Chapter - 3

Now the good news about the first one is that you don't feel choked about your feelings

and you don't regret that you didn't tell the person you love about how you felt about them. And I just had to tell her! Never give in to this feeling, nothing comes out of telling the person you love that you love him or her. It's bullshit, it's an urban legend. After doing it,

you realize it's better to live on the tiny hope that maybe she loved you, rather than being

rejected and humiliated outright. But I was just an ugly, fat kid. What did I know about these complexities? All I knew was that she was the girl of my dreams and I liked her to bits.

Let's just rewind a bit to tell you what had happened in the last seven years of my secret

relationship with Nisha, a relationship about which Nisha herself knew nothing about.

I loved her like crazy.

Within the first week of seeing her, I knew her phone number, the street she lived on, what

her parents did, what bus route she took, almost everything there was to be known about her! Though, getting all this information seems regular right now, the year was 1996 and things were different back then!

As time went by, my obsession escalated. After a year, and for the next seven years, I

walked two kilometres every day after school so that I could share the same bus route. For

the next seven years, I always took two schoolbags so that I could take a seat in two rows and decide later which row would give me a clearer view of her, after she took her seat. I did these things on a very regular basis, and now that I think of it, I guess I should have gone to a doctor instead.

Anyway, back then I wasn't a big extrovert, but by the time 2003 came along, I had retreated so far into my shell that I had problems even engaging in everyday conversations with people. Why did that happen?

My obsession, now at dizzy levels, made me believe that Nisha would hear every word I

say, and that I needed to measure my words before saying them out loud. And that is when, deep down, I knew for certain, that a girl like her, who hung around with cooler kids with gel in their hair and motorcycles parked outside the school, wouldn't even give a passing thought to someone like me. She had a whole army of better boys who catered to her every whim and fancy; she was a pampered kid. Had it been left to me, I would have carried her around in my schoolbag to prevent her from the torture of walking.

Man! I did need to go to a psychiatrist back then. But it was around that time that I

realized that I was getting a little overboard, that it was just a crush and I had to get over it,

especially since my grades had started to slip to unacceptable levels. I started to

concentrate a little more on my engineering entrance examinations, putting everything else aside for a little while. It did soften my preoccupation with her. Sometimes I thought it would have been a lot easier for me, had she started going out with somebody. But that's just pure speculation; I might just have killed myself, metaphorically speaking .