P (wet hair); Last exam

She is not exactly at the top of her class but she is pretty good. Good enough to ask questions, to attract stares outside class when she catches the professor for a two-minute chat. She doesn't wear red very often but that is simply because she doesn’t have a lot of red things, not because of any particular aversion to the chromatic aspects of that colour. I used to think of you every time I saw her.
Now I think of you both. You are, like she is, fragments of me. I tell myself that I am going to remember you while walking up the stairs to the department. But then again, the very idea of female beauty is so naïve and unqualified. I am aware of the biological behind the visual (and the imaginary), and it doesn’t stop me from appreciating the beauty of both the biological and the visual.

But I still cannot explain what happened a few days ago, right after the exams got over. I was sitting outside class, listening to people declare how badly they’d done their papers, and suddenly I saw her walking toward me. I looked away, to pretend that I hadn’t noticed her, so I could be surprised when she actually stopped near me. She was wearing a magenta kurta, and it had flowers printed all over it. When she stopped next to me I smiled, and couldn’t do anything else. I told her that I’d written a decent paper, and she asked me what were my plans for the two-month break, now that the exams were over.
I don’t know why, but I can’t quite explain what happened next. I haven’t cried for eight years now. I never cry. I have felt physical and emotional pain, but the carapace of masculinity never allowed me the tears, the liquefaction of dejection.
As the first tear rolled down she pretended not to notice. She began to get slightly embarrassed as the drop grew to a steady flow. She looked away from me, either because she was uncomfortable or because she thought I would feel better this way, if she didnt look at me. At that point, I hadn’t started to hate myself for crying before her. I was really, just crying. I had dreamt of that moment for so long. I couldn’t believe it would really amount to nothing.

-Uh-oh...are you alright?
-Ya, Im fine..
She smiled. I couldn’t look her in the eye, caught as I was, between hating myself and trying to explain myself to myself. Crying unmans you somewhat. It really does.
-Nothing… Just this really stupid thing. You know, I’ve had dreams of this day, this moment, of how good it would feel to be done with the exams. Its… its like the past six weeks someone was choking me, forcibly holding my head under water, and now I have finally surfaced… but I cant see myself gasping for breath… I imagined doing things after the exams got over, and I cant think of anything now.
-Maybe your lungs have got used to breathing under-water. Maybe its not so bad anymore.
-Like the way your stomach shrinks if you don’t eat a lot of food for days together?
-Ya, something like that.
-Okay.
-Okay.
I wiped the tears from my face. More like smeared it across my cheeks. She began to walk towards the main gate. I followed, making it look like a mutual decision.

-I have to have lunch with a professor. Actually, its we. Four of us are having lunch with her.
-Okay. I would have asked to have lunch with me otherwise.
I fixed my gaze on the embroidery on the sleeve of her kurta. I hoped she’d notice it and not think I was looking at her arm. It had tiny flowers, eace with a mirror at the centre and four thin petals surrounding it. The flowers were dark green, and were stitched on a black strip that ran along the edge of the sleeve. The bed sheet in my room has flowers like that, though the flowers are much bigger and without the mirrors.
She saw me looking at her sleeve. I didn’t move my eyes, though after a while she moved hers.

-You actually cried… Aww.
-Don’t have to remind me, embarrass me…
-No, its cute…I think I’m going to tell my friends.

We walked into her friends at the gate, they reacted with a similar aww… and I told them it was nothing. I spoke with them for two minutes and left. I walked back to the building because I had to use the urinal. As I stepped outside the loo I saw her waiting for me. She was standing near the water cooler at the corner. Between smiling at her and walking toward her I took my water bottle out of my bag, thinking of filling it up. Before I could ask her why she hadn’t left for lunch she raised herself on tiptoes, leaned into me, supported herself with her hands on my shoulders and pressed her lips to mine. I closed my eyes at the moment of contact, and I knew she was waiting for me to make some sort of movement, to give a sign because our lips stayed like that for quite a while. I moved. I puckered my lips, held her in mine briefly, and released her. She did the same. I wanted her to use her tongue but she didn’t. She pulled away in less than a minute. Her eyes were half-asleep, unwilling to get up, and the dream of a smile slowly painted itself on their watery canvas. I preferred to look rather than to speak.

-Wow.
-Thanks.
-I should be thanking you. I half expected you to push me away.
-Really? I was a bit shocked, honestly, if you ask me, but I’d never have pushed you away. Even if I didn't like you kissing me... I mean, its not everyday that I have people kissing me as I fill my bottle at the cooler, you know…
She laughed.
-Ya, I thought so. I have to leave.
-Oh yes. Of course, I mean. See you in a couple of months, I guess?
-Yes, I don’t think I’ll see you before that. Don’t think I can.
-Have a nice lunch.
-Sure. You too.
-Whatever they give in the canteen…where are you going, Nirula’s?
-Yes, I think.
I nodded and waved. She walked down the stairs. I followed her head till it all but disappeared under the staircase and I shouted.
-Thanks a lot. I don’t think anyone saw us.
She looked up, smiled, winked. Time slowed down, enough to let me notice her sleeve again.

The following day as I moved my things I was hating myself. I hated myself for settling down in one place such that it was so difficult to shift. Carrying the books from the room to the cab, and then from the cab to my flat in Gurgaon reminded me of my own complacency. I sickened myself with the way I had settled down in my room in North Campus, with everything from books to toiletries to clothes and a computer. How much better if I just had a big canvas bag that I could carry on my back to college everyday, and if I could just dump all my stuff into it and move out of or in to any place I wanted to. A couple of shirts, a couple of t-shirts, a couple of trousers, sets of underwear, some books, a bedsheet and a toothbrush. That’s all one needs, really. But I’ve got a taxi full of stuff. Around two hundred and fifty seven books. And a computer. I was shaking my head in despair as the taxi moved out. The taxi-driver took a long hard look at my books and asked me if I had bought them all, and if I had started a laboratory (I think he meant 'library') in my room. He leafed through one book and said he couldn’t understand a word of what was written. It was DM Thomas’s The White Hotel.
Everytime I came down with my hands full of books he’d raise his eye-brows and ask me if that was it, and I would shake my head and go back up. I couldn’t help thinking of a line from Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass: they settle down as if they’re never going to leave.