have been staring at them for 4 months now. You should be used to them by now.”
That was said in front of 8 other people. I can’t remember a more embarrassing situation in my school life other than that. But straight after saying that, while everyone else was laughing, she winked at me. There was no doubt she was flirting with me. It was there and then I decided I was going to hit on her.
So I tried wooing her. That embarrassing situation became my keycard. Whenever I would find her alone, I would try hitting on her. I would walk up to her and say, “So how are those beautiful legs of yours doing?” Or something related. She always flirted back. In fact, I had never enjoyed flirting with a girl as much as I did with Sheetal. Once I even told her that there were other parts of her bodies I liked staring at other than her legs. I almost immediately regretted saying that thinking that I had crossed the line. Yet somehow her reply was, “Yeah? Even I would like to see some parts of your body someday.”
Yet every time I asked her to have dinner with me, she turned me down. I asked her out in the tone of a friend, yet she rejected me in the tone of a date. So I realized that she just liked flirting, that it was one of her talents that she enjoyed using and that she was never actually interested in going out with me. In fact she never had a boyfriend in school. So even though the flirting between us continued, I never asked her out.
Life took a turn. After school, all of us friends were headed to different colleges, not knowing when and if we will ever meet again. To my surprise, Sheetal wounded up at Manipal with me. She had secured admission in Bio tech. It meant that there was some one to talk to in this new and strange place and it also meant that I had my link to the female world of Manipal right at the outset. Not that I needed any, but just that I wouldn’t have to work hard to search for that link unlike the other boys.
But somehow I lost my interest in pursuing her once we came to Manipal. Maybe it was because she never really seemed to be interested in me. Or maybe it was because I had a girlfriend within the 2nd week of reaching Manipal. One bird in hand is worth more than two in the bush, right?
And thus we decided that we would forever remain in the ‘just friends’ category. But things are never really that simple, are they?
A month afterwards, my new best friend Virat told me that he had feelings for Sheetal. And as I was the connection between the two I was naturally asked to help out. This wasn’t so easy of course. Sheetal happened to be one of the hottest girls on the campus, almost every guy had a beeline for her and being a freshie, all the available seniors were looking to claim her as well. And Virat was no Brad Pitt. Not that Virat looked bad, no, he was pretty decent looking and quite a few of the girls would have been quite happy to go out with him on the basis of just his looks but this was Sheetal Malhar we were talking about. She was way above his league as boys would put it.
My advice to Virat was simple-play the sincerity card. Because if he tried to play the cool stud, then there were a thousand guys who had him beat in that department. So I asked him to be the simpleton guy who she could take home to her parents and not to a cheap motel room. In simple words, I told him to act like he was ‘the one.’
Oh, haven’t you heard about ‘the one’? See, this whole concept was probably introduced by a girl. Juliet is my best bet. It could be Laila or Ranjha as well, but the point is it was definitely introduced by a girl. ‘The one’ is defined as the person whom the heavens has sent just for you to spend the rest of your life with. Where the sun, the moon, the solar system, all the constellations, the entire galaxy, in short the whole universe (don’t know about meteors) unites to just bring the two of you together. Where your every chromosome matches with ‘the one’ and the world is perfect. Ah darn-girls can be so cheesy.
Now Sheetal Malhar doesn’t seem the type but I have a feeling that almost every girl actually believes in ‘the one’, whether they admit it or not. I mean every girl begins to dream about her Prince Charming the moment they turn nine. And if you dream about Prince Charming, then you believe in the one. Why? Because Prince Charming is the ultimate ‘the one.’ So next time you want to woo a girl you now know whom to approach.
So well, the story continued. Virat had a go at the impossible-to make Sheetal Malhar fall in love with him. If in the first week of college some one had told me that Sheetal Malhar was going to date Virat Mathur, I would have laughed my guts out. Yet today it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
Not that this was the easiest of tasks. Sheetal hardly seemed interested in having a conversation with Virat initially, leave alone actually thinking of going out on a date with him. But perseverance pays. There was no doubt Virat had hopelessly fallen in love with Sheetal. And all we had to do was make Sheetal realize exactly what that meant. Once she fully understood the gravity of the situation, I was convinced that Sheetal would at least think about what a relationship with Virat could mean. And so it happened. And honestly-there couldn’t have been a worse or a better way to make it happen.
