A sharp, evocative campus romance unfolds in The Daily Eye’s Kaleidoscope section, as Prof Dr Piyush Roy’s compelling fiction series begins—new episodes releasing every Wednesday evening, tracing desire, ambition, and identity in a changing India.

“My name means dawn,” giggled Anisha, before bursting into that full moon laugh of hers, as I rued my luck, for having to contend with only a fleeting peck on the cheek. The carrot on dangle that had upped the spirits of us guys, whiling our time in the canteen corridors, was to be Anisha’s partner at the Freshers Welcome Party, if we could decipher her name correctly. The closer we were to the real meaning, the greater the chances of the reward turning from a partner to date, we all had believed. Boys will be boys; but then why rein imagination at the cusp of one’s twenties! I had missed narrowly, guessing her name to be meaning something like the ‘end of night’ or ‘darkness’ perhaps.

“Better luck next time,” she whistled as Anisha picked her purse and made a dash for that ubiquitous classroom, which enjoyed popping into existence after every 15-minute break, all through the day, from eight in the morning to evening eight. And mind you, these were only the official hours, the unofficial extending well into the midnight under the normal circumstances of an assignment-ridden weekday in a student’s life.
Rather, read an MBA-pursuing student’s life, in one of those select ‘new-age’ multi-acre spread finishing schools, with promises to create different managers for the new millennium. Mine was different in a way that it was tucked in scenic environs, a few kilometers away from the din and bustle of India’s student capital, Pune. The historic Poona of the Peshwas from where they had ruled a sizable chunk of India a few centuries ago till the third battle of Panipat had pushed them into regional satraphood. An old city adapting to new flavours; raising a grudging toast to that non-interfering traditional Maharashtrian hospitality finding itself thrust onto crossroads of sacrosanct traditionalism and lucre-induced compromises. The city’s retired gentry, elders and the financially able had started bartering parts of a hitherto cherished private space to those outsider students, who wouldn’t even bother caricaturing their dear city’s nomenclature for anything from a Marathi-accented Punhe to the anglicized Peune.

Not my versions, or distortions, but fond accent-induced references of the countless students flocking from all over the globe and within for a culmination of varied professional dreams in this, one of India’s keenly sought-after university towns. At one count it was reported to be home to an over three-lakh vibrant student population by the turn of the twentieth century – few permanent, most floating. Hence, numerically speaking, the 30 odd students pursuing a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA), in my class, specialising in Media, Advertising and Communications might not have been a consequential drop. But they did make their presence felt at least in the college of their enrolment, before they left this academically ebullient city. Some were also destined to leave a mark beyond, from among those select 30, which our nascent host institution had taken great pains to scout from across the country. A representative multi-ethnic, tumultuous mini-India at the modernity junction of post-liberalisation, fighting the last impeding restrictions of constancies and values left back home. The freedom of anonymity riding a crescendo of abandon, providing an encouraging leverage to live a Jekyll and Hyde kind of existence, alternating between ambition’s spurring leash and passion’s preying indiscretions. Where studying like mad also entitled one to that much-awaited break called partying wild. A work and fun routine or vice-versa that camouflaged itself under indefinable little rivalries and brittle competition, morphed under the sophistication of a grades-propelled race to the top. A laboured guard that was to break soon, perhaps in one of those moments of homesick emotional giveaways under the assuring warmth of a friendly touch, discovered over a ‘cuppa’ of the infectious Rum-&-Coke, at our first, self-funded, self-dedicated freshers’ ‘introduction’ do at Pam’s outhouse.

Pam or Parminder Sing (minus that self-effaced mandatory ‘h’), was a wasted scion of an over-populated wealthy farmer family from Patiala, living off a few land holdings and two farm-cum-outhouses at Mehrauli and Pune. The latter address came handy to our cash-strapped class, when this boxer Sardar with a warm heart and a hot head, proposed free, the providing of a venue, to an irritated Anisha and a disinterested Priya who were quite near hijacking the mandatory ‘getting-to-know-each-other’ welcome party with their respective reservations.

While Anisha was all for going for the privacy of the venue, cost non-issue, Priya vehemently put her foot down on the cost factor. No further holes in our bleeding pockets, she had reasoned with many buying the argument, as most of us had already deposited advances to the tune of twenty to thirty thousand rupees, apart from shelling out advance monthly rents, ranging from a minimum three thousand rupees, to gallop beyond, as the one-room kitchen set-ups increased in floor space. These definitely were like big bang reverses on modest student budgets, given the little disposable income that away-from-home graduates-to-be, paying exorbitant fees and maintaining a staggering lifestyle were left with.

