"All these years I have lived right next to her and still didn't know that she was there."
"Arun, come to your senses you have only known her for a day and a half and you are already behaving like. Well Majnu." Dhruv said in a really annoyed voice and I could not have blamed him for being rude to Arun. Even I used to think that the three of us knew each other well. We had bonded well since our first semester in that place which was supposedly an engineering college. I am Kunal by the way and am not going to play a big part in this story that am going to tell you I was just an onlooker to whatever happened. So as I was saying arun, dhruv and I had bonded well since the first year of our college. It was not like that we had got along like a house on fire as soon as we met. Nor had seniors ragged us in some dimly lit corridors. Nor was any of us special in any way. We were just as ordinary as the average engineering students you could think of. Studying in a not so fancy private engineering college on the outskirts of Malgudi. (A medium sized town in north India not too far away from Delhi.)
We had come to attend the fest of one of the many engineering colleges that have mushroomed in Delhi, affiliated to IPU (Inderaprstha University) and were staying in an overpriced dingy hotel. And some rooms away from us were girls from another engineering college from malgudi.(It is said that in India if you throw a stone then it will hit either a dog or an engineer.) We had met during the first day of the fest. Considering that we were from the same town and those girls looked good actually we had got along pretty well. And it was on the second day of our stay(we had come for three days) that Arun had gone love-struck. I had been noticing since morning that he was giving kind of special attention to that girl called Poorvi, but I hadn't expected that he would completely lose his senses in one day. No one would have expected this from Arun, he was the shy non flirt types and stayed away from girls. The only female he was friendly with was his mom. Normally it was I who fell for girls ASAP and those two were the ones to talk sense into me. (Though I won't say that I didn't try to flirt with Poorvi but there was something reserved in here manner like Arun that stopped me even before I actually began.) And here we were some 36 hours after first meeting those girls with Arun behaving in a way normally reserved for me.
"Look Arun, we have their numbers you can stay in touch with her when you get back and if you are too cowardly for that then we can manage it. Don't worry and let me sleep now." Dhruv said while turning out the lights.
It would be needless to say that the next day before leaving Arun was trying to behave in a typical un-arun-ish manner I never knew that he remembered so much veg jokes and could actually smile without showing his silver filled tooth. I also had to supress an urge to make fun of him in front of Poorvi. Also needless to say that throughout our way back the topic of discussion was , you gussed it right … Poorvi.
I had actually started to hate the name by the time we had come back to Malgudi.
****
"What is this global warming after all? We are doing this to the earth after all. We are taking things out of earth….." No this wasn't a seminar on global warming that we were attending this was Khatri. Kamal Khatri, Kamal Kumar Kahtri, KKK for short. According to him he is a teacher (no a lecturer ) in our college. Officially he was teaching us analog electronics that semester but actually we had diversified our syllabus a lot. In the past two months of we had done all about sofa design, costs of plasma TVs, quality of food in college functions and now global warming. Basically Khatri was not interested in taking classes and we were not interested in attending them. However you need to pretend to listen during Khatri's classes otherwise he could make life hell for you like Arun's was to be made in a few moments.
It had been almost 2 weeks since we had come back from that fest but his mind was still stuck in that place, with Poorvi.
"Yes you check shirt, not you behind you(he ment arun). Do you think am wasting time here?"
Arun just stared at him.
"Why were you grinning then?"
"sorry sir."
"meet me after the class, I have some work for you."
Soon we came to know that Arun's summer internship had been finalised under khatri on some nanotechnology project. Of course Khatri had decided this for Arun. Who actually was upset over this as he already had planned of doing his internship at the same place as … yes you know it.
Arun’s mood did not get any better in the days that followed mainly because of two reasons, one poorvi was busy with her exams and not replying to his messages and two, The only other person doing internship with him under Khatri was Prakhar.
Well to tell you about Prakhar all I would say is that I hope you know chatur ramalingam, the guy who managed to pull off that Chamtkar/*****kar speech in 3idiots, well he actully did exist in our class and was called Prakhar. The knub(bunk spelt backwards) he loved attending classes and had no life except for books and coming to classes. The aim of his life was to attend classes and he was of course a pain in the neck for everyone, even khatri. But as he had no other life khatri had decided that it would be a good idea to have him for the nanotech project.
-Continued
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