When a Lawyer Falls in Love (3 page)

Three

‘Sonali, I’ve found the guy you ought to marry,’ said Ankur, one hot afternoon. The young law students were walking towards the college library, an old building within the campus. ‘The college librarian is just the man for you!’ continued Ankur, thinking of the weather-beaten, dentured septuagenarian.

‘I mean, instead of a home, both of you could set up a library and you could have your honeymoon right here in this old building, your dream destination!’ said Ankur, laughing and turning to Sonali for her reaction.

Sonali gave him one of her ‘How would you like to be murdered?’ looks. Ankur stopped laughing.

‘I can’t believe you spend your free time here! And I can’t believe that you manage to drag me each time!’ said Ankur, his voice dwindling to a whine.

‘Hello Mister! You can go back to the hostel and collect your brains! You insisted on coming along!’ retorted Sonali, the afternoon sun beating down on her pretty head.

‘Yeah, but…,’ Ankur tried to defend himself with something witty, but gave up. By then they had already reached the main entrance of the library.

The library building was an old structure with a portico and tall pillars. One would almost expect vintage cars to glide by and stop in the portico as they might have done, half a century ago. A large and sturdy doormat greeted them at the entrance, which seemed like it had witnessed generations of lawyers-to-be hurriedly go past it, in a rush to conduct research, clear exams and win cases.

The duo suddenly felt relaxed as they walked into the cool shade of the library, a respite from the scorching sun. Two pigeons sat huddled together on one of the high beams of the portico.

A skinny old man greeted them at the entrance. It was said that he had been sitting beneath the same cobwebbed ceiling for the past ‘phorty’ years.

‘Hello sir!’ said Sonali respectfully, as she put down two voluminous books on the tall wooden structure that doubled as a desk and a barrier, protecting the puny librarian from unruly students.

The librarian didn’t speak much but proceeded to show his approval by revealing a glimpse of his dentures.

‘Sir, I need to find the book
The Lord of the Rings
,’ Sonali politely asked.

Ankur balked. To him, it hardly made a difference whether the old building was the college library or an Ayurvedic dispensary, while Sonali was actually reading!

Professor Mahapatra was right. The stress levels of students had reached unprecedented levels!

The librarian’s flimsy bookmark pointed in a direction, and Sonali, flashing her brightest smile, walked across the sprawling library with Ankur trailing behind her.

‘See, he is already so quiet and hen-pecked. No need to train him,’ said Ankur, more to himself, as Sonali’s brown eyes busily scanned various rows of books. They reached the Fiction section where Sonali disappeared behind one of the racks. Ankur followed her around like a stray puppy.

‘You are actually going to read?’ said Ankur, and stopped short. Sonali was standing in front of an array of romance novels. ‘
Mills and Boon
, huh?’ teased Ankur, with a musical twang. ‘Shut up! This is a library!’ barked Sonali, in an angry whisper.

‘Really?’ enquired Ankur, playfully sarcastic. ‘
The Lord of the Rrrrings,
huh?!! Liar, Liar, Lady Lawyer!’ Ankur said in a low voice, gloating over his clever alliteration. Suddenly he felt a sharp ‘thwack’ on his chubby arm.

The lawyer lady was clearly not amused. Ankur decided it was safest to retreat before he was assaulted by hard bound books that according to him, had no practical use unless turned into missiles. Most books had not been borrowed in decades!

To get to the other end of the long book rack, Ankur had to first cross a potential avalanche of Classics—a global conspiracy created by writers to inflict upon civilisation. When he finally crossed the intimidating, narrow space between tall bookracks, the light at the end of the tunnel emerged. His was the classic case of being head over heels.

Now just why did he love Sonali so much? A lawyer ought to cross-examine himself sometimes. Sonali was, after all, just a classmate. Yet he felt so much emotion, that the matter simply could not be overruled.

As Ankur sat alone in a secluded corner with a book that may as well have been in Malayalam, his mind went into Hindi film flashback mode, complete with songs. Ankur remembered the first time he spotted Sonali with her freshly shampooed hair, swaying with gay abandon as a seventeen-year-old at their freshers’ party.

Sonali had sportingly agreed to be ragged and she had danced with purposeful slowness to a fast-paced number. She looked even cuter as she did an energetic Garba to painfully slow classical music.

Ankur was in love with this girl who could listen calmly to both sides of an argument, yet vociferously defend anything she was truly convinced of. He was in love with this girl who would insist on being Florence Nightingale each time he fell sick, and who could give the local goons a complex in the art of striking terror. She could be a regular hell raiser, especially if Ankur parked his butt in theatre seats more often than necessary. She was the reason behind his maintaining a rank in class and not selling his law textbooks to a recycling unit as he was tempted to do, every other day. Sonali Shah, in a word, was his life.

His parents knew about her, and as long as their son was happy at the prospect of eating
dhokla
s and playing Dandiya for the rest of his life, they would gladly bless the union.

Ankur wasn’t so sure about Sonali’s family. He could almost visualise the Shah household letting out a collective war cry, chilling enough to curdle all the milk in every Gujarat dairy co-operative.

Truthfully speaking, the lawyer-to-be would have preferred to get married at his work place, namely the court, since the conservative Gujaratis and their rites were sure to finish him off!

Ankur was already planning the wedding in his head when he was struck by a rather profound observation—he hadn’t actually proposed to Sonali.

What was even better was that the object of his affection wasn’t even aware that he harboured such feelings. In fact, she treated him as though he was one of her female friends.

Ankur was sure that he would propose. Someday. Sonali, a Leo, would want to be wooed in style. Besides, she had enough astrology crammed into her brain to expect to be wined and dined in a manner befitting a Leo lady.

