Part I: The Hypothetical Loves of My Life

The last three years. Two distinct categories. Boys I liked. Boys who liked me. There was never any overlap.


[ The fine print: I have decided to steal an idea that many others implement, and do a serial post. This one post might, therefore, be followed by more posts. Or not. Depending on when I get bored. Talking about boys I haven't dated is actually fairly boring - even I'll admit that. ]


First there was the boy who had the on-and-off girlfriend. They would keep breaking up and getting back together again, and I'd never be quite sure whether I should give up hope or not. A girl who used to be a friend back then (I have very many ex-friends; I tend to turn hostile after a while, I think) also said that she had a crush on him. But since she had a very not-off-at-all boyfriend, I wasn't particularly threatened. But then she went and told this boy about my crush, conveniently choosing to not mention her own. That was quite annoying. Anyway. I soon outgrew this boy after I got to know him a little better, and after a few weeks of acting like the permanently wagging tail of a happy puppy around him, and much mooning, I gave up. Blessed be. The girlfriend is permanently off now, I believe. I've met her. She's actually quite nice. Not that I thought so then. He and the ex-friend are now very good friends.

In the meantime, there was the boy who once gave me a ride on his motorbike. The only reason I'd wanted a ride was because he was the only guy in the department who had a motorbike, and everybody was generally getting rides. It was like going on the ferris wheel, except that it was free. I was happily riding pillion, and only realised that things were a bit iffy when he refused to take me back to college until I'd spent some time with him. But he saw sense once I threatened to clobber him on the head with my bag or somesuch, and very meekly took me back. But it wasn't as sinister as it sounds - he didn't take me to a sleazy deserted area after dark. It was a respectable enough park, and quite early in the evening. A reasonably harmless boy. But also a very persistent boy. In the following days, he went on to write the lyrics to 'Everything I Do' - ill-spelt and full of errors - on a scrap of paper and delivered it to me in the middle of the library. I was sorely tempted to correct it with red ink and return it to him, but felt that it would be too rude. And then he constantly kept on me passing chits saying 'I love you' and other such mushy things that boys say in the middle of my Political Theory and Indian Constitution classes. Once he wrote 'I can't live without you'; pushes to the edge, I wrote back saying 'Get a life!'. The next chit said 'You ARE my life'. I gave up after that. So did he, after about two months of pestering. But I found out a year later that he'd been telling other classmates that I was the one chasing him. And this after I let him see my answers during tests since he didn't know anything. Ingrate! But what was galling was that some people actually believed his version of the story. I'm sure many others will, too, after reading this. Sigh.

And then there was the boy who asked a classmate of mine to ask me out on behalf of him, and didn't realise that via media is a huge turn off.

But there was also the boy who wrote me a love letter in Bangla. It was very unexpected. But he never bothered me after he found out that I wasn't interested. And continues to be nice till date. Very different from the wannabe-Bryan-Adams boy, and the Oh-I-may-be-shy-but-your-friend-is-not boy. A really nice boy.

And all this while, all I did was continue in my huge crush on the first boy. And he wasn't the slightest bit interested. It used to make me most sad.