People write love stories, and people write autobiographies. People write autobiographies that revolve around love stories. And more often than not, these love stories are picture perfect. Girl meets boy, boy eyes girl, girl looks at her friends for approval and gets it, girl reciprocates, silent sighs, sleepless nights, first kiss, a few more sleepless nights, they go against the world and everything falls into place. Boring.

I mean, wouldn’t you rather be lying in the arms of your loving boyfriend or girlfriend in

the backwaters of Kerala or Mauritius depending on how lucky you are or how rich your partner is, than reading this book on a Friday night, curled up in your bed with no one to cuddle but your pillow.

But the fact is that you are here, and in all probability know that finding true love is as

difficult as finding a needle in a haystack. But then again, love wouldn’t be such a huge

concept and Valentine’s Day would just be another day if love was something you could find walking on the subway, or over the counter. Love is not something which you can receive by an email whenever you need it; it is tough finding love. For guys, it’s a little easier—give them a nice smile on a nice body and they can fool themselves that they are in love, for a little while at least.

Anyway, as we go finding true love, we all experience turbulence, speed bumps, ugly

turns, tears, tonnes of ice cream, assholes, bitches … but do we stop? We do not. We fall in love repeatedly, hoping that things will turn out just fine this time, and more often than not, they do not. However, if they do, it makes for a great love story. What if it does not?

This book is about when it almost doesn’t. And some other unrelated things. Is this my

story? No. But it’s the story of someone I know, in his own words. He has been around for six years, and has led one of the strangest love lives I have come across. He has rarely been single and has always been a sucker and a staunch supporter of true love. He has dumped and been dumped countless times. This guy just keeps falling in and out of love. People get into flings knowing that it is going to be a fling. This guy gets into it thinking it’s a relationship and only when it’s over, he comes out, scratches his head and says. Oh, it was a fling!’

He always believes that love is waiting right around the corner! It will come when it comes; the possibilities are endless.

For him, it has come. Lucky bastard.

This book is his story. That lucky bastard is Joy, my best friend.

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‘*Joy … So, now that you finally know what you had been looking for, let’s go for it.’

‘Go for what?’ Joy said as he casually sat with his legs up on the coffee table.

‘Tell me all of it. Everything. From the first girl,’ I said. ‘You had promised you would!’

‘NEETI, for the last time around—Firstly, it is boring, not to mention—embarrassing. And secondly, find some other scapegoat for your book!’ he said as he pushed me aside to watch a repeat of a soccer match. I snatched the remote and turned it of , inviting a nasty

look from him.

‘It’s the first time that I have asked you for something,’ I said, with my puppy face look.

We, girls, are lucky to have such a weapon, aren’t we? Moreover, Joy usually fell for it.

As he did that day.

‘Fine. Fine,’ he said. ‘But I will change names. I will change things as I deem fit. And no details. Maybe I will even lie and exaggerate, and make myself to be a stud instead of the raging nerd that I am. And I will rush through it. She’ll be coming any moment and we are going out. And I am not doing this again.’

‘Why? That’s unfair. You have all the time for your girl and not for me. I knew you before you got to know her, you were my friend before you became her boyfriend. Hmmphf …’ I faked anger. ‘Take it or leave it!’ he said.

' Whatever '

Though my displeasure was evident, he did not budge from his decision, and frankly speaking, I didn’t really have much of a problem; I had his attention now. With a couple of cof ees and bagels at hand, he started on the story.

‘Tell me everything,’ I said.

‘Fine. Neeti … It was 1996. And …’ Joy started. ‘It’s a long time back, so I may miss some things and make up stuf that I don’t remember …’

And then Joy started narrating the story. His story. And hers*.

It was 1996. And I was in the eighth standard. Girls weren’t pulling down socks to flaunt

their legs yet. Guys were still to discover the wonders of hair gels. And girls were still not

their top priority. We were all busy sprinkling ink on each other’s shirts and sharing lunches. The happy pre-puberty days.

And that’s exactly when I met her. I saw the face, which imprinted itself on my brain for

many years to come. Well, to be true, I didn’t meet her, not exactly. I just saw her across the

room full of rowdy and shouting eighth-standard students.

‘Nisha?’ the teacher had called out.

‘Yes, ma’am,’she had responded in her chirpy voice.

