Partha Sarthi Sen Sharma - Love Side by Side

SIDE BY SIDE

A graduate from Delhi University, Partha Sarthi Sen Sharma is an Indian Administrative Service officer currently based in Lucknow, India. He has written articles, mainly travel pieces, for The Times oflndia, The Hindustan Times, Discover India, Swagat, Rail Bandhu and other periodicals. In 2011, he published a travelogue titled A Passage Across Europe. Apart from his work and writing, he loves to spend time with his family. He is a sports enthusiast, an avid traveller and a voracious reader.

Love Side by Side is his first fiction novel.

SIDE BY SIDE

PARTHA SARTHI SEN SHARMA

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher's prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Not too many people had come to college this early. There was still some half an hour left for the first classes, when the college campus would start humming with students and professors rushing, greetings, and laughter. But at eight in the morning, all was quiet, and only a few students like me were hanging around the old brick-walled playground. The `University special' bus that took me to college was actually catering for north campus and as such, always deposited me at the gate of my engineering college well before my college would start. I could hardly recognize any of the few students sitting here and there on the red brick wall, invariably in front of their own departmental blocks, as if attached to their departments by some invisible umbilical cord. A few of them were mugging up notes in anticipation of their weekly tests.

On some days, I would be the first person to reach college and then one had to be really careful of the hordes of monkeys that infest the entire north-central Delhi. But today it was relatively safer because a few students had already arrived. Just across the main street, outside my college campus, stood Riya's college. But she would, of course, reach her college just in time, in her chauffeurdriven car like most of her fellow students of IMT. So it was no use venturing into her college at this hour. Even going to meet my hostel friends-Ravi, Joydeep, and the rest of the gang was not an option. They would invariably be rushing around, getting ready, towels wrapped around their torsos, toothbrushes in their mouths, and trying to procure optimum time in the common bathrooms and toilets.

I wanted to miss the first class and go over to IMT to meet Riya. But there is always a difference between what one wants to do and what one is expected to do. Maybe, I thought, I would go to her college during one of the ten minutes breaks and try my luck.

`Hi.' It was Rajesh, one of the many Rajeshs in my class of Mechanical Engineering, from Sarojini Nagar in South Delhi. He was dressed in his usual tailor-made, baggy trousers, a cotton printed shirt which had sleeves upto his wrists, and black, Bata leather shoes. Rajesh's father worked as a section officer in one of the many ministries of the huge monolith called the Government of India. Almost entire mini-cities like Sarojini Nagar and R.K.Puram had been set up and populated by the government in the decades immediately succeeding independence, to house its army of civil servants and clerks, during times when the government was still believed to be working for the country and its citizens' benefits.

`Hello,' I replied with a handshake. `You are early today.'

`Yes, I got a lift. The first class is RAC's, isn't it?'

Rajesh was a very good and diligent student from a government school, quite like me, who had got admission to our prestigious government engineering college solely on the basis of the marks that he had got in class XII boards examinations. This was before every engineering college worth its name had started having an entrance exam of its own, turning the colleges wealthy and the students miserable. The fees of our government engineering college was such that Rajesh's all four brothers could study there, and secure their future without their father having to worry about fees and education loans.

Some other students had started arriving and soon we were in our cavernous lecture room with its dusty desks and tables. None of us expected that some class four staff would dust and clean the desks before the classes and neither did any any of us care. Professor Khurana would be teaching us the concepts of refrigeration that day, as he had been doing, for umpteen years before us, and would continue to do so for years till his eventual retirement. He was a sincere teacher, who regularly taught students with effort and dedication, but was not sincere enough as an academician to contribute papers to journals and magazines. I wondered if he even thought that publishing papers or conducting studies were part of his duty. After the usual wasting five minutes that were consumed by taking attendance in each class, the lecture started-totally monologous and hardly with any questions or discussions to interrupt. My fellow students were attentive enough and their degree of attention was somehow related to the economic background of their families. The class consisted of students belonging to various different socio-economic classes. Some belonged to rich business houses, who had posh houses and came to college in cars. Many of them were excellent in studies and quite intelligent, but didn't consider acquiring a graduation degree or a job during campus recruitments as their ultimate aim in life. Some of them were already thinking of joining their family business or starting on their own one. Still others used to mug up English vocabulary to clear GRE/CAT exams, either to migrate abroad or to do a MBA from any of the IIMs to embark on a career of corporate management.

Other students, the majority in fact, like Rajesh and me, belonged to ordinary middle-class families. We had joined the college to get jobs after graduation. Most of us could not afford the fees for post-graduation without scholarships, and the burden of family expectations ensured that our ambitions and foresight didn't go beyond the immediate goals. `We' normally wore tailor-made shirts and trousers, which in Indian cheap labour market, didn't actually mean top brow luxury, and Bata shoes and concentrated on our classes and exams. We didn't want to top exactly, but were hell of a lot frightened by that prospect of `supply'-the process of failing in one subject in the semester exams and to reappear for it six months later. `Supply' was like an unthinkable crime, a frightening blemish for us. And then there were the hosteliers, a group within the group. They had come from all over India and were distinct from the Delhi `day schis'-short for day scholars. The day scholars and the hosteliers were friendly towards one another but formed two distinct nations, selfcontained within themselves.