Blame it on my newly acquired hormones if you will, but something very different had happened that day. To this day, I struggle to understand what it was. Over time, it became love. But I still fail to understand that sledgehammer-hit I endured on that day.
Over the next few days, I could not take my eyes off her in school. I would lean my chair back and forth to dangerous angles just to catch a glimpse of that angelic face amongst the other interfering heads. For the first time in my life, I would hate having to leave school and go home. At home, I would be impatient for the next morning to begin so I could go to school and catch a glimpse of her. Sundays would be a torture for me.
By this time, I had realised that I was very much in love. But for a shy and reserved person like me, our school was a bad place to fall in love in. If a person like me was so much as seen talking to a girl, he would be teased and tortured mercilessly. Even without that danger, I wasn't exactly the smoothest talker around girls. Girls, especially beautiful ones, would unnerve me. I had a distinct stammer too at that time. And at times like these, my stammer would become so bad that I would literally be rendered speechless.
But I knew that if I wished to continue living, I would have to speak to her. I had a friend at that time who wasn't quite as bad as me around girls. I decided to pin my hopes on him. In our school, we used to have a seating arrangement where the students would be arranged in four columns of about 7-8 rows. The rows in each column would move up and down alternatively every day so that no student remained in the same seat for more than a day. I waited for the day when my friend and me would happen to be in the adjacent row to her's. I pretended that I had forgotten to bring along my pencil and asked my friend if he had an extra one (having verified earlier that he did not). I then casually told him to ask her if she had an extra pencil. He did so and I got the pencil. That pencil was the ice-breaker between us. The pencil gave me further conversational opportunities. The conversation was mostly carried out between my friend and her, but I managed to drop in a few words of my own.
From that day onwards, I spoke to her occasionally - a few words here and there. I would still keep stealing glances at her during classes. She would see me occasionally looking at her and would smile at me. I would do my best to pretend that our eyes had met completely accidentally. I was still a very very poor conversationalist. I actually would rehearse my future conversations with her at home in front of the mirror. Of course, once I stood in front of her, I would panic and more often than not blabber something hardly coherent.
And by this time, the teasing from my classmates had started in right earnest. I suppose most guys would not have minded a great deal. But I did mind, terribly so. Being very shy and reserved, I just could not take the teasing easily. Many a time, I resolved that I would not speak to her again. But staying away from her was even more of a torture. I continued to flit between the two horns of this dilemma for the next couple of years.
I think that by this time, she had started liking me too. She probably even expected me to declare my love to her. But I just did not have the guts to do so. I would be racked by self-doubt. She was the most beautiful girl in school. What was I? Why would someone like her even think about being with someone like me? On hindsight, those were stupid thoughts. But at that time, they seemed very reasonable to me.
I would pass out of Model School without ever having declared my love to her, a rather damp ending to this tale I suppose. 12 years have now passed since my last day in school. But even today, my memories of Model School and in fact my memories of Namrup are synonymous with my memories of the girl I watched walking from the teacher's desk to her seat. And in my memories, she still walks in beauty.
