THE PROPOSAL DESIGN OF LOVE

PART 3

That thing you do

That sinking feeling of not being part of Project Eyephone had not left Prakarsh , and yet when he checked his inbox , he could not resist checking the third unread mail from her .

“Dear Prakarsh ,

You will be handling ZEE.C.S for Zee Television Networks. It’s a huge responsibility. Please start working on the media selections. The brief for the same had been attached herewith.

Regards,

Anushka Mittal

Group Head

HIVE 5”

A pang of guilt hit him in his gut. He remembered how rude he had been to her yesterday .He looked at his watch. 9.15 am. He knew she would not have arrived. Yet he stood up and started walking to her cubicle. On his way he noticed a lanky boy picking up his belongings from his desk. Prakash had seen the boy earlier and yet they had never talked. He went near the boy.

“You are leaving the firm?” he asked

The boy gave a wry smile and remarked, “No. They have just asked me to shift downstairs. I have been assigned new work station.”

Prakarsh noticed the company’s smart card dangling around the boy’s neck . He managed to locate his name on the card . Pranay… The boy saw Prakarsh staring at his smart card . He quickly put it back in his pocket.

“You don’t seem to happy about the change in workstation?”, Prakarsh asked.

The lanky boy craned his neck at the far end of the wing.

Then he looked at Prakarsh and answered, “It does not change anything.”

The boy took his paraphernalia and left the empty work station .Prakarsh saw something written on one of the walls of the now abandoned desk,

“A spark initiates a relationship, but madness sustains it”

Prakarsh stared at the forlorn lanky figure as it walked away and remarked, “Crazy”.

……………………………

As project ZEE.C.S progressed Prakarsh realized that in some ways, Anushka was not half as bad a group head as he had initially thought her to be . Two months into the project, he still had not found the courage to apologize to her for misbehaving with her. He still didn’t talk with her much, barring the odd presentations that he shared with her .Anushka on the other hand took care not to intervene too much in Prakarsh’s work. One day Prakarsh entered her cubicle. She had worn a saree. Prakash kept looking at her. When they had studied together he never had time to rate her beauty. He noticed she had worn chandelier earrings. Everytime the earrings swayed as she moved her head, he felt a tingling sensation in his heart.

“But Prakarsh , don’t you think that outsourcing the survey would be a better option?” she asked. He came back to the present. He would have answered her query but her cell phone buzzed.

“Sorry”, she said. Prakarsh gazed at her. Why was she looking different today? There was something out of normal in her. He suddenly screamed. “Kohl”

Anushka quickly turned her head .Prakarsh gestured her to continue talking. She got busy again. He knew why she looked different. It was her eyes. Beautiful. He was looking for more adjectives when Anushka’s last word caught his ears.

“Yes, I will be meeting you right after work today.”

So was this the reason she had worn a saree. He tried to picture the caller. He could only imagine himself.

“How does it matter?” he said to himself. He hated her, he convinced himself.

When Anushka started leaving early after work for the next few days no other team members were bothered. After all it gave them a chance to have fun at her absence .Prakarsh didn’t share the enthusiasm. He wondered where she went these days. One day he tip toed after her when she left office. He asked the taxi driver to stick to her car. He ultimately got off in Howrah when he saw Anushka entering a small passage near the railway station .He followed her with an impending sense of fear. She stopped across a shabby building and handed the guard outside the door a package. The guard checked the belongings inside the package and asked her enter. Prakarsh looked at the sign board hanging above one of the walls that fenced the building.

RADHA ORPHANAGE, A Home for the underprivileged

An hour passed. Prakarsh was about to return to office when he saw Anushka coming out .Two girls were following her. He had seen their pictures on Anushka’s desk one day .She kissed both of them at the gate. The girls were crying, A man stood near them trying to console the girls

“Don’t cry Riddhi”, the man said to one of the girls , “ She will come tomorrow too.”

Then he looked at Anushka .

“I sometimes find it hard to believe you are just 24. Not many finance orphans with their initial pay packages you know.”

Anushka didn’t react to the man’s words. She kissed Riddhi again, looked at the man and said ,” They remind me of my past .” She turned away to her car and didn’t look back.

That night as Prakarsh tried to sleep, Anushka’s face kept coming back to his thoughts. The Saree , the chandelier earrings , the orphanage . He woke up and switched on the lights. On one of the walls Prakarsh had put Anushka’s picture. He shot darts at it whenever he felt angry. He took out the picture pinned against the wall.

He looked at it for long.

“I hate confessing Anushka Mitttal , but you have a good heart down there.”

He cursed himself for saying those words.

…………….

Anushka didn’t even lock her car .She rushed to the accounts department .Last day , in her hurry to visit the girls she had forgot to send the proposed budget for Eye phone . She ran towards Mr. Puneet , head of the accounts department at ANM.

“I have made a huge blunder.” She gasped for air as she said it.

Puneet looked surprised.

“I didn’t mail you the budget for Project Eyephone along with the proposal. Did you mail it to the client?” she prayed that he would reply in the negative.”

“ I actually did .” he remarked. “But it had a budget.”

“What?” she exclaimed.

“Prakarsh Tiwari mailed me the budget in the evening saying that you told him to do so. It was only because of that I approved the budget. Did he lie? “

Anushka knew that tact was required here.

