Page 25 - The World's Best Boyfriend

Sometimes his mother would keep lunch wrapped in an aluminium foil on his
desk.
‘What are you doing down there?’ asked a girl one day while Dhruv fiddled

with a fountain pen, shirt stained with little blue spots of Chelpark ink. Dhruv
looked up to see the girl from his colony, the dalmatian, the one with the spotted
skin, looking at him. ‘Do you want to share my lunch?’

Dhruv shook his head.
‘You won’t get it if you touch me or share my food. Didn’t you get the flyer
that was never distributed?’

‘I didn’t say no because of that,’ lied Dhruv.
Dhruv was hungry. His father would not wake up in time to help him get
ready for school, or prepare lunch, or even drop him to the bus stop. He would,

though, kiss him on his forehead every day at least once as they rushed to get
dressed. ‘I love you, and we are happy together,’ his father would assert like a
universal truth. But Dhruv wanted a lunch box and a clean uniform, too.

‘Why do you sit here every day?’
‘My mother is a teacher in the school and she comes looking for me with a
lunch box. I sit here and wait for her to leave.’

‘Where’s the lunch box then?’
‘I don’t take it. She waits and she takes it back.’

The girl starts to laugh.
‘What?’
‘It reminds me of a ghost-woman from a Bollywood movie who wears a white
saree and roams about with a candle in her hand.’

Dhruv frowned. ‘She’s not a ghost.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I said that,’ the girl said. Dhruv

went back to taking the pen apart. ‘I heard your story. I don’t see why anyone
should talk about it. If you were in the US, you would be in the majority.
Divorce rates are 54.8 per cent there.’
‘How do you know that?’

‘I have a computer at home. AMD 1.2 GB Thunderbird Athlon computer with
320 MB SDRAM, SoundBlaster Live Value, CD drive and a 12 GB hard disk.

It’s actually my brother’s but I can use it after he’s done. He only watches porn.’
‘Porn?’
‘It’s just biology in action. Nothing something you would be interested in till