I too had a Love Story
#Ravinder Singh
I remember the date well: 4 March 2006. I was in Kolkata and about to reach Happy’s home. I had
been very excited all morning as I was going to see our gang of four after three years. After our
engineering, this was the first time when all of us—Manpreet, Amardeep, Happy and I—were going
to be together. During our first year in the hostel, Happy and I were in different rooms on the fourth
floor of the Block-A building. Being on the same floor, we were acquaintances but I never wanted to
interact with him. I didn’t think him to be ‘a good guy’ because of his fondness for fights and the red
on his mark sheet. But, unfortunately, I was late in getting back to the hostel at the beginning of the
second year and almost all the rooms were already allotted by then. I was not left with any choice
other than becoming Happy’s roommate. And because life is weird, things changed dramatically and,
soon, we became the best of buddies. The day our reunion was scheduled, he had been working with
TCS for two years and was enjoying his onsite project in London. Happy was blessed with a height
of 6’1”, a good physique and stunning looks.
And Happy was always happy. Manpreet, or MP as we called him, is short-statured, fair and
The reason I use the word ‘healthy’ is because he will kill me if I use the proper word—‘fat’—for
him. He was the first among us to get a computer in the hostel and his machine was home to countless
computer games. In fact, this was the very reason Happy and I wanted to be friends with him. MP was
quite studious. He had even cracked the Maths Olympiad in his school days, and was always boasting
about it. His native place was Modinagar but, at the time of this reunion, he was working with Ocwen
in Bangalore.
Amardeep has been baptized ‘Raamji’ by MP. I don’t know when he got this weird nickname or
why, but it was probably because of his simple, sober nature. Unlike the rest of us at the hostel, he
was not at all a night person and his room’s light would go off precisely at 11 p.m. At times, MP,
Happy and I used to stand outside his room a few seconds before 11 and begin to count down, ‘10, 9,
8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 … and Raamji has gone down.’ The only mysterious thing about Amardeep was
that he used to go somewhere on his bicycle, every Sunday. He never told us where he went.
Whenever we tried to follow him, somehow he would know and would digress from his path to shake
us off. Even today, none of us knows anything about it. The best thing about the guy, though, is his
simplicity. And, very importantly, he was the topper in the final semester of our Engineering batch.
He made our group shine. He belonged to Bareilly and was working with Evalueserve when he, along
with MP, flew to Kolkata for the reunion.
After college, all of us were pretty much involved in our stereotypical lives. One day, we found out
that Happy was coming back from London for two weeks. Everybody was game for a reunion.
‘Happy’s place in Kolkata, 4 March 2006,’ we decided.
Finally, on the scheduled date, I was climbing the stairs to Happy’s apartment two steps at a time.
It was about 12.30 in the afternoon when I knocked on his door. His mom opened it and welcomed me
in.
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