Page 54 - The World's Best Boyfriend

13

Dhruv had been in a little fight last night. The seniors had come knocking at his

door and he had asked them to fuck off. They hadn’t taken the affront lightly and
barged into his room. The matter was settled when they roughed up Dhruv, who
in turn smashed a table lamp on one of the senior’s heads. They had to rush the
senior to the hospital.

Groggily and with one eye barely open he looked at the timetable on his
phone. He was already late for the first class—advanced physics. It took him

another twenty minutes to get out of bed, brush, and find the motivation to reach
his first class at DTU, the college he had always thought of as giving him the
metaphorical freedom from the house he had grown up in.
Still in his shorts and flip-flops, his right palm bandaged, and with a deep gash

on his forehead from last night which had needed medical attention, he walked
through the corridors looking for his class.

Mr Tripathi, fifty-three, dressed in brown trousers, a faded white shirt and
chappals, was teaching the first-year electrical engineering students. In a
desperate bid to leave a good first impression, their eyes were glued to the old
man, nodding furiously like bobbleheads, pens whirling on paper, writing every

word like it was holy.
Dhruv knocked at the door. The class turned to look at him. It was a class full

of hopeful and hopeless, virgin young men, and predominantly average-looking
women, who would drag themselves unquestioningly through four years of
engineering to get one of those million little enviable cubicles where their life

energies will be slowly sucked out of them.
‘May I come in?’ he asked.
‘Should we allow latecomers?’ Prof. Tripathi asked the class. The students

shook their heads.
‘What is wrong with you?’ said Dhruv to the class who pretended they hadn’t
heard him.

‘You’re late,’ said the professor.
‘I hope I haven’t missed much.’
‘You’re not dressed appropriately for class.’

‘Sir, I was hoping the first class would be a sort of informal introductory