A High School Crush #1: A New Friend

I first met Aarush when he joined our school in the eleventh standard. He was from West Bengal. His dad had been transferred for his job and he had ended up in our school. It was after the summer vacation that year, so he had pretty much missed the beginning of the school year. He didn't seem to have any difficulty making friends, though his heavy bengali accent seemed to cause him some troubles with the more rowdy ones in our class. They would bully him a little with bengali stereotypical nicknames. That soon stopped once Aarush decided to respond a little too aggressively at one of them. Simply demonstrating their place to the bullies seems to work pretty well in most cases.

I, in turn, did have my fair share of interactions with him, since we had this regular activity in our school where new students were put in groups of four with the existing students from the class. They called it familiarisation sessions. I have no idea why I was put in a group with three boys in the name of randomness. It was all fine with me though, since I liked the way he spoke. Gives me a glimpse of what people from other cultures are like, I used to think. Somehow, he seemed to enjoy being around me, talking about stuff I hadn't heard him talking about with anyone else. As the year rolled in, I had almost forgotten about the other two, though the end-year group project did keep them in my mind.

By the end of the year though, things had changed quite a bit. More than a few times, I had some long conversations with him, outside of our group sessions too, especially during the lunch breaks, and naturally, as it always happens in high-schools, everyone else assumed that we were becoming exclusive, 'as a couple', they say. If anyone asked specifically, I would have my reaction ready, a hysterical laughter, as if it was the most hilarious joke of all time. But if I thought about it on my own, either when I walked to and from school, or just before going to bed, there was certainly a weird attraction I felt towards him. I believe people call it having a crush.

We mostly talked about school stuff, but he did tell me a lot about his childhood and the city he was raised in. He told me about his interests, which were sketching and reading, about how he had a near perfect memory, and how at the age of nine, he had broken his wrist while learning to skate. Except for his memory, which I couldn't care less about, he was a rather normal boy who shouldn't have grabbed anyone's intrigue. But try as I might, almost everyday when the bell rang indicating lunch hour, I found myself ditching all my friends to go sit with him, just the two of us.

I did tell him a lot about myself too, which he seemed to listen to with great interest. He even put in his inputs when I told him my hobbies were playing the piano, and writing stuff. Even though he had no interest in playing any instrument, he seemed to have a strangely vast and rather accurate knowledge about music. It was mostly bookish knowledge, nothing practical, but accurate. I chalked it to the near perfect memory he alluded to earlier. Sometimes, he would tell me something which I had to fact check from Google or my own learnings, and every once in a while, I would be right and he would be wrong. Even though that happened rarely, it gave me a sense of achievement.

"It's better to fact check and correct someone, while reinforcing your own knowledge than to be wrongly confident that you're right about something until it embarrasses you." he would say. I couldn't help but agree with him on that. Every time I did fact check his claims, I would learn something completely new too.

We often spent our free classes in the library. He was struggling with math and I with chemistry. It sort of made sense to me, he was a person who was good with names, images, just knowing and remembering things in general which I wasn't. Of course it too could be attributed to his memory. On the other hand, he was not so great with processes, where you needed to follow certain steps to reach a certain goal. So it was no surprise he struggled with a subject like maths.

We helped each other a lot, and by the end of the school year, we were spending almost every weekend together, either at his place or mine. My parents seemed to like him. He was always polite, and my dad asked him quite a bit about how he was liking the school and about his family. He answered all of these questions with a brevity and courtesy that was borderline too formal sometimes. My mother probed him to sing a few Bengali songs. She had this idea that Bengali families always teach their children about music. Aarush told her many times that while her idea about his community wasn't wrong, he had never tried singing himself, but my mom kept prodding him every once in a while, and he kept dodging the situation.

However, when I went to their home, I didn't feel too welcome. His parents, mostly his mother, won't leave us alone for more than a few minutes at a time. They didn't quite get onto my nerves, but it was sometimes awkward to know that you're under someone's watchful gaze all the time. One day in the school I asked him about it, and he told me that his parents were the deeply orthodox type, and didn't think a girl and a boy of our age should keep such close friendships. Of course, they didn't explicitly tell him this, but he said he could sense it as clear as day.

