The Delhiite Lover

I think she knows

It would be right to say that Avanti was the first girl in my life for whom my heart really throbbed. Quite luckily we were in the same sections in class 6 and if that wasn’t enough, we were made to sit together by our class teacher. That’s called luck. We became good friends being seat partners and spent our time joking and playing silly games together. When I returned home from school, I used to wait eagerly for the next day to start so that I could meet my crush.

Anirudh was no longer my classmate and I made a new friend called Angad.  Angad was one of those guys at school who were close to me and to whom I shared a lot about myself. He used to sit in front of us and the three of us chatted endlessly. One day, I had this strong urge to tell angad how I felt for Avanti. He was sitting in front of me and Avanti was sitting beside me. We were playing this game in which we had to move our finger to draw letters one by one on another person’s back and then he had to guess what we wrote. So, I thought of this as a good idea to tell Angad what I wanted to tell but since Avanti was beside me, she could easily see what I write on his back. So instead, I told angad to look at what letters I was trying to draw in the air with my finger but cautioned him not to speak a word about what he understood. He agreed. I drew an ‘I’, he said “ok”. I drew the letters ‘L’, ‘O’, ‘V’, ‘E’, and he started giggling with his hands on his mouth. All this while Avanti kept trying to decipher our coded messages we were exchanging and she did understand the first two words I had conveyed, or so I thought. Then instead of drawing the letters for the final word, I just pointed to her. And Angad’s face filled with shock and Avanti saw the finger being pointed at her and she went mad asking what was going on. Angad kept on giggling and staring at me with astonishment and I begged to him to shut up and keep quiet. Avanti tried hard to get this information out from Angad but he didn’t let me down and kept the secret with him.

Days passed by and I could see that Avanti hadn’t given up. She found moments when I was away and tried to get the information out of Angad with the help of another friend named Aishwarya. However, Angad was kind enough not to say anything and just brush her off.

But one day, Angad came to me and said, “Ayush, bro I want to tell you something.” I asked him, what it is about. He said, “It’s about Avanti.” A chill ran through my spine and I asked him to go on, shaking.

He started,” I was in the computer lab and then Avanti and Aishwarya came up to me and they started to threaten me that if I won’t speak up, they would complain to the teacher and I begged them to stop it but I was under a lot of pressure and I said that you ‘think’ that Avanti likes you… I didn’t tell them that you like Avanti.” “What!!! Seriously??? Shit!!!” “Look, I couldn’t do anything, I thought it would be better than telling her that you like her and they would leave us alone... so...”

I just said, “Hmm… ok.”