It was official. Preeti and I were a couple but we did not want anyone else to find out. Of course other than the people we were always surrounded by i.e. my friends, her friends, my friends at school, her friends at school, her friend’s boyfriends and friends of our friends. Pretty soon everyone got a whiff of the affair and we did not know who to blame. Was it our friends who had told the others or was it us who had told about it to so many people or was it our being so deeply in love that everyone could see it in our eyes or maybe it was a combination of all three.
Before Preeti proposed and we became a couple we used to talk to each other casually in front of everyone but now that we were a couple there was a sudden urge to hide the fact that we were talking to each other from everyone. Now we used to meet behind parking lots, talked in sign language in the tutorials, avoided each other in public and call on each others home phones when our parents were not around. We talked about the same things as before but said I love you to each other after every three minutes. We had been brought up that way because everyone around us always gossiped about people having a affair and used to talk about couples in derogatory terms like he’s after her and they have hooked up and stuff like that but nobody ever said that they are in love or anything positive about being a couple and that put the thought in our minds that what we were doing was totally wrong and unacceptable.
In school, I could not concentrate and always thought about her. When the Biology teacher talked about how the heart pumped blood and how it passed through arteries and veins all I could think about was how my heart beat became faster every time I saw Preeti. When in the history class the teacher talked about Rasputin and the affair with the Russian Queen I would be reminded of our affair. When the Hindi sir talked about Krishna and Radha I would imagine it was us and even during recess I would be busy updating the guys about what was happening with my relationship. As soon as I got home Preeti would call me from a telephone booth and ask the guy there to ask for me and if anyone else answered the phone tell them it was Tarun who was calling for me. The thrill and excitement of the affair became so exciting that we started taking bigger risks. We would decide on what clothes we were wearing and wear the same colors and she would walk past me as many times as she could when we were standing in the colony. We would buy chocolates for each other and share it when ever we got a chance to pass it around.
I also hung around a lot more with Rajesh and Ameet (Preeti’s friend’s boyfriends) and we used to go on group dates to the Public Garden for a walk early in the mornings because we thought that nobody we knew would be up so early in the morning. But we were wrong there were thousands of people there every morning and hundreds of them were well acquainted to us. So when were on our leisurely strolls too we had to keep our eyes and ears open and our instincts razor sharp and be ready to run and hide if we saw a similar face. We did not even know how many times we had been caught and seen with each other and there was this constant fear that if someone went ahead and told about it to any of our parents we would be in deep trouble but the adrenaline rush and the thrill of it all kept us going and we used to come up with newer ways to meet and hook up. I had also befriended guys who lived in Preeti’s apartment so that on the pretext of playing cricket or visiting them I could catch a glimpse of her.
Then one day at school in the English class we were studying the chapter about Chacha Nehru’s letters to his daughter Indira Gandhi when he was in prison and in one of the letters he had written to her that she should do whatever her heart wished to do but make sure that she doesn’t do anything that she wanted to hide from the others because if you want to hide something from the others it is because your conscience is telling you that it is wrong and one should never fight their conscience. That got me thinking and I thought that when I knew I was in love and was doing nothing wrong why did I want to hide it from everyone and why did it feel so wrong? I decided that I should tell my folks about my girlfriend and come clean and clear my conscience but as soon as I got home and Preeti called me using Tarun’s name and I realized that ideologies like Nehruji’s did not work in the real world and even if they did there was no place for it in my world. I was having too much fun being secretive and wrong. It was all over the top and crazy stuff but being in love makes you do so many stupid things and I was doing them all at once because according to me once your heart starts beating faster your brain stops functioning properly and mine had but I did not regret it one bit because when you are in love, stupidity is your shadow.
