Page 88 - Half Girlfriend

even that sounds way better than how I said it.

I don’t know what came over me that day. Maybe I just couldn’t
wait anymore. Perhaps I felt insecure and scared. Most likely I am a
crass Bihari from Dumraon whose true animal nature had come out. I

realized I had spoken filth. I tried to take it back.

‘What the hell did you just say?’
‘Nothing. Listen, I just.

I released my grip. Before I could collect my thoughts, Riya
Somani had collected her belongings and left.

*
She refused to take my calls. She didn’t reply to any of my twenty-

seven messages. I waited for her at the college entrance every
morning.

She stepped out of her BMW, ignored me and waiked quickly into
her classroom.

During breaks she surrounded herself with her girlfriends.When I

approached her in the cafeteria, she took out her phone and pretended
to be on a call ‘That was a bit much,’ Shailesh said. I had told my
friends about the debacle in my room.They had listened with much

interest, hoping for a story with titillating action. Instead, they heard of

a total fiasco, When I repeated the ‘deti hai...’ line I had said to Riya,
even my thick-skinned friends cringed. We spoke filth sometimes but

nobody would ever talk like that to a girl. I, the idiot, had spoken like
that to the woman I loved, worshipped, adored and respected more

than anyone else on earth.
‘Fix this disaster, rather than focusing on intimacy right now,’ Ashu

had said, his tone irritated.
Weil, I had tried to fix it. Riya just wouldn’t meet me. Helpless, I

had no option but to stalk her. I had to talk to her alone. I swore to
myself not to say a word of Hindi, lest it come out crudely again.

I did find her alone, finally. She sat in the library, immersed in her
textbook, poring over the history of European literature. She wore a

red-and-white salwar-kameez with black earrings, ‘Riya,’ I whispered.