All the world's a stage. And all the men and women merely players. The stage had been pre decided and parts already scripted. Just the actors remained to be chosen. I was just rudely pulled out of my philosophical musings and my school boy fantasies and cast into the unfamiliar part of a lovelorn idiot. A part I was most unsuited to play! But then little choice had I in this matter. Play on I had to! Till the time the powers that be decide that divine comedy has played on for long enough and grants me the welcome release.
My friends having realized the futility of trying to dissuade me, decided to do the next best thing. Whenever they got an opportunity, they pulled Mr. Casanova away from her and tried to set up opportunities for me to spend time with her. I also soon realized that I was by no means the first one to have experienced these kinds of feelings. My friends had also been through this at some point in their lives. Swapping stories of failed romance over a bottle of Old monk and a dozen Wills Navy Cuts on a Friday evening with melancholy songs playing in the background became my only island of happiness amidst an endless sea of sorrow. For the time I spent with her also was no longer all that enjoyable. It was all just plain hollow talk with no direction. I had no clue where to proceed with this thing. I had not given a thought to marriage till now. That seemed the only logical way to put my handkerchief over her and tell all the wannabe Romeos to keep off. But in the process I would be voluntarily walking into the mouse trap instead of waiting for me parents to lure me in a few years later and run me through the Great Indian Bride Hunt. And then even if I were to decide to walk the plank, there still remained whole ordeal of proposing. How would she react to that?
The days just rolled on and the training eventually came to an end. I had mixed feelings. I was sad that I would probably not see her regularly anymore since we might be assigned to different projects. But then I was excited about getting started on the job. The excitement temporarily at least seemed to push back the swelling tide of melancholy. And I also harbored a hope that out of sight, she would also go out of my mind. But then so much for wishful thinking! One bearded joker atop a camel had decided to play bowling with the towers of USA. As the towers came crashing, so did the American economy, and with it the fortunes of Indian IT companies. So it came about that there were not enough projects for all of us and I was asked to go and sleep on the bench till they needed me.
I could not really sleep in peace for a fellow with red horns, long red ears and a longer red pointed tail came and set up his workshop in my idle head. So I had all the time in the world to keep agonizing over my situation. My hope about her going out of sight also was only wishful. She definitely seemed to have other plans. She kept running into me for some reason or the other every other day. And she also developed this annoying habit of forwarding jokes, quotations and sickly sweet mushy stuff to me. The fellow running the workshop in my idle mind somehow seemed to interpret all these gestures as her expression of affection towards me. And so I began to spend the days just waiting for her forwards and trying to find similar e-mail forwards to send to her.
I rarely ever read the contents of her forwards though. They were mostly mundane uninteresting stuff. What was more interesting to me was the mailing list. I would go over the order of names and try to analyze trends. Even though I had still not studied much statistics at that time, I had somehow independently hit upon the concept of design of experiments, a statistical technique to vary the inputs to a system and study how they impact the system output. I tried varying the order of names when I sent forwards and tried to see if that influenced the way she ordered her list. For instance I would put her name as the first in the list one time. Another time, in a mixed list of men and women, she would be the first woman on the list. Then try the same with second place. And so on. To date I have not managed to discover if it was a coincidence. But to my surprise whatever I did to her mail id always seemed to be reciprocated with my mail id. And the correlation coefficient would have been close to 95% to ignore it!
As if things were already not complicated enough, a new one arose. I began to suspect my roommate had also begun to take an unprofessional amount of interest in her. The thought began to affect my behavior towards him. I seemed to have found a hitherto undiscovered streak of vindictiveness and meanness in my character. It soon reached such a level that my other two roommates who I had already taken into confidence decided to intervene. I told them of my suspicion and asked them to help me carry out a Nacro test to confirm my suspicions. Initially they tried to argue with me on the ethicality of the whole thing. But as I had mentioned earlier, I was no mood for any form of reason. I told them all was fair in love and war. And so the plans were made. Actually it turned out much easier than we had imagined. All it took was two pegs of Old Monk to get the truth tumbling out. My suspicions had not been unfounded. My friends suggested I directly confront him the next morning instead of getting all worked up and vindictive.
My friends’ suggestion turned out to be a good one. In fact too good for my comfort! For this person was a temperamental fellow unlike my other level headed friends. He got too enthusiastic about this whole thing and decided to take upon himself the role of the white dove, the messenger of love. It was only going to be a matter of time now. He would definitely end up breaking the deadlock one way or the other. That would have of course been good in one way. But for the fact that subtelty was clearly not his forte. His methods were too direct for my liking. Some of his ideas if they went wrong I feared might get me hauled up for sexual harassment and thrown out of the company. And that was going to be too heavy a price to pay. But the next few days were somewhat better for my mind had at last found some diversion. I had to expend most of my energy to rein in this fellow and prevent him from implementing his hare brained schemes on my behalf.
Sometimes we work hours together toiling away to solve a problem. But still a solution would seem nowhere in sight. Then you decide to finally give up and sleep over it. You get up in the morning. And presto! The solution has presented itself to you in your head. At times huge issues confront you and you feel you are caught between the fire and the frying pan. You just delay the decision and go off to sleep. And when you wake up, you find the issue has resolved itself. This is called the Narasimha Rao technique named after the former Indian prime minister who had mastered the art of employing this technique to resolve all the serious issues confronting the nation. And unknowingly this was the technique that was going to be my savior.
That morning the HR representative, who suddenly seemed to have suddenly taken cognizance of my existence on the company rolls, called me to her room. She handed me out a letter. I had been assigned a project and permanently transferred to a different city. I had exactly three days to pack up my stuff and leave and report at the new office. The next few days were hectic. I had to settle down in the new place, meet new colleagues and there was whole lot of new things to learn on the project. So I did not have a moment to ponder over anything else. The forwards that continued to hit my mailbox mostly remained unread. Slowly their frequency began to dwindle and by the time I had settled down, they had totally stopped. And I had not even noticed. She had totally disappeared from my thoughts. I suddenly felt light and free. It seemed as if a huge load had been lifted off my head. The whole world lay before me. When I looked back at my erstwhile emotions, they seemed completely alien. I wondered if I had really felt those or it had just been a nightmare. Probably as Sherlock Holmes says “
Work is the antidote for all sorrows.” Phew!
Then one fine day, suddenly a tinge of the old feeling hit me. I had received a mail from her after a long time. She was getting married. I wanted to attend the wedding. That had a feeling of poetic conclusion to the whole affair. But then I did not want to tempt fate. So I just drafted a congratulatory mail to her expressing my best wishes for a happy married life with a note expressing my inability to attend due to professional commitments.
Well, that was the end of this one. She was the first but by no means the last before I moved on to Bride Hunt. But let us keep that story for another day. They will eventually come up here. But not immediately, though. I want to get back to my stories and poems and maybe revive one of the other humor series that have been sleeping, roll out a couple of book reviews, maybe a couple of articles before I get back to this.
Previous Part:
I too had a love story: First Blood
Related Post :
Great Indian Bride Hunt Series