How did she look?

She was like the first breeze of autumn, like the sparkling sun after a long cold night; she

was a midsummer night’s dream. She barely came up to my shoulders, her eyes were darker than the blackest night, her soft pink lips seemed to be made out of candy, her cute steps across the floor, as she walked around, would make my day. I still remember her perfectly well in our school uniform with a pink muffler around her neck. And the reddish winter glow on her cheeks. Ah!

How did I look?

I was fat, dark and ridiculously ugly. Like. Totally. Ugly. It was as if God had something

against me. If he had to make me so ugly, he should have played with my mind too and made me have a crush on someone as ugly as I was, someone with freckles and unruly hair, maybe a lazy eye! Why her? Why Nisha? Why the cutest, beautiful girl in the class?

Anyway, seven years later, in the winter of 2003, I had just turned eighteen. It was my last year in school and somehow, I had managed to grow even fatter and uglier, and she had only grown prettier. She was no longer the girl I had first seen seven years back. She had grown positively womanly, if you know what I mean. She was cute then, but she was irresistibly.beautiful now. Her lips had grown pinker, her eyes were wider and they sparkled even more now, her hair was now long and worn in a style far beyond her age. All these years the gap between her social standing and popularity and mine had just kept widening. Although I had grown taller and she was still short and hopped around like a pocket-sized bunny, it didn’t make her any less un-gettable.

It was the last year and I was in the S.A. dilemma.

What is a Screwed Anyway dilemma?

It’s something that almost every guy has faced in his lifetime. It’s almost as common as the Asshole Boyfriend phenomenon.

What is the Asshole Boyfriend phenomenon?

It’s when every girl you like eventually ends up going out with the guy you hate. Simple,

right?

Now back to the Screwed Anyway dilemma.

The girl is out of your league—but she is single—you ask her out—she refuses—you are

screwed!

The girl is out of your league—and she is single—someone else asks her out—you are

screwed!

Now the good news about the first one is that you don’t feel choked about your feelings

and you don’t regret that you didn’t tell the person you love about how you felt about them. And I just had to tell her! Never give in to this feeling, nothing comes out of telling the person you love that you love him or her. It’s bullshit, it’s an urban legend. After doing it,

you realize it’s better to live on the tiny hope that maybe she loved you, rather than being

rejected and humiliated outright. But I was just an ugly, fat kid. What did I know about these complexities? All I knew was that she was the girl of my dreams and I liked her to bits.

Let’s just rewind a bit to tell you what had happened in the last seven years of my secret

relationship with Nisha, a relationship about which Nisha herself knew nothing about.

I loved her like crazy.

Within the first week of seeing her, I knew her phone number, the street she lived on, what

her parents did, what bus route she took, almost everything there was to be known about her! Though, getting all this information seems regular right now, the year was 1996 and things were different back then!

As time went by, my obsession escalated. After a year, and for the next seven years, I

walked two kilometres every day after school so that I could share the same bus route. For

the next seven years, I always took two schoolbags so that I could take a seat in two rows and decide later which row would give me a clearer view of her, after she took her seat. I did these things on a very regular basis, and now that I think of it, I guess I should have gone to a doctor instead.

Anyway, back then I wasn’t a big extrovert, but by the time 2003 came along, I had retreated so far into my shell that I had problems even engaging in everyday conversations with people. Why did that happen?

My obsession, now at dizzy levels, made me believe that Nisha would hear every word I

say, and that I needed to measure my words before saying them out loud. And that is when, deep down, I knew for certain, that a girl like her, who hung around with cooler kids with gel in their hair and motorcycles parked outside the school, wouldn’t even give a passing thought to someone like me. She had a whole army of better boys who catered to her every whim and fancy; she was a pampered kid. Had it been left to me, I would have carried her around in my schoolbag to prevent her from the torture of walking.

Man! I did need to go to a psychiatrist back then. But it was around that time that I

realized that I was getting a little overboard, that it was just a crush and I had to get over it,

especially since my grades had started to slip to unacceptable levels. I started to

concentrate a little more on my engineering entrance examinations, putting everything else aside for a little while. It did soften my preoccupation with her. Sometimes I thought it would have been a lot easier for me, had she started going out with somebody. But that’s just pure speculation; I might just have killed myself, metaphorically speaking .