When Raj Learned to Ignore Ravi to Fall For Me :

Me and Sri :

In Hindi there is a saying which goes like : Daney daney pe likha hain khanewalo ke naam. Its English translation would be something like - Every single grain has the name of the eater written over it. That I was destined to be a great businessman was a foregone conclusion long before my birth. My father Maheshwar Tiwari was a selfmade man. Right after I completed high school, my father sent me to the family business at the cloths shop in the City Mall. Father never thought very highly of me especially after what I did with a close relative in class nine. Let me share it with you here to find out for myself if I was really the one to be blamed, the culprit, you know?

Sanju or Sanjana was my cousin. She studied in the only girls' college at the southern end of the city. It was a Sunday and I had gone with my friends for a friendly cricket match some half an hour's distance from my home.

I don't know if the loss had anything to do with my poor state of mind or not, and this was despite the knock I played. I scored 69 in the match coming down at number 3 and was the last man out. Knowing how I was hurting, my friends kept quiet on the way back.

Another reason for my foul mood was how the victorious team that contained a few students of our school in the lower classes, drove by in a matador, singing, shouting and screaming their hearts out. Someone even started chanting :

"Losers! Losers! Shame on you!" While the others chorosed the words like hell.

As I entered the house, I bumped into Sanju. I had met her some years back during an occasion in their house. It was an awesome day by the time we reached their place. Her parents were well to do and had arranged a gala get-together when Urmi(la) aunty sought me out.

"Look at Ravi! ( She called me Ravi though my name was Narayan!) Beta, how you've grown! You're a handsome young man now. Let me call Sanju to give you company. You two were inseparables in your childhood."

Aunt Urmi looked at my parents standing behind me and exchanged pleasantries with them for a while. I heard her calling out to her daughter a moment later.

The girl who came down the stairs sometime later was a very attractive girl in a sari. How old could she have been at that time? Same as my age? But the sari suited her to a niceity. She ran down half the staircase before slowing her speed to saunter down the rest of the steps.

She had her eyes on me all along. I don't remember how we ended up in the balcony of her parents' room. I don't even remember what we had talked about at that time. I don't remember anything of that meeting except for one thing. She struck me as a girl far more mature than most of the girls her age.

"Hi, Ravi. ( She called me Ravi following her mother.) Remember me?" The tilting tone in which she added the question tag, made me want to reach out to her. This time, despite the hawk eyes of my mother, we ended up in the roof of our house. The day had made way for a crimson dusk by then. The rustling of the branches of the banyan trees that swayed over the surrounding wall, the agility in the air that suggested the advent of Spring and the silvery crescent that was emerging just over our heads must have done something to my unhappy soul.

The way Sanju kept talking to me, laughing and throwing her hair back with a shake of her head from time to time, did something to me. I heard her saying :

"You know, Ravi. You've to grow up fast to accept defeat. Wining and losing is a part of growing up. Besides, no one likes a loser.. "

Sanju had an angular face covered with long, shiny black hair that fell over her shoulders. I had a feeling that suddenly the wind was blowing faster and the pen of crows sitting on the branch of a coconut tree flew away cawing as if they sensed some immediate, evil happenings. Right then a storm reflective of the one inside me, started brewing. I didn't, couldn't let her finish the sentence as I pulled her face towards me with a lot of ferocity and fury. I must also confess to the truth, in this context, that I kissed her hard. And for a moment, for a very tiny moment I had the feeling that she liked being kissed by me while I got desperate to put my hand under her shalwar, groping my way up till it reached the hard bra-border. She was so flummoxed by the whole thing that she didn't even know how to respond to my outburst. It was at that precise moment that she pushed me away with all her might that I could never imagine she had had!

I was so much taken aback by her wild response that I got thrown back, had something entangled at my right foot and nearly tripoed down. As she ran past me towards the door of the roof, I tried to halt her by catching hold of her kamiz. Unfortunately, she was already out of my sight by then and all I was left with was the utter sense of disgrace, retaliation and defeat.

