Stud's Story

There was once a boy in our batch who was a stud. This is his story. Let us call him Stud. And what a stud he was, that despite being in the first year, a female in the fourth year fell in love with him. Things progressed quickly from Facebook to Gtalk to missed calls to phone calls to brief encounters to amorous meