You Were My Crush: Till You Said You Love Me! (2 page)

The morning did not start well. I had cleaned up someone else’s puke and the smell was still somewhere in my head. I had images of her puking in my sink going through my mind all morning and she was no longer cute to me!
Filthy.

All this while, my phone kept ringing. It was Eshaan and he kept calling incessantly. I had a ground rule—
never answer Eshaan’s call until he calls you for the sixth time
. If he called less than five times then it had to be something frivolous.

It had been one year in Hindu College, Delhi University, and there had not been a single day that he had not called me to let me know about the scheduled lectures, the extra classes, the extra notes that I might need, et cetera. My default state was to ignore his calls. I picked up the
sixth
call.

‘Why don’t you pick up my calls?’ Eshaan said angrily.

‘I was a little stuck,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

‘Okay. Next time, please pick it up the first time,’ he said.
Yeah, right!

Eshaan told me that a tax-planning professor was less than impressed about being offered money (by Dad) to mark my internal exam paper (I had decided to leave the answer booklet blank) a little
leniently
. The professor wanted to talk to me in person now.

‘Your father cannot buy
everything
!’ Eshaan had said once.

He was not quite right. My father was a wealthy man. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, or diamond. You get the drift. My bank accounts were always loaded; credit-card bills were never a problem. The car I drove, the house I lived in, it was all
his
but still
mine
.

Last year, when I had screwed up my board exams and it looked like it would be hard to get into a Delhi University college, I had called up my father. Next day, I was a Delhi squash champion, and I got admission in BCom (Honours) through the sports quota.
Not bad at all, was it?
I did not hate studying, but when you have everything, education is never the top priority.

My father was kind to me but not without reason. My parents were divorced and we were never on talking terms. He was a stranger to me, and I was brought up fatherless since I was eight. I did not miss him. Until a year ago, till the time Mom was alive, he had some point of contact in the family. However, when she lost her battle to cancer last year, he had no one left. The car, the house, the gym—all these were his attempts to buy me. I was greedy enough to let him buy things, but not as much to sell
myself
.

I drove all the way to college to meet the honest, upright, asshole professor of mine. Why couldn’t he just accept the money and shut up? I always assumed that professors are poorly paid. Why would he turn down
extra
money?

‘Have you thought about what you will say?’ Eshaan asked as soon I got down from my car.

‘No. He wants to meet me, right?
He
wants to talk, not me,’ I said as I walked towards the professor’s offices.

‘Benoy. Listen.’

Eshaan was always full of motherly advice. Nevertheless, I could not ignore Eshaan either. If there was anything I knew about BCom, it was through him. Well, not just BCom: he had my back for everything.

‘Yes, Eshaan?’

‘Just go in and tell him that you weren’t well and you had to go home. Tell him you passed all the other exams … and that your dad was just concerned about your future, that’s why he—’

‘Eshaan? Why don’t you go and talk to him?’ I joked.

‘I did.’

Despite the frequency, his over-involvement in my life never ceased to amaze me.

‘I just asked him what the issue was and he said he would only talk to you,’ he said. ‘I am sorry.’

Eshaan was asking for my forgiveness because he could not
un
screw what I had screwed up. He was such a darling! Had I been a girl, I would have kissed him and hugged him. Well, maybe not.

‘No, man. It’s fine. I will handle it,’ I said.

‘If there is any problem, just call me. I will be in Kamla Nagar. Okay?’

‘Sonil?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said, as I saw him blush a little.

Relationships, I tell you, they totally fuck up even the sanest of men. He had started dating a girl from Daulat Ram College. It had been a year and he was nuts about her. Eshaan was charming, smiled more than necessary, cared more than necessary, was unnecessarily fair and was immensely likeable. He was cute, like a little brother, like a panda. It often went against him. He was often too cute for any girl.

I wished Sonil would see that, too. I
hated
her. She thought I was a vain, ill-behaved, rich brat, and an asshole. She had asked Eshaan to stay away from me, but Eshaan wasn’t that stupid.

I walked through the corridors, smiling at every face that I came across. I recognized a few faces and a few of them recognized me. Last year, I had joined college with much fanfare. I drove big cars to college, argued with seniors and professors alike. Very soon, I was
in
famous in the college for my behaviour and unabashed abuse of the power I wielded. After a few days, people got busy and they promptly forgot about my existence.

Mom’s condition had worsened and her chemotherapy sessions had started. I had to be with her. She had left her job and her condition deteriorated with every passing day. Doctors had not given her much time. I wanted to spend every waking second with her. She had started losing
herself to cancer and it became infuriatingly tough for me. I had always seen her as a strong woman, who brought me up as a single mother—managed work and a
worthless
son. It was torturous to see her like that—frail, weak, losing weight and hair every day, vomiting and crying. Even behind those smiles she faked, I could see what she was going through.

‘Benoy?’ she had said.

‘Yes, Maa.’

‘Take care when I’m not there.’ She had smiled at me.