“One needs time to manage one’s economy… Anisha let’s get the niceties over with something cool but cheap,” Priya said.
“Cheap — that’s a dirty word for me. I can’t lend my name to anything that lacks class,” went Anisha, in her typical style, oblivious of the gathering sneers. Pam intervened with a decent bailout, robbing Rahul of one more opportunity to act the God-sent queller for the quarrelling damsels.

The year was 1999, the annual packages on offer at the best B-Schools in the country, the IIMs had just started touching five-figure salaries, and we still had six months to get into the new millennium.
Since our MBA institute, like many others in Pune, didn’t have a hostel of its own, we had to scout around the city for houses, balancing the cost and travel factor to arrive at a liveable compromise — a student house, which went slightly easy on the deflating pocket-money bulge in the wallet. Thus introduced is another thriving calling amongst Pune’s many households. Lending rooms on rent (varying from one-room shacks to large furnished flats) is big business in this university town, on which survive a host of brokers, retired couples, lonely or edgy; and those ‘natural’-born Puneites blessed with the property spoon, oops boon. So, one often had lanes and rows of houses without break, abound in dichotomous double storeys with strict landlords below sharing the top space with unbridled youngsters above, around institutional hubs like Fergusson College, Pune University, Symbiosis, MIT, Bharati Vidyapeeth, Sinhgad, and a 100 more and adding. While their ‘ambition curriculums’ promised skills in every human vocation, known and emerging – from management, science, engineering, IT, armed forces training, arts, commerce, law, medicine, pharmacy to media, design and filmmaking; outside of the classrooms, a funny game of hide and seek played between modernity and tradition, as the young student migrants laboured to invent new passable compromises around the restrictions and inhibitions of their landlords. ‘People Management’ for them had already become a lived experiment. The consequence — a lifestyle of ‘to each on to his own’ – lived discreetly, with a passive aggression. Often visible in the malignant undercurrents that bordered the transactions of my class, cursed with a pyrrhic glory of having too many natural leaders, and all thinking ones at that. Currently leading this breed of pampered know-alls out to make a statement of their own, howsoever silly, alarming or weird the fall-out, was Rahul’s unique fixation of having everything intoxicating from a teacup; only. The storms that followed were harmless… Naturally!

To be precise, that was one more of Rahul’s ‘I am different’ style statements. One of the original seducers, his crossover midway from a surreal Masters in English Literature into a wealth-worshipping course like MBA, seemed quite an oddity, given his affections for the niceties of the Queen’s language and an eclectic lifestyle, enhanced by a love for the exotic. Not to forget Anisha, currently his most coveted medallion, who he had to woo fast, for courting envy at the ‘official’ freshers’ welcome party. Of course, she would soon be hopped, skipped and jumped for the next victim of Adonis.

Rahul sauntered up to her, that silky crop covering his droopy eyes, surveying the positioning of that shiny piece of gold sparkling over his mildly hairy chest, slightly exposed to be covered again by that body-hugging orange T-shirt, opening finally to reveal a pair of just-forming biceps. A kind of a posh ‘desi’ mix between Notting Hill’s plucky Hugh Grant and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’s cocky Shah Rukh Khan, and equally cute-to-a-fault. Smelling of all the three cups of ‘Rum-&-Coke’ he had just downed, he spotted Anisha, smoking by the side of the makeshift bar, a beer in hand, two guys in tow, miserably failing at their desperate efforts to impress her. Rahul put his arms round her waist from behind, as she feigned being caught unawares, giving an ‘un-coy’ look of irritation.

“You seem bored to death… Missing my company, is it?” Turning to the other guys, trying hard to strike a decent conversation with her, he said, “Take a break, boys; the ‘Man’ has come to take charge of the lady!”
Shocked by his confidence, they hesitantly withdrew, as Anisha waved a ‘will catch up with you guys in the class’, before shooting a categorical, “Try your charms somewhere else dude, hairy men turn me off”.

Rahul just couldn’t comprehend what had hit him. But he liked her difficult-to-please matter-of-factness. This was one girl in whose good books he had to be, as friends at least, if not lovers. And irrespective of all her come-hither charms and social skills, his state of inebriation didn’t withhold the realisation from him that she was not a one-night-stand girl.
Never!

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