Engineering Love Chapter 1 : Part V

I stood lifelessly on the bed thinking if there was any possibility of turning this around. A morbid clock on the wall hinted that I'd been sleeping for four hours. If a child were unconscious for four hours in school, the authorities would call up the parents, parents of parents, next to kin and the neighbors, and not necessarily in the same order. Colleges were more casual about it. No phone calls really. They were glad though that I'd woken up. 

The only possible silver lining out of the whole fiasco though was that there were no more classes to attend for the day. It was time to go straight back home. I was relieved that the ignominy of facing all any object living or dead, who/which saw me faint in the class, was avoided. 

With a hurried sense of unbelongingness to the clinic, I picked up my bag, gave a conceited glance to the nurse and walked straight out. No pleasantries exchanged.

The walk back to the metro station seemed much longer than the walk in. I had never earlier been in a position to sympathize with myself this much. Never had I felt so deranged about how I was supposed to face people the next day. As much I felt urge to talk to somebody about it, I also felt the helplessness of having only Sumit to hear me out. I cannot talk to him about it - I said to myself. I knew he would just rub it in further.

I walked with my head down, kicking the minutest stone on my way. I was conscious that she still lingered in my neural networks.

'Saswati' - I recalled. Now that I knew the name, I couldn't but help build a perception about her. 

She belonged to a middle class family. Her dad must be a mid level employee in some government organization. Mom - a teacher in a government school. She must one of the three daughters that the family has. She's perhaps the eldest, even the brightest. And now that she's made it to NSIT, she's the one last hope of her parents that she earns her dowry all by herself. Never had she managed to strike an independent conversation with a member of the opposite sex, unless it was strictly academic.

I had her all scoped out. At least I thought I did. Although this was all mindless extrapolation. I truly wanted to believe that there was more to her than that. For all I knew she could've been a sex goddess put simply. All boys like to think of an alternate persona of the women they persistently think about. It's an extremely entertaining possibility to believe that there's more to a girl that meets the eye.

And while I was still imagining the extraordinary and in all probability, the improbable, a familiar female voice called out from behind - 'Hey, aren't we in the same class?'