Without a doubt, she was royalty. At least for him. And he knew that if he was too shabby in his approach, his Lioness was likely to roar. So he was willing to wait even on bended, arthritic knee if need be, until he could claim her with a real diamond. And a twenty-four carat heart.

Four

It had been a long day. Ankur had hurried back to the hostel, unlike the little groups that hung out just outside class with the leisure of grazing cattle. Many assignments needed to be completed and Ankur had a headache. He thought it wiser to catch up on some shut-eye.

No sooner had he stepped into the room, than Ankur heard a noise. It was rather disconcerting. He knew he was the only one on the floor, as he had switched on the light himself, in the corridor, before fiddling with the lock on his hostel door.

An eerie silence seemed to engulf the place as Ankur stopped to listen. Maybe it was just his imagination. He shrugged and proceeded to remove his T-shirt and sprawled on his cool, inviting bed. Given his family history of lunacy, Ankur was a little worried at these sudden symptoms of schizophrenia. All the same, he blissfully closed his eyes. A minute later, Ankur heard the noise again, and this time he was very sure that it came from somewhere within the room.

Memories of graves overgrown with weeds, and ghastly masks from tacky horror shows on TV crowded Ankur’s brain, as he looked around uneasily. For once, he hoped it was a mouse. Seriously, if Vyas had been around, Ankur would have adhered to astrology and ‘demonstrated his affection, with a touch of violence!’ His lanky roommate had instilled a near-permanent fear in his mind, and Ankur was now certain that he was on his way to his own final trip to the graveyard.

It took heroic effort for him to actually get up and investigate, rather than hurry out of the room, like he would have otherwise preferred to have done. The noise seemed to be emanating from the tall wooden cupboard, very close to the window, jumping out of which was an option Ankur had just considered.

The old wooden cupboard was fixed to the wall and was about the only piece of furniture that the room with peeling yellow walls had possessed at the beginning of the year, when Ankur and Vyas had been allotted it. Other than the two old, rickety beds of course, which loudly expressed their displeasure each time Ankur sat down on them, enthusiastically. The college had perhaps built their furniture from the corpses of trees that once stood guarding the graveyard at the edge of the campus. He could hardly wait for Vyas to return. Then in a sudden burst of energy, Ankur walked up to the cupboard and violently flung open the door. Only to wish, moments later, that he hadn’t.

No sooner had his eyes registered that there was actually a ‘being’ sitting inside, than his vocal chords swung into action, rather involuntarily. A panic stricken yell followed. The ‘being’ joined in the yell. In fact, ‘it’ yelled so hard, that Ankur was almost blown away by the impact.

Sitting on Vyas’s now-crumpled clothes, was a girl with light brown hair and a lot of lung power. Ankur’s emotions remained suspended in a state of shock.

‘Who…what are you?!!’ blurted Ankur, muttering in Marathi. In an emergency, one always resorted to one’s mother tongue.

The girl didn’t answer. She only proceeded to contort her face and break into a loud sob. Ankur panicked. This time for different reasons. He suddenly realised that he stood in front of this girl, in his torn-under-the-arms banian—the sight of which would make anyone want to cry.

He wondered if he ought to first slip on his T-shirt or interrogate the girl. The girl had already decided. ‘My name is Caroline,’ she said, in a shrill voice. She had a pretty face, though it was still contorted. The girl didn’t need to say more. ‘Oh! Caroline…!’ repeated the dazed Ankur, as he dived to get his shirt and hurriedly put it on.

‘Err…nice to meet you!’ he said, even as he thought that this was possibly the most unpleasant introduction of his life. ‘Please sit down…,’ he added, and grabbed the clothes strewn on the chair, shoving them in his closet. A guy’s cupboard is not always the first thing a young man would want to show to a girl, but he’s left with little choice when the girl chooses to emerge from the same closet.

Caroline looked a little odd as she tumbled out of the wooden rack, that miraculously enough, did not tumble down with her. A few of Vyas’s clothes did, however. Ankur had a good look at the girl who was indirectly the cause of his peregrinations in graveyards.

Caroline, he noticed, was technically very good-looking, though paradoxically, she wasn’t what he would call attractive. She had light eyes, but then again, so did contact lens wearing ghosts from most horror movies. Although pathetically sniffing into a hanky that materialised from nowhere, she looked more the kind who often made others sniff.

She was tall, fair skinned and slim, but there was something about her facial expression that suggested she was better suited to be the girlfriend of an underworld don. It was as though vinegar had been sprinkled over a plum cake, with her small and unobtrusive features having a very shrewd look about them. Besides, Ankur noticed, she had rather large teeth that made her look like a direct descendant in the line of a vampire family. Vyas’s kids, Ankur decided, need never be scared of ghosts!

‘Vyas should be coming soon…,’ Ankur said nervously, fumbling with his shirt buttons.

The girl barely nodded, gingerly sitting on a chair. She was quite obviously shaken. Vyas deserved the real shaking, thought Ankur, making a rather late New Year resolution.

‘So how did you…err…manage to get into the…cupboard?’ Ankur asked, smiling for the first time, though he had the vague feeling that he might be talking to Caroline’s ghost. The very thought of a girl breaking into a boys’ hostel seemed plain impossible.

‘I came in through the window,’ replied the sniffing Dracula. Ankur did not know whether to be awed or amused.

‘I wanted to surprise Vyas,’ she added.

Surprise? Shock, was more the word. What’s with this couple anyway, thought Ankur.

He was now convinced that the pair had indeed met at a psychology course. In fact, looking at Caroline, Ankur was sure that his adorable roommate with his expressive girlfriend, ought to re-enrol themselves.