When I was down on the ground floor, I expected to see a circle of all my relatives led by my father and her parents to ask me for an explanation of my detestable conduct on the roof.

Surprisingly, nothing like that happened. I saw them discussing something animatedly from a distance. Couldn't make out what the topic of their conversation was when I noticed her standing near the staircase.

I did some quick calculations to come to the conclusion that she couldn't have told them about me. She didn't. At the same time when she turned her head around to look back up at me, her eyes were blazing, to say the least.

To cut a long story short, exactly ten days after the kissing attempt on the roof, Urmi aunt called my mom to inform her about my evil nature. My mother, unlike other mothers, listened to Urmi aunt's outbursts through to the end with utmost patience, didn't utter any expletives, unimaginable for women her caste and status, and hung up by telling aunt that she (mom) would make sure that I didn't get to set my evil eyes on the 'innocent child' again.

Things quitened down on the home front after the Sanju affair. But for reasons not very clear to me, father entrusted me with the entire business of running the cloth-shop. It was while keeping accounts of the daily transactions that I got involved in the second touch-feel affair.

There were four employees working at Shroddya Saree Shop in the first floor of the mall. Dozens of retailers, small-scale merchant women, shopkeepers and lay buyers used to visit our shop on a regular basis. Ms. Taniya was one of them.

Extremely petite, mod, glamorous and attractive, she caught my eyes the very first day she came to ours with a more older woman, who happened to be one of those frequent visitors to our Shroddhya.

Ms.Taniya made friends with all four of the employees including Shantanuda within no time. Soon she was asking for tea and bying heaps of the discarded cloths at a cheaper price. She didn't stay in the shop for long, an hour or two at the most, would select the clothing items, ask someone for a glass of water, and then scurry over to the seat in front of me.

"Wai, Narayan, can I pay half the money in cash and the rest in Credit Card?" She asked me with the sweetest voice I had heard from anyone on two legs! (That reminds me that she had the most shapely legs as well. The soft, white skin showing through the torn jeans was an instant turn-on.)

I disconnected the ear phones and looked down at her, askance.

I shook my head as soon as she had repeated the question. I told her that we didn't accept credit cards by principles. Anyway, if she didn't have the cash on her, I would make an exception in her case and accept it. Ms. Taniya looked grateful.

At the end of the payment, she turned to me again.

"It is even hot inside this air-conditioner room. Isn't it working, Shankar?" She queried looking up at the air-conditioner."By the way, you should strart serving your customers cold drinks instead of the hot tea from now on." The smile that hovered over the corners of her mouth then, had me bowled over. As Shantanuda was on leave that day and another had gone down to Barabazaar in Kolkata for ordering the clothes, I had no option but to ask Bapi, the youngest employee working at Shroddhya to go out to fetch the chaiwala.

The fourth staff, Anubhav, was busy showing some sarees to a client when Ms. Taniya wanted to know if she could return one of the kurtees. I shook my head and said," You have to bring it the next time. We're closing early today."

"Can I just look at something I was in a dilemma about, inside the adjacent room?" She asked with those mesmerising eyes of hers.

As I had no other client to tend to, I decided to lead her inside the other room. When I walked past her, somehow my shoulder brushed against hers, and the soft flesh around the upper part of her hand, made me visualise what she would look like without the clothes.

Ms. Taniya caught me looking at her and stretching out a finger, pointed to a rim of clothes on one of the upper racks, giving me a feel of her body in the process.

I looked back to see Anubhav spreading out another churidar to the middle-aged woman. Ms Taniya, in the meantime, was trying to reach out to another shirting piece on a rack across. The way she was poised at that moment, made me crave for her body and I couldn't resist elbowing her mounds of flesh. It felt so good.

She moaned out softly at my touch and eyed me with what I might term as a burning desire. Her mobile rang just then to break the spell that both of us found ourselves under.

The same night I received an sms from her asking about a missing item in her packaged bag.

To be continued…