3. Cupid strikes

I kept the cell and rubbed my eyes again…

As I discovered the beads of perspiration all over my face, I realized that it wasn’t just a dream…it was…a nightmare…

But why this? Why should it be a nightmare to me, even if Joy happens to get married off to someone else? Who does she mean to me? She isn’t my fiancé or something! She’s just my best friend damn it!

I really hated myself for dreaming such a dream. I was still sleepy, but was scared, really scared, to drift back into sleep. So I let my mind wander, scramble and unscramble with my memories, make voyages into the past, long forgotten voyages, memories from my love life buried in the past…

When I was in the nurseries there was a girl in my class named Ayesha Sultana. I went around telling everyone that I would marry her, I still don’t know why I thought that, as I didn’t even used to talk to her. All I knew was that she was a girl, and I being a boy needed to marry a girl, and there was nothing wrong with this girl. This was the beginning of my ensuing love life…and yet you couldn’t call it anything related to the word “love”.

The first time I fell in love, or so I thought, was when I was in class 1. There was a chubby Marwari girl, Roshni Agarwal, again a classmate, who I fell for. All because she used to bring chocolates, all foreign-made, to school every single day! Everyday I used to spend time drooling over her chocolates, but she always thought that it was her I was drooling over, and eventually liking all the “attention” I gave her she started sharing her chocolates with me! And bingo! I was in absolute love with her! Things went on perfectly for about a month and I had exhausted all her chocolate store. The day I noticed that she had stopped bringing chocolates to school, I stopped talking to her, for good…

It was in class 3 that the love-bug bit me again, her name was Smita Das. All my smarty friends said that she was something called “sexy”. Even I thought I was gaga over her. But this was because of the super trendy blue denim bag she used to bring to school. At those times we were required to carry those dull maroon bags with the school emblem on them, which we had to buy from the school office. Amidst all that maroon, it was only that blue denim bag that stood out. And I stood just behind it…devouring it with my eyes throughout the assembly prayers. Secretly all my prayers were aimed at the bag. All my prayers turned futile when one day she left the school. Her father had been transferred elsewhere, I had heard.

In class 5 we all were in a frenzy…FOUNTAIN PENS!! Just the mere utterance of the word would end us up with writing pages of crap with out new weapons! And there was our warlord… warlady rather…Priyanka Sen! The girl with all types of fountain pens in the world! From what the grapevines said, her father in his youth had a knack for fountain pens of all kinds, and she had inherited that legacy. She had all types and makes of fountain pens, ranging right from the Mont Blanc piston type pens, to the raging transparent bodied Aurora classics. And what was more incredible was the fact that she actually brought them to school. I would fight ruthlessly with all my friends, even Joy at times, just to sit beside her. She was my dream princess. My princess…of pens. But slowly as the craze for fountain pens faded away, so did my love…and one day I had an open fight with her because she was trying to copy from my answer sheet during a class exam. After that we never talked…

Cupid was generous enough to spare me, for two years, of his arrows. In class 8 I fell for a girl again, this time not because of any materialistic gains, I fell in love with this girl because she used to sing beautifully. And I used to sing too, alongside her, during those school functions. After her, in the years that followed, I fell in love with many damsels, who went by the names like Nikita Bothra, Sreerupa Mukherjee, Tanuja Bose, Atreyi Sanyal, Claudia Thomas, Shonali Mishra, Kavita Sing…some because they were brilliant in studies, some because they danced well, some for their magnetic personalities, some because their vests grew tight very quickly, some for the ways they preferred miniskirts over knee length ones, or some because they would flirt around with anyone and everyone...

And still Joy thought that I would someday fall in love, with someone…I could not help but smile…