Flashbacks: How I met Anjali

How I met Anjali - 5

We had already encountered quite a few times, and we usually met pretty far from our college campus. Guwahati university campus was a perfect heaven for me and I used to feel little safer out there. I was sure my college wouldn't be there. Also, her college, as well as her hostel was quite near to the University. But day by day I was overcoming the fear. I started to become bold. I became so daring that sometimes after dark we even used to enjoy our evening stroll in that narrow and little exposed kind of road, just opposite to few of our engineering college hostels. With time, I developed a comfort zone with Anjali and even didn’t hesitate to visit her hostel as well.

Aha, how can I ever forget those long, stressful and also little embarrassing kind of waits inside her hostel gate. Having a cellphone was like owning a BMW those days. I think in today’s world, in exactly similar kind of situation, guys would make 100 calls or rather 100 missed calls waiting for that long. Most of the time when I used to visit her hostel, she would come and ask me to wait. Their hostel had a small waiting area and fortunately few chairs were also there. I simply used to wait and wait, totally clueless about what the hell she was doing inside. Sometimes she used to send one of her friends to entertain me, might be when she realized the fact that she's actually very late. Who knows? She might have wanted to confirm whether I had already left or was still waiting like a cow. There was a room pretty close to the waiting zone and the girls inside always used to keep the window open. It was quite embarrassing to wait for that long in such an uncomfortable environment, but with time I got used to it. Every time I got to hear those laughter sounds originated from that room, my heart beats used to accelerate. I always thought the girls were laughing at me. So many visitors used to come and go, but I continued to wait.

One afternoon we simply entered the Jalukbari Park, the nearest park in the city from our college campus. Well, that was quite a dangerous and vulnerable place to hang around, but it didn't bother me much that time. I felt that was a totally different category of park and we didn’t rise to that level yet. That was for the first time I entered that place. It had a big pond inside and many couples were enjoying their boating out there. At first instance I thought to give it a try, but that would have been a suicide. The pond was clearly visible from the main road and it wasn't difficult to recognize the boaters in broad day light from there. Also our college bus always used to pass from there. The park had lot of bushes and I was quite fascinated to see few fancy looking umbrellas. Well, only the tip of the umbrella was visible in those bushes, but after a closer glance I got the glimpse of two human looking species under it. Couples were holding each other tightly and were whispering. They were sitting so close to each other that sometimes even their lips connected.

We thought to maintain some distance from such valentine kind of people. We were simply enjoying our casual kind of gossip. Anjali was born and brought up in Shillong. She said that her parents are originally from MP and they have many relatives in Raipur.

“Where is Raipur?” I asked.

“It’s in MP. It’s the capital of MP”

I found that very interesting and wanted to crunch some more fun out of that.

"So what is the capital of Chhattisgarh?"

She thought for a while and then replied "I think it’s Bhilai "

Then I asked her the capital of Jharkhand. She already started to get irritate.

"You came to showcase your geography knowledge or what?"

"At least you should know the capitals of all Indian states"

She asked me the capital of few North Eastern states and I answered them correctly. Then she asked me the same of few European countries and I couldn’t answer few of them. She blasted at me that even I didn’t know the capital cities of some of the well-known countries. I countered her and asked the capital of Goa. I was really enjoying the "shame-shame" game with her. Then all of a sudden she opened her water bottle and out of anger threw some water on my face. I was quite shocked and my t-shirt also got wet.

"What the hell you did just now?"

"You stop this nonsense or else I will throw more water on you"

I was very annoyed and was getting little ferocious too. I snatched her bottle and poured hell lot of water on her. Without saying anything she immediately took her bottle and left from there. That was a little embarrassing moment and few people already started to stare at us. I also started to walk behind her and in no time she was already outside the park. I shouted from behind and asked her to come back. She took a rickshaw and was going the way towards her hostel. Immediately I started to run and jumped on that rickshaw. I asked the rickshaw guy to stop. Anjali had a quarrel with me for next couple of minutes and then we again returned to the park.

How I met Anjali - 7