“You are beautiful..” I exclaimed through my reveries. She looks towards the professor and me, towards her. She carelessly turns her head towards my eyes. Her brownish braids and that zulf being parked shabbily above the eyes in contrast to the systematically arranged hairs. Her eyes look in the direction where I stood. Standing and gazing at her.
Did she really hear what my mind whispered?
I turned my attention to the professor, knowing well that the attention wasn’t in the direction where my eyes went. There was a slight chance of her looking this way towards me. I hesitated to look straight into her deep hazy eyes. Eyes, which won’t let me stare into them without going into a trance, demanding they were.
She looked like this. Each time, I lay my eyes on her, right from the first day when I saw her to this day. Not much has changed. I knew nothing then, and what I know now is close to that nothing. She is a puzzle, unsolved. The difficulty of solving this puzzle increases as a new piece is added when trying to solve it.
Zakia. Pure, her name. And yes, she was. As pure as anything that I haven’t seen with my eyes.
She walked in a sequined grey salwar kameez, with a chunni laced with beads and heavy embroidery. And yet, perhaps due to the soft cotton with which they were made of, kept flowing away while she carelessly walked. It was the first day in college for her and for me.
There are rare occasions when you feel like a bolt hitting you right there inside your chest. A peculiar pain that isn’t exactly a pain. Lingers for a while till she sashays past you. That was the moment. The first moment.
In an age of social networking, it’s pretty amusing for one not to be active on any of these platforms. But then, there I was. A novice at this art of Facebooking as what they called it as. I was always like, “what’s the point?” and, more importantly, never felt like joining it. I had better things to do than waste myself on something idiotic like these.
But, now I found myself in the middle of it all.
After cajoling one of my friends to let me use his account, and a little help from the same lad, who happened to be one of the “addicts” on these, I searched on her with help from Jaafar. It didn’t take us time to locate her, and as was evident many from the college were already on her “friends’ list”.
It was explained to me in a not so polite way that this friend list is just virtual social decorum that one follows and doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
Of course, I wasn’t listening.
A tinge of jealousy sprinkled across my confused face.
[For the first part, click here ]
As narrated by the Idiot, with minimum exaggerations and enhanced expressions. For further development keep waiting.