Part 4: Between friends...

The newcomers settled into a predictable routine,an orbit that took them from their rooms to the classrooms,to the library and then back into their rooms with occasssional forays into the canteen for piping hot cups of coffee and campus gossip.Graduates-in-the-making or anything else,campus gossip and the accompanying bottomless cups of coffee are a integral part of the student's life.Adi too,was no exception to the routine,albiet with a difference to break the monotony-Nilima's company.Her company was like a breath of fresh air to his otherwise unsocial existence in the institute.Every morning he got up with a smile on his face.The prospect of facing a day loaded with lectures followed by getting cooped up in the library did not faze him,Nilima never made him feel bored.The lectures were often punctuated by her comments regarding anything that moved-the lecturer,the students;she left nobody.She liked to pick up the idiosyncrasies of those around her and make a scathing comment on it which,Adi was sure,if that person heard it would make them wish they were dead.However so true was her observation and so sarcastic her comment,Adi had to do everything to control his laughter.The girl was pure magic.He always wondered what was so charming about her;was it poise,her way of speaking,the way she carried herself in the crowd?What exactly it was he never found out.She attracted him like no other girl ever had,yet she never did anything to grab his attention.Perhaps unknowing to Adi,that was what was so charming about Nilima-the fact that she never pulled on any feminine strings to attract him,but rather let him follow her of his own accord.Late night library sessions often terminated in a long walk across campus in the cool night air,listening to the crickets singing their night songs or some lone owl hooting somewhere far away in the distance.During these walks,topics changed track rapidly-school,friends,campus gossip,everything under the sun.Slowly without realising,they loosened up the knots on their personal lives and told each other things that you would tell only a trusted person.Past crushes,heartbreaks,ambitions,failures everything.Adi always felt a surge of jealousy when she mentioned her past crushes,always wondering if she still felt the same about it.But of course he dared to not ask her directly,fearing he would reveal himself to her sharp mind which never seemed to miss anything.Both of them had a unique way of telling anecdotes.Adi's sole aim being to get her to laugh her head off.Her unadulterated laughter brought a smile to his lips.The way she threw her head back when she laughed,the twinkle in her eyes and the dimple on one side of her cheek!All his worries seemed to evaporate in front of her laughter.They came to understand each other perfectly.Adi somehow felt Nilima understood him more than he understood her.She had a uncanny sense for things that he liked and things that could make him blow his lid off.And because she knew this,sometimes to pull his leg she would make a passing mention of a past crush just to see him fret and fume silently.She knew he would never make an open mention of his bad mood but would sulk all day long,answer her questions with monosyllabic answers and pay no heed to her comments.At the same time she knew how to pacify him.He was like butter in her hands.She adored him for all his eccentricities,for his ability to laugh at himself and his fierce devotion to her.He never made it known to her openly how much he liked her,but she knew how much Adi was attached to her,how much he enjoyed her company.Both of them had toyed with the idea of putting all the cards on the table-Adi with telling her and Nilima with popping the question outright.It never seemed to happen.Somehow or the other both found an excuse to not do it,the worry that it may jeopardise a budding friendship was always on the back of their minds.Looking back,Nilima would regret not doing it,regret not being frank and outspoken about it.Somehow she never seemed to realize that their friendship was too strong,strong enough to withstand the answer to the question that was buzzing in their heads.Perhaps both of them cared so much about the other that they did not want to loose the person,maybe that fear held both of them back.
It was a very boring lecture,even Nilima was too bored to make any witty remarks on her favourite targets and was taking advantge of the cool classroom and the relative quiet by catching a quick nap.Even Adi got bored of taking notes and was gazing into nothingness.His gaze swept once around the class and he espied the fellow on the first chair dozing off.He made a move to tell Nilima about it,both never missed a chance to have a good laugh at his expense.He stopped short when he saw her sleeping.She was looking so beautiful.Her face a canvas of serenity and pure innocence.How much he adored her.She was the centre around which his universe was revolving.No other girl had understood him so well.He admired her for ability to melt his usually frigid demeanour,to make him bend to her will,not by force but as if he himself wanted to.He wondered how she managed it.She knew how to bully him without actually bullying him,how to make him jealous,how to make him smile again.She knew him like the back of her hand.And for that he loved her.A lock of her hair was dangling carelessly and Adi had a mad urge to tuck it behind her ear,the way she did it quite frequently.Somehow,for some inexplicable reason he found that gesture very attractive.He wondered what she was dreaming about.Is it me,he thought.He was lost in his reverie and was startled as the class erupted into peals of laughter on a rare joke cracked by the lecturer.Nilima got up with a start and Adi looked away hastily.But,Nilima sharp as she was did not miss it.
She smiled inwardly to herself.Adi,she thought,you are so predicable.But he was not like the other guys.There was a rare sense of decency in him that most people mistook for aloofness and nonchalance .But she knew that he was neither.He was like a nut-a hard exterior that hid a soft heart.A pillar of ice that she had melted without realising it.He did not have too many close friends on campus although almost everyone knew him.She had a sense of possesiveness about him,because she knew that she knew him all too well and was the only person who did.She also knew that Adi would not care for any other girl as much as he cared for her.She had a slight suspicion that Adi thought of her as somebody beyond a friend,but she was waiting for him to make the first move.She pretended to go back to sleep but kept her eyes opened a bit,gazing absently at him as he scribbled in his notebook.She knew that he was least bit interested in the proceedings of the class but was thinking about her.How right she was!Because Adi was doing precisely doing that.His hands were scribbling away pure nonsense in his notebook as his mind relived the past few minutes.
Life would have gone on like this for some time,both would have plucked up enough courage one day to speak out their minds and found out that the other person was thinking nothing different.Adi would have gone down on one knee to propose to Nilima.Two hearts and minds would have met for a lifetime,met to never separate again.Everything would have been like a fairytale had it not been for the intrusion of Mac in their lives.Mac,who like a wedge drove them apart.It was not that Mac was the devil incarnate but Adi never saw him in any other light.From the day they met to the day he saw his back he came to loathe Mac.They never managed to see eye to eye about anything.Neither knew who drew first blood,but then it hardly mattered when both the fighters were determined to bleed each other to death,thankfully proverbially and not literally.They had locked their swords in a battle that would last for the better part of six years and whose reverberations would ring for the remainders of two lives.The joust was for a unspoken prize-Nilima.All three of them would remember that fateful day of their lives as if it were yesterday, when three lives had become intertwined.Two of them struggling madly against each other to break apart,hurting each other and themselves in the process.The three would never forget that stormy day,as if the gathering dark clouds were a harbringer of the storm that was to break open in full tempest in their lives.......