Page 148 - Till the Last Breath . . .

‘Oh, c’mon. Did you see the way he looked at you? He is clearly into

you. It was as if we didn’t exist!’ another girl added, disappointedly.
‘Whatever.’ Pihu shrugged and they moved on to other areas of
discussion, even though she couldn’t really think about anything else but

him. Pretty. Stunning. All in the same conversation. It really did feel like
her birthday after all.

They left after a little while. Everyone wished her luck, some for life, and
others for her non-existent relationship with her doctor, Arman. They had

come scared, thinking they would find a girl devoid of hope, but what they
had found was a girl throbbing with more life than all of them combined.

Venugopal hugged her the longest and told her that he had started to date. It
was the girl who had cried. Pihu nodded approvingly.
Alone in the room, she started to daydream again. This time Arman was

the visiting professor and she was the bubbly, enthusiastic student in the
front row who would do anything to get a good grade. Anything. She

blushed in her sleep as she fantasized about kissing him in the staffroom.
Slowly, she drifted off before things got nastier.

It was late evening when she woke up to an empty room. She hadn’t slept

that well with all the books around her distracting her, begging for
undivided attention. Throughout her sleep, she had been tossing and

turning, thinking about the time she would wake up and write her name in
blue ink on each of the books she had been given. She really wanted to use

the fountain pen Venugopal had gifted her too. And she was pleasantly
surprised that Venugopal had started dating a real girl (after a slew of

imaginary ones), a Punjabi at that, and imagined the girl who had cried
today laughing at Venugopal’s terrible Hindi. She missed him, and she
missed her college. At times, she really missed the physical part of studying

medicine—cutting open a dead body and seeing what lay inside. Rotten
lungs, shrunken pancreases, wasted livers—these were things that really got

her skin to tingle and her face to light up. She got up and walked
awkwardly to the bathroom, her feet and hands not really strong enough to

support her, and washed her face. Her body might be giving up, but her