Under The Mango Trees

Chapter Forty : In Between The Pages Of An Erotica

I had gained confidence after coming out to Jazz like the confidence that filled someone who passed the mock exams to get prepared for the real ones. It was she who had dragged me to attend the Pride parade at Azad Maidan where people proudly carried the rainbow flags, placards with quirky remarks and clever asperses on this society. All around me were radiant smiles and glistening tears. It was overwhelming for me since my love for Lila had been so quiet and suppressed and here I was, in a loud and open space. I hugged the people who my mother would have avoided on the street by gripping my arm and surreptitiously pulling me to the side or crossing the street, just so we couldn't get close to someone who identified as someone different.

That night when I fell on the bed as light as a feather and as giddy as a child who had visited an amusement park, I knew that Freud was wrong. Lila had shown me his quote on her Instagram, 'Love is the most proven way to overcome the feelings of shame.' Instead, what ended up being true in my life was, 'Loving myself is the most proven way to overcome the feelings of shame.' I didn't know how long this feeling of self-love and optimism would last, yet I was grateful for today, for experiencing it today.

The days that followed were a constant repetition, train rides to college with Jazz, attending lectures with Shreya and Jazz, breaks with Jazz and train rides back home alone since Jazz preferred to stay late in the college for some activity or another. Even I joined a book club to stay at college late so I could avoid seeing Pavitra's rotting face that soured everyone's mood around her. Today was the first day of the book club. I was secretly thrilled for this even though in front of Jazz, I had played it cool. What if I met an interesting boy or a girl at the book club?

Any person reading a book instantly became ten times hotter for me, although Lila had been the kind of girl who would laugh at the most intellectual books, use the pages of it to make paper planes and fly them till the words would disappear and become meaningless. That was how she had been, making everything around her lose its meaning because of her larger than life personality and ability to arrest anyone's heart. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't free the prisoner. And here I was again, thinking about her and pressuring myself to forget her when one of my top new year's resolutions was to let my feelings evaporate naturally, instead of telling myself to let go of them.

The book club was a total flop, I was surrounded by people who read cheap romances by commercially popular authors and one such book with a raunchy cover was thrust in my hand. I didn't find any of the girls in the club interesting either, so I kept to myself, nodding and smiling at them like they were my distant relatives at Pavitra's wedding and waiting for the day to get over. When I aimlessly flipped through the pages, I found the bland protagonist and her erotic adventures with the hunky man more enthralling than the people around me.

That was how I ended up standing on the train on my way back home, staring and stifling a laugh at how the protagonist purred when the man slammed her aggressively against the wall.

"Meow?" I asked myself in surprise, how could she do that in that intimate moment? Then again, I never came close to being hot and heavy with a man. The last time that I inched towards it was when Anthony had ruthlessly, but inadvertently bit into my lip and not in a sexy way. That memory made me wince and when I looked up, I saw a familiar face peering at me in mild amusement from the general compartment of the train.

The second our eyes connected, Dev broke away our gaze and focused on the book that was laid open on his lap, natural and cool like the night that was seeping into the sky outside the window.

What on earth---? In the panic and peculiarity of finding him here, my eyes had flickered back to the words dripping with ribaldry in that embarrassing book that I held in my hands. He would have seen that smutty cover! I buried my shameless head deep in the book, sporadically stealing glances of him, but he never looked up again. Perhaps, he had seen enough. The rest of the ride back home was purgatory since I repented more about him having caught me like this than thinking about the poor spine of the protagonist who kept getting slammed against the wall as if she was a duster in an angry teacher's hand.