Sincere apologies for the delay! I blame all my teachers equally and indiscriminately :)
Thank you all for sticking around anyway. You guys rock my world!
By the way, all the parts of my story now have a title that's actually the title of a Bollywood movie - my tribute to the "filmigiri" which plays such an important part in my story ;)
Will be sending out PMs later :)
Part 8
Dil, Dosti, etc
The winds began to sigh and croon love songs in his ear, as she entered the cafeteria. Adi smiled down at his coffee, his confidante. It winked back at him teasingly. They all knew, except her.
"Adi," she chirped as she sat opposite him, "Black coffee again? Chhi!"
He let out his signature low slow-motion laugh, and nervously straightened his nerdy glasses, feeling, as he did so, that his right ear had most treacherously turned red again.
"Hi Pinky. When did you come?" he said, (as usual).
"Just now. Okay, so, tell, na? What happened?"
The question had kept her up all night, tossing and turning, and drafting numerous text messages, only to subsequently delete them.
"What happened?" Adi repeated, confused.
"Didn't you go to see that girl? The one your mum found on shaadi.com? You said you were going to go yesterday."
"Oh yeah, maa wanted us to go yesterday. But I somehow managed to convince her that I needed more time, etc. so we finally didn't go."
Pinky's heartbeats steadied themselves; he hadn't gone. The air around her felt breathable again, and the sun seemed to have brightened up eagerly to suit her mood.
"But why didn't you want to go?" she asked, attempting the neutral, nonchalant expression, instead of looking as relieved as she felt.
Adi's coffee gave him that meaning-laden look, nudging him to give her the true reason, but he turned his eyes away. Truth came with a price.
"What's the point?" he said jokingly, "Girls don't like nerdy-looking guys like me. I guess I should get a makeover or something... try to look like Maan Singh Khurana."
"No!" Pinky exclaimed, perhaps a bit too quickly and emphatically.
"No?"
"No," she insisted, "You shouldn't have to change. You're perfect, just as you are. Maan Sir may be really, really hot, but you're special, Adi. Because it's what's inside that counts. And you're a really nice guy. You're sweet, kind, helpful, honest, intelligent, hard-working -"
Pinky stopped herself. She was blabbering away again. The next thing she knew, she would have confessed that she was falling in love with him, and their cool, chilled out friendship would be forever plagued by awkward, self-conscious silences. It would be too heavy a price to pay.
"What happened, Pinks?"
"I'm starving, yaar. Hmm, aloo ke paraathe."
Adi smiled, enchanted by how ravishing she looked when ravenous, and ran her words through his mind again, quickly memorising them so that they would give him company after she had left.
Ideally, he reasoned absent-mindedly, one should love enough to want to confess one's affections to the object thereof, and not so much as to inhibit one's ability to make such confession.
...
"Well, ideally," Geet pointed out from the floor above the cafetaria, "we should not have to be stuck with each other for another, what is it now, another month and a half."
She was with Maan in his office cabin, in what he had originally intended to be a truce meeting to put an end to the war that had been raging for two weeks. But of course, peace was in no way forthcoming, which should come as no surprise, seeing that the idea had not been vocalised as yet.
"So what do you want me to do?" Maan asked, exasperated. They were stuck with each other for another month and a half. Stating the obvious did not help. But of course, Handa being Handa...
"Oh, many things, Khurana," she replied mischievously, as her mind immediately began to buzz with ingenious ideas for future pranks, all of which seemed to culminate in ego-puncturing public embarrassment.
"No, it's out of question. I will not sleep with you," Maan said firmly.
Geet was clearly taken aback by this unexpected line of attack and felt her face take on an embarrassingly deep shade of red. Maan was most pleased to take note of the effect his words had had on her.
"Wh-what?" she fumbled ungracefully, "N-no, I didn't, Hai Babaji, I didn't... I -"
"I'm sorry, Handa, but I have standards," Maan declared, smirking, and giving himself an imaginary congratulatory pat on the back. He had finally gotten back at her for the time when, at their first meeting, she had refused to shake hands with him on the basis that she had "standards." He struck the incident in question off his mental revenge checklist.
"Khurana, I had no such thing in mind," Geet snorted, quickly recovering from her flustered state.
"Oh yes, Handa, of course you didn't. And that is exactly why you were trying to seduce me at Dev's birthday bash."
A tiny corner of his brain reminded him of the peculiar tingle he had felt when she had touched his chest, but he was quick to push back that particular memory into the obscure corner where it rightly belonged.
"What?" Geet spluttered, "I was only checking if you had that cut on your chest."
"Oh, is that what they call it nowadays?" Maan asked, trying to stifle an overwhelming fit of laughter building up behind the quivering corners of his mouth.
"Khurana, I told you what that was about."
"Oh yes, a superhero. Sorry, Handa, but that was incredibly lame."
Geet humphed. She should never have told him about her superhero. It would be too much of a strain upon his barbarically limited emotional range to even begin to imagine the beauty of such a perfect romantic moment. In fact, she had no idea what had possessed her to tell him in the first place. After all, he had been satisfied when she had used Sameera as an excuse. Then why subject her dream man to being viewed through his pathetic Khurana lenses?
"By the way," Maan continued, "You know you keep calling him dream man and all. You really don't know these superhero types. They're the most perverted of the lot. They have x-ray eyes."
"Oh please don't bring him down to your level."
"Seriously, Handa, you don't even know him, if at all he is anything more than a figment of your ... Handa insanity."
"Khurana, you're not jealous, are you? Because that is cute, but you don't stand a chance."
"That's a relief. Thank you so much, Geet... and Geet's Babaji."
"Anyway," Geet said, changing the topic irritably, "why did you call me to your office again? You said we needed to talk. Can we make this quick? I have a rehearsal that I need to get to."