‘Don’t say that,’ I had said to her, with tears in my eyes. I had never imagined my life without her. ‘You will be fine.’

I was lying to myself. Every single day, I saw her going through the pain. Little by little, I saw her die. I heard her in agony every day and wished I could take it away. When I used to sit on the cold, hard bench of the hospital and hear her cry, I wished that she would go peacefully rather than go through the excruciating pain every day.

I would look at the life-support equipment that kept her alive and think,
It’s just making it harder for her
. It was
my mom
on the bed. She deserved better. She had done nothing to deserve this pain.

Finally, the
day
came when she left me behind. It was a very hard time for me. When my mom passed away, I stopped going to college. I had prepared myself for the loss, but nothing prepares you for death, nothing prepares you for absence. With her death, a small part of me died too. I did not cry for days. I lived in denial. I thought I would wake up some day and find her caressing my hair.

It had become impossible to live any longer in that house. The
silence
used to drive me crazy. Even months after her death, I used to go downstairs after a good night’s sleep and look for her in the kitchen. I used to leave water bottles everywhere, thinking that she would be there to put them back in the fridge. I used to shout at nights, asking her for dinner only to realize that she was no longer there.

I used to remember all those times when my mother wanted to talk to me after a long day at her office and I used to be too busy on the phone with my friends. I used to regret every such moment. The uncelebrated Mother’s Days. The birthdays I was not there with her. I used to feel embarrassed when Mom used to hug me in public. However, in that empty house, and in my empty life, I could have done anything to have her rest my head on her shoulder and put me to sleep. I loved my mom and I missed her every day. She left a huge void in my life. She was
everything
to me, my only family.

I underwent therapy and Deb’s mom started to take care of me. Over this period, I had started to drink and smoke heavily. I did everything to fill up the emptiness in my life. Nothing worked. After the person I had loved the most
died
in my own arms, everything else stopped to matter. It took me a few months to get back to normal.

I crossed a line of staff offices with different names on them. Finally, I saw the name in bold letters—Dr S.K. Ashra (Tax Planning). I knocked on the door and the voice from the other side asked me to come in.

‘Good morning, sir,’ I said.

‘Sit down, Benoy,’ he said politely.

I was pleasantly surprised as I had expected him to blast me. That is what he had called me for, right? Eshaan had told me he had a reputation of being nasty with students. He was forty-five but looked older. With his short stature, small paunch and unintelligent looks, I would have guessed him to be a government clerk and not a professor. It was hard to believe that he had turned down a bribe. He looked like someone who would have mattresses stuffed with money from bribes.

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Umm, I noticed that you did
not
give your tax exam,’ he asked while sipping at his tea from the chipped teacup.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Sir, I wasn’t well,’ I said, half-heartedly. I did not want to lie. I just wanted him to accept the money and get lost.

‘So? You left the paper empty?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

‘You know that you can fail this subject unless you really do well in the finals,’ he said, and leaned on the table.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, uninterestedly. I added as an afterthought, ‘Sir, what can be done?’

The conversation started to sound like I was avoiding a speeding ticket from a constable. I felt like the girl who lifts her skirt in the porn movies to get an ‘A’ from the old, sex-starved professor. If it was anything like that, it was going perfectly for me. Now, I just hoped he wanted money, and not me.
That
would have been weird.

‘Umm,’ he said, ‘your father called yesterday.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I am sorry about that.’

‘No, no, no!’ he said, his voice suddenly turned super polite. ‘Your father is a
big
man! That he called me was an honour in itself.’

‘Ohhh, is it?’ I said. I wondered if he was being sarcastic.

I knew the
look
in his eyes. It was
greed
. It seemed he did
not
want the money. He wanted something more. After ten minutes, during which I totally lost any respect for the professor, I walked out of the room. I checked my phone and it had thirteen missed calls from Eshaan. He was tenser about the entire situation than I was. Eshaan always thought of me as a lost soul, and maybe after what happened in the first year, I
was.
Since I did not have any real friends in college, he always took it upon himself to see to it that I was not bored or feeling out of place there.

‘Benoy?’ he asked when I called him. ‘How did it go?’

‘It went well,’ I said. ‘I did what you asked me to. I cried a little, begged him to score me, and then he said he would give me the average marks for the exam.’

‘See. I told you!’ he said, genuine happiness dripping from his voice. ‘Not everything can be bought!’ he said again.

‘Yes. You told me,’ I said.

I did not tell him what really happened. After I cut the call, I did what I hated doing the most—calling up
Dad
. These calls were important and I could not run away from them. These
paid
for my life.

‘Hello?’ I called him up.

‘Benoy? How are you?’ my father said from the other side.

‘Remember the tax-planning professor?’ I asked.

‘Yes, yes, the exam that you missed.’

‘He lost your number.’

‘Oh!’

‘He wants more. He has kids studying abroad,’ I said.

I was right.
Bedroom mattresses stuffed with money
. Eshaan was wrong. My father could buy everything.