One evening- me, Sheetal and Virat were hanging out at DT. And Virat in a fit of adrenaline got himself drunk. Imagine a guy who has just started drinking a few weeks back and then decides to gulp down 400 ml of White Mischief. With soda of corse. Or else he would be vomiting throughout the night. So there we had Virat, completely drunk and not aware about anything else in the world but himself and his feelings. And what better way to let out his feelings than now, when he won’t remember a thing in the morning. So while Sheetal and me were dancing, Virat pushed me off and said those famous words of his-“Lay off my girl you bastard.”
There-it was out in the open now. Virat, the guy who would take 3 months to ask a girl’s phone number even if he had been talking to her every single day had just declared his love for Sheetal Malhar in front of 100 odd people and in an open disco. Seriously, some of the best incidents in the world happen when people get drunk.
Sheetal looked complete bewildered. Her immediate response was, “Virat!! What the heck??” While me~I just gathered myself and prepared for one hell of a show. I wasn’t sure if anything positive was going to come out of it-but hell, this was free entertainment. For Virat wasn’t done yet. Nope, in fact Virat was just getting started.
“Sheetal, you stay out of this,” he responded to Sheetal’s earlier posed question of what the heck!! “And you,” he said, turning his attention towards the hapless me. I straightened my collar and waited for Virat’s rampage to begin. “You,” he said again raising his pointing towards me. “You call yourself a friend?? You backstabber, ungrateful son of a bitch. I tell you I like this girl, I ask you to help me and this is how you pay me back? By dancing with her as if she were your girlfriend?”
“Buy you little richie richs,” Virat continued his accusations towards the crowd. “You little richie richs just don’t know what love means, do you. All you care about is getting some action in the night. Slam, Bam, Thank you maam. That’s all you want. I mean man has become such a pathetic creature that he has forgotten the first and most important basic thing that makes him above animals. And no, it’s not your freaking brain, you mint sized dodos. It’s your feelings. Emotions-the one thing that controls your heart. For any animal can indulge in the act of reproduction. But that act means something to us humans. That’s why we call it making love. But you don’t care about making love. All you care about is sex. All you want to do is fuck. And for that I spit on you.” And with this Virat actually spat on to the floor of the disc in front of a crowd who were still as dumbfounded at Virat’s outburst as they were at the beginning of it. Heck-even I had my mouth open. And I swear if something else hadn’t happened, we would actually have given him a resounding applause.
But then, as soon as Virat spat onto the floor, we heard the sound of a hand whipping across Virat’s cheek. The slap was so hard that a still staggering Virat immediately fell on the floor. Sheetal, the person who was responsible for the bright red marks on Virat’s right cheek, ran out of the disc, covering her mouth and in absolute tears. I immediately went to help Virat who was unconscious by now. “That was some slap,” I whispered to myself. Me and another person in the disc helped Virat to his feet but still being in an unconscious state we had to almost carry him on our shoulders to a nearby sofa where we laid him down. Making sure he was alright and still unconscious, I asked the waiter to give him lemon with salt, a usual remedy to help the hangover that people have when they wake up from a bout of heavy drinking, and then ran outside to look for Sheetal.
I found her sitting on the parapet just outside the entrance of the disc, still in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. I sat right next to her and kept quite for a while, letting her cry a little longer before I said, “You know, I never thought of you as one of the crying types.”
The tears didn’t stop completely. But still she managed to say, “So now you want to tell the world that Sheetal Malhar, supposed to be an attitude bitch, can cry as well.”
“Well, that’s one way of putting it. At least now I can blackmail you with. The fact that Sheetal Malhar isn’t really all that strong and some things do get to her, well-that’s an asset I could use sometime,” I said.
There was a small bit of laughter from her as she punched me on my arm. The tears had almost stopped now. “Yeah right,” she said, “as if anyone would believe a guy with a reputation like yours.”
“Ah yeah-damn! Why didn’t I think of that before? Maybe I should have flirted a little less with the girls.”
My attempt at humor almost always worked. Sheetal didn’t say anything but the fact that her tears had almost stopped now and that she was laughing at my stupidity knew that I had managed to cheer her up to an extent. But the job was only half done. There was the impending talk of Virat’s outburst still left. Luckily it was she who brought up the topic.
“That was the most embarrassing moment of my life, in there” she said in reference to the incident that had just happened a few moments ago.
