The College Chronicle!
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The College Chronicle!
For someone as awkward, plump, plain, egoistic college life was definitely not as it was supposed to be! Ananya was reading the college love stories wistfully on the blogging site and invariably she was taken to her own college life and her non-existing story!
It was in the 90s, she had just stepped out from her world of books to where all the action was. Back in Assam, in her times’ college started from the eleventh standard, when she was barely sixteen. Clad in salwar kameez, dupatta pinned tightly, lest it should uncover the wrong places; college life was certainly not the candy floss colleges of Bollywood! Getting admitted to the top college at that time, mainland Guwahati was at beck and call! Sheikh Brothers, Kalyani, Kalpana, Revati, umpteen food joints, bookstores she coveted, the Guwahatians will know the magic of Panbazaar!
Cotton College was a getaway to dreams, jostling with many toppers of the state, eve teased by the intelligent boys with an edgy sense of humour. She was lost in the swarm of students, so was her other two buddies. But they stuck together, awkward they didn’t know how to ‘chill’, boys were a distant cry and they also hardly paid any attention to the three!
It was a world of movies, crushes, budding romance, novels, physics lectures, dreamy English classes taken by stalwarts of the state, stinky labs, handsome lecturers and this secret hope of romance. Is she going to meet him here? Would he be a literature student with thinking spectacled eyes or a mathematics buff with a penchant for reading, one who would know she was the one for him!
Of course, nobody bothered to know the average looking girl, yet she knew someone would know and the ones who didn’t, didn’t matter actually! Well, can we blame the dreamy sixteen-year-old, really! I don’t. I love her confidence, love her stance and love her penchant for love! So, what the world is cruel, and she is downright silly! That’s how she is, the world was a big stage for her to make her mark!
The first year went by, three friends chatted, watched movies, bunked classes, gossiped. It was in the second year, beginning of class twelfth when one among them began to get serious. She distanced herself from the other two and set to achieve what she was here for, far from her home town. The other two struggled, fumbled with calculus, chemistry labs, entrance preparations. The dream world was taking a backstage and career tried hard to lure.
It was almost at the end of the second year when her junior friend Shreya informed her, ‘He wants to talk to you’, Shreya sounded awkward herself.
‘Joy… Joy Roychowdhury, you remember him don’t you?’
‘I just know the name’ Ananya’s heart had already started beating faster and she stared dumb, ‘Why would he want to talk to me!’
‘I dunno, I asked for the previous year papers, he said for whom, when I took your name….he was like…, oh she wants, ask her to get from me.’ Shreya scorned, ‘I was shocked too. The next day he caught me, hey did you ask her? I was like you seem so over interested, go and give her yourself. You know what he said, I’d love to, just let her ask once.’
Ananya and Shreya had a hearty laugh. Needless to say, Ananya never got the previous year papers. But her eyes, head, the heart did a rapid scan every day, who was Joy? He was in their section, why doesn’t she know. He was her school senior, he had missed first-year exams, as he had an accident. Did he like her…? But why would he? They haven’t even talked, as far she could recall. Was she special…did he see her for what she is… which one was him really!
Nobody had to tell Ananya which one was him! The building of British times, where they had physics and chemistry classes in galleries, one day she spotted the intense pair of eyes who stopped dead on the tracks when their eyes met! That was the nearest to romance and love she could get in the two years of Cotton College, the moment she could live again after all these years!
The next few days their eyes locked several times, though Ananya did her best to avert his glance, it followed her in college. It was physics class next, where time stood still, when he stood right there, looking at her. Confusion, awkwardness she looked away. He had shared the same long bench with her, with many students in between of course! His intent stare was to stay with Ananya for years to come
Ananya’s friends knew of him…oh the one with Kinetic Honda…? She had stared away with a nonchalant face as she approached him one afternoon, her heart doing flip flops! Would he talk to her today!
‘ I don’t even know him’ She had argued with her friends, more with herself.
Last day of the twelfth exam, all chatted in groups, she saw him stealing glances at her, far from her. This is probably the last day we are meeting! Would you speak up Joy! But what then if you are not the one! Her sane mind whined.
Ananya never met Joy again. They hardly had any common friends; social media did not exist in the mid-nineties. She had written pages in her diary…about him.. was he the one…? Did he see in her what she believed she had! But it could be all be a hallucination…all her imagination…he just wanted maybe to talk to her and simply move on after her tepid response!
We would never know too what Joy felt for Ananya, was it her eyes, her tough demeanor, did he want to reach her, seek her, find her…? Or was it just a fancy he had! They had moved on in life, for Ananya, it wasn’t her first love but it was definitely the first upsurge of emotions she felt for anyone. The galleries of Cotton College, lanes of Pan Bazar radiated her feelings for him and weaved her eyes with a sweet untold story for the years to come!
Does her story stand anywhere in the College Chronicles!
Soma Bhattacharjee