"Uh, yes, actually, I wanted to tell you that... we... nothing... actually, I just wanted to disturb you and make you come all the way, so I pretended I had something to say. But I don't."
Of course, the real purpose of their meeting was so that Maan could negotiate for some kind of reconciliation. But he had quickly realised that to put forward such a suggestion might have been perceived as a concession of defeat, and decided against it. You see, Maan Singh Khurana and defeat didn't quite gel, to put it mildly.
Geet smiled patronisingly, "So this is your idea of revenge for my behenji act at Dev's birthday bash? Wow, that is so... pathetic!"
"Oh no, Handa, I have already settled that score. Don't you remember how, when we went for the wedding, I told Nissar that you wanted to quit acting because your actual, deepest heartfelt desire was to marry me as soon as possible and become a perfect housewife?"
"How can I forget, Khurana? I will always hate you for that. Do you realise that was Nissar Parvez, who might have been wanting to cast me in his serial? No, but before I could even say anything, you had to -"
"But I thought you said you wouldn't like to succeed on the basis of recommendation?" Maan said innocently.
"Yeah, but that doesn't mean you... But yes, you're right. I will make it big because of my talent and hard work. You see, it's not quite like me to throw parties to impress my clients," Geet replied with a sly smile, as that glorious memory came to her mind.
Maan sneer vaporised into thin air, "Don't remind me. You made you lose that Rathod hotel contract! I still can't believe you gatecrashed into the party and told Mr Rathod I was in love with that silly daughter of his. Not only did he cancel the deal, but I had to listen to his ridiculous lecture about the qualities he wants in the moron that's unfortunate enough to marry her. And now that Rasika chick stalks me. Really, Handa, what the hell!"
"Big deal, Khurana! What about you? You came to the radio station during my show, bribed the idiots who were still awake so you could barge into the recording room just to distract me while I was on air. And you told Pinky's dad that I had an acting workshop to attend every Saturday and Sunday at eight in the morning! So now he wakes me up horribly early and I have to get out of the house, pretending to go to that non-existent workshop. I can't even tell him the truth. After all, you're Maan Singh Khurana. He would never believe me. Plus, that day in the restaurant, you took advantage of the fact that I had never had sushi before and told me to eat all the wasabi in one go. Do you know how - Oh and on Monday, Hai Babaji, you told everybody in the radio station I was pregnant!"
"Correction. I didn't tell them anything. I was only telling you to walk slowly and be careful when taking the stairs, and I refused to allow you to eat that papaya salad. For once, I was being all nice and caring towards you. They just assumed what they wanted to."
"Whatever. I know you did it all on purpose. That was sick, Khurana. And I don't even know how to correct them because nobody talks about it in front of me. They just look at me all funny."
"But you're not pregnant, Handa. What's the problem?" Maan said, faking naive incomprehension.
"They should not think something about me that's not true. That is a problem."
"Oh no, not again, Handa! Like I said before, I will not sleep with you... not even to make the rumours true."
"Hai Babaji," Geet sighed, "Is that the only thing on your mind? Typical guy! Disgusting."
"I know you like me, Handa. You're just in denial."
"Wow, really? What makes you think that?"
"Well, just the fact that you go out of your way to ruin every single date I've had with a girl these past two weeks. You've literally been stalking me all over town. If it's not your behenji act, it's your flirting, and if it's not that, it's your horribly dramatic and embarrassing 'you-cheated-me' speech. Oh but the worse was when you hinted to Meera that I was gay, so now she's trying to have an affair with Dev instead. How could you?"
"Oh yeah, that was funny," Geet reminisced dreamily.
"For you, perhaps. Meera spends so much time at our place and I hate that she looks at me like I'm some cute girl that she could not possibly ever want to kiss. And I think she's told Dev, who's told Naintara who's told the entire house including the gardener and Nakul. Yesterday, Dadi began to tell me all these random things about how she would always love me and accept me as I am. It was only later that I realised what she was getting at."
And that was it - Geet could not hold back any longer. She began to laugh uncontrollably.
"Handa!" Maan said angrily, but for some reason, the laughter was infectious, and soon, the bug had caught him too.
They laughed incessantly, at their own, and at each other's craziness, at the silliness of it all. Whenever their laughter started to dwindle away, they saw each other and remembered something else that they could not help but laugh at. It had just struck them then how enjoyable the past two weeks had been, without them realising it.
"It's so much fun fighting with you," Geet said, once she was able to breathe.
"I was thinking of the exact same thing," Maan confessed, equally surprised, smiling back at her.
"But I hate you," Geet quickly clarified. This was the Khurana guy after all!
"Of course! Me too," Maan concurred, and then, in the awkward silence that ensued, out of the blue he suddenly remembered, "Mr Marchanda said you were taking part in a play this week. Congratulations."
He frowned slightly, as he wondered why he had had to say that. This was Handa! Who cared?
"Thanks. It's tomorrow, six o'clock at the Artscape Theatre," Geet replied, and was instantly confused by the words that had escaped her. Why was she giving him so many details? It was not like she wanted him to be there.
"I'll be there," he said, before his brain could intervene.
"Okay, um, but... look, don't -"
"I won't. It's your first break. It's an important day for you, I understand."
And she understood why she had wanted him to be there. It was like they were friends, kind of, sort of. Not actually friends, but something similar. Even if he was Khurana. His congratulation had been sincere, she knew it.
And he knew why he was being nice to her all of a sudden. All the elements in his revenge checklist had been checked. The war had ended. Unless Handa started again, of course. As she undoubtedly would.
Edited by whimsical - 14 years ago
Geet - Hui Sabse Parayee
Bade Achche Lagte Hain Naya Season
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