"It's always been like this. At least since I was in eighth standard." He told me.

"If keeping in touch with me is causing problems at home, you can tell me you know." I told him. He laughed out loud, as if it was the funniest thing he had heard all year. "I'm serious!" I said. I didn't think it was funny at all.

"Ruhi, they are the ones who think like that, not me. You are no bother to me, or to my life at home. And furthermore, it's not like I'm trying to make you my girlfriend or something. You're a really good friend, Ruhi, and I would like to keep it at that. I'll not fight with my parents about what they are thinking based on their generational ways and beliefs. I don't like to fight with anyone anyways."

That hurt me. It was like being punched in the throat after running two miles non stop without water. Here I was seeing him through the pink sunglasses only a girl in her late teens can, and he told me without missing a beat that he considered me nothing more than a friend. Of course I didn't let any of it show that afternoon in the library. That would have been awkward. But that night was the first in a long time that I cried myself to sleep. The raging thunderstorm outside my window didn't seem to share my sorrow at all.

After that day, I tried my best to keep a safe platonic distance from him. I'd spend less and less days with him during lunch breaks. Of course our academic discussions didn't have any kind of hindrance because of this. He was like a camera reel when it came to chemical formulae and bonding theories, being able to recall everything in vivid detail at will. He gave me fast and infallible tricks to remember stuff which I noted down instantly. He praised me when he understood with clarity what trigonometry was all about or why calculus made sense. By the end of high school, I had completely stopped going to his place, and I tried to keep him away from mine too. Although in the somewhat free space of the school grounds, I still felt the constant urge to keep talking to him with any excuse. Of course, he never seemed to pick up on these as cues for something else.

As we neared the final exams, we applied to the same colleges for the same courses, but for my life I couldn't have imagined that we would be accepted to the same one. I always thought I would be accepted to a far better college than him. It wasn't an ego thing, it was just intuition that a near perfect photographic memory alone couldn't help you crack the entrance exams of these prestigious institutions. And thus I was even more interested in getting rid of my crush for him as quickly as possible. Although, I didn't quite succeed in that regard.

I was right for the most part in my thinking about getting selected to colleges. But there was a factor I hadn't considered. If he couldn't do well enough to get into a recognized institution, it didn't mean that I couldn't do bad enough to ruin my chances of getting into one either.

I couldn't cry after finding out the name of the college I'd be going to. Trust me, I wanted to. I just couldn't accept that I had ruined my grades, and my merit just because I kept obsessing over him, and compulsively fighting myself to keep a platonic relationship with him. My parents asked if I wanted to take a drop year and try again the next year. I told them I needed to think.

The next day, I told them I don't want to try again. I'd go off to college right away, and try to make a good enough career once I got out. Maybe there was a part of me that thought maybe if I went along with him, there'd be a chance that I could turn our friendship into something that I had wished for for the past couple years. Talk about messed up priorities in your late teenage years!!

As for Aarush, even if he had any inkling of what I went through, he didn't show it at all. Maybe he didn't have any clue to begin with anyway. "You know Ruhi, I always thought you'd go to a better college, you know!" He said to me, a couple days before our high school graduation day.

"Me too, but you know what, it doesn't really matter, does it?" I said.

"I think in a country like India, it does. Here most companies decide to choose the cream of the crop from the reputed government colleges. And the college I am going to, it'll be a drag to get a good job once we graduate from there. And now you too are in the same one. Are you sure you don't want to try again next year?"

"Maybe it'll be difficult, but you know what I think, Aarush" I said, looking straight into his eyes, "I think the college you go to is like a medium for your paint. Of course, good colleges are a better quality medium, and the paint would be brighter, it'll look good on the canvas. But the medium alone can't decide what the picture means, can it? The artist's vision has to count up to something."

Aarush didn't say anything for a long minute. "You never struck me as the philosophical type, you know?" I just smiled, thinking, I never struck myself as the philosophical type either.