I wasn’t sure how to go about this. I knew I had to defend Virat and make Sheetal understand that maybe Virat hadn’t chosen the most pragmatic method to express his feelings for her, but those feelings were still genuine.
“He’s right in a way you know,” I said.
“About what?”
“About the whole man becoming a pathetic creature and love making part.”
I waited for her reaction. I wanted to make sure that she understood what I meant before I said any thing more.
Her reaction was this. “So you want to start a discussion on sex with me now?”
I guess my reputation precedes myself. Even one of my best friends tends to think that all I am interested is a hop in the sack. Slam, Bam, Thank you maam, as Virat would put it.
“No, that’s not what I meant,” I said in an attempt at defending myself. “I meant we don’t get to see those genuine emotions anymore. Love has almost taken a backseat in our lives. We tend to be in a relationship out of default, because it is what most people tend to do rather than because we really do have feelings for that person.”
“Speak for yourself,” she replied.
That was another stab at my reputation. I guess a guy with umpteen break ups in his resume isn’t exactly most suited for a talk on genuine emotions. I still tried though.
“Look, what I really meant to say and I know coming from someone like me, this sounds strange, but Virat does really like you. And probably loves you as he said. Whatever he said in there was cent percent true. I could completely identify with every word he said. He would talk to me about you day and night but not once did he mention about how hot you were or how great your figure was. All he would talk about is how beautiful you are, how amazing your eyes were. I guess he didn’t care about the materialistic things. All he could really see was this Sheetal Malhar who according to him is the most amazing woman on earth.”
I am not used to poignant moments. Not of the romantic variety anyways. I am not used to people actually thinking about what I had just uttered. Most of the times they would either laugh or just curse me or both. But to notice that a statement of mine had been followed by quiet silence and not some innocuous curse or laughter meant that I had, at least to an extent, got to Sheetal. Maybe not completely, but she was definitely thinking about what I had just said.
After a few moments she said, “And that justifies what he did inside?”
“No, I am not saying that,” I replied. “I am not defending what he did inside; I am defending the words that he said. He maybe drunk but whatever he spoke was the truth and his emotions for you are very genuine. After that it’s all really your choice. You can get back to where you were before today evening or you can choose to go ahead with your life. It’s really your choice. No one can force you to like any one. You may not be interested in Virat but you can’t deny him the choice to like you. He likes you and that’s the truth, it’s not going to change. What could change are your feelings for him. And only you know whether you have feelings for Virat or not?”
And with that I ended my long monologue. We sat there for a while longer, me and Sheetal, just staring into space without saying a word. I didn’t expect her to reply and so she didn’t but I knew that she was going to think about it. Her silence said that much.
After a few minutes I got up from the parapet. “Chal then, let’s go pick up our drunk friend and get out of here,” I said and offered my hand to Sheetal and helped her get up. 10 minutes later, with Virat entowed between me and Sheetal in an auto, and still unconscious, we left the place.
A week later Sheetal and Virat started dating.
“Yeah, the story.” Virat responded. “So the reason why Anjali Shah got drunk all by herself yesterday night at Thaloor’s was because Mohit Bansal gave her an ultimatum, one which she just couldn’t accept.”
“What ultimatum?” I enquired.
Virat looked at Sheetal. “Sheetal, please throw some light on this matter,” he said almost as if there was formal press meeting going on.
I prepared myself for Sheetal’s version of the story now. “Yeah, so this news actually just filtered through yesterday night right after your making out session with Anjali Shah,” Sheetal began. “Mohit Bansal wanted Anjali to stay with him.”
“Stay with him?? Meaning?” I enquired.
“Meaning have a live-in relationship with him, you idiot,” Sheetal responded.
“Huh? What??” I responded in complete shock. Now this was the first time I had ever heard of this. I knew India was getting quite advanced but a live in relationship was still unheard of during college life.
“Yeah, can you believe the jerk?” Sheetal continued. “I mean everyone thought that Mohit was this nice homely boy and here we come to know that Mohit Bansal wasn’t as homely as we thought him to be. Or perhaps a bit too homely. Pun intended,” Sheetal winked.
1 comment:
Wht the???... Mohit bhansal.. A prfct luking guy.. Wnt to live in relation... Dat ws a shock.. Biggg shock... Ns sheetal... Ahhhaaaa... Love her... Nice attitude... Awsm... Blissful to read it
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