“Oh... I just remembered I told him that . So silly of me that I forgot.”

Prakarsh was surprised when he saw Anushka’s message on his cell phone. He smiled when he saw it.

“Thank you”

He knew how hard it must have been for her to type the words. But he thought the message did deserve an answer.

Anushka was in a client meeting when her phone beeped. She saw the message and smiled .

“Let’s not discuss this again.”

……………………..

The winter of December made Prakarsh more uneasy about something. First of all, he started looking for excuses to visit Anushka’s cubicle. Even on small decisions he sought her opinion. Anushka found that strange too. Prakasrh started noticing her more. Her dress, her eyes, her earrings. He felt strange when during the lunch break she sat with Mr. Pansari . He even had a feeling of anger when she offered a male office colleague a lift in her car one day.

That night he met his friend Amit in Park Street. Prakarsh looked upto Amit when it came to matters of the heart. Abhishek heard him with patience.

“I mean I feel strange even telling you this Amit . Because I know that deep down I hate her. But all of a sudden I have started to notice her more. I actually kind of think of her all the time when I am about to sleep. I check my friend’s facebook wall to see if she has put any comments or changed her profile pic. It’s actually kind of weird because I hate her so much.”

Amit slurped the last drops of cola from his glass. Then he said. “Hmm…”

“What hmm?”

“Tell me something Prakarsh , why do you have to tell yourself all the time that you hate her.”

He didn’t reply. Amit continued, “I think you know the answer to that. I have a question for you. You just said that you hate her don’t you. So tell me Prakarsh , whats the one thing you badly want to change in her?”

Prakarsh had not expected a question like this coming. He thought about it . Anushka had made his life hell when she studied with him. She had outscored him in Mental maths in standard five . He had lost to her in a debate competition in his higher secondary days. She was overconfident, arrogant and absolutely obnoxious. He closed his eyes and pictured her , in the saree smiling along with with the two girls from the orphanage , her chandelier earrings dangling from her ears.

He gave the question a thought and replied, "I don’t want to change anything in her. I think she is perfect.”

Amit looked sternly at Prakarsh , “ Then dear boy , I think we have got a small problem.”

Prakarsh didn’t want to hear further . He stopped only when Amit called his name.

“Prakarsh , I think you are madly , deeply and irrevocably in love with her.”

“Love is crap. I don’t even know why people fall in love.”

Amit smiled pedantically and replied, “Because some people are sane enough to realize that money can only help you survive. If you have to live ….. You have to love.”

Prakarsh didn’t want to hear further, He had had enough.

………………

Things came to such a pass that Prakarsh felt that the best way out of this is to avoid Anushka . He started missing the weekly teem meetings on some pretext or the other . During lunch he ate at his work station because he could not see her with Mr. Pansari. Whenever his team mates discussed Anushka , he would silently walk away without offering an opinion.

One day he saw a mail from Anushka , she had asked him to meet her. She shut her laptop when he entered her work station.

“Prakarsh , I wanted to ask you something . You seem to be avoiding me for some time now. Is there some problem.”

Yes , I hate you , he wanted to say . But he didn’t .

“No , there is no problem. Can I leave?”

Before the answer could come out , Anushka’s cell phone rang . It was Mr. Pansari , He had asked Anushka to meet him.

“Prakarsh , can we talk about this later , I have to meet Mr. Pansari.”

He didn’t reply. As she was about to leave, she heard him say , "This exactly is the problem”

She turned back, “Prakarsh , did you say something?”

“ Somethings don’t need to be said Anushka.”

“ I am sorry Prakarsh , I didn’t get you .”

“That’s the problem. You never do.”

She looked at her watch.

“Prakarsh I think we need to talk. Just give me twenty minutes.”

Prakarsh lost his cool as she looked at her watch again.

“ I don’t want to talk to you . I hate you Anushka Mittal , simply hate you .”

Few of the employees stared at the glass walls of Anushka’s room to see what the fuss all about was. They saw a very angry boy storm out of the room and a girl completely dumbfounded.

……………..

He could not sleep that night. Her face kept bothering him . He opened his laptop and looked at her pictures, pictures he had stealthily taken from her friend's album on Facebook.

When the last picture was displayed, he looked at her face. Then he screamed, “Hate you to the power of infinity.” He then started crying.

Some moments passed. He realized that if he kept this feeling to himself he would go mad. Mad … The image of that somber lanky boy descending down the stairs …. and the writing on the boys's desk came back to Prakarsh’s mind.

A SPARK INITIATES A RELATIONSHIP, BUT MADNESS SUSTAINS IT

He now knew exactly what he had to do. He started typing something furiously on his laptop. The next one hour were about to change his life.

……………..

In Behala , Anushka couldn’t sleep . Prakarsh’s behavior kept bothering him . She woke up and switched on her laptop. An icon popped up. A mail from Prakarsh . Her breath almost stopped. She never understood why he had that effect on her. She saw the word doc. As she read it, her pulse numbed.

“Prakarsh … what have you done?”

She read it once more just to reassure what she had read.

THE PROPOSAL DESIGN OF LOVE ….

…..

Part 4 in 2012 … Please post your comments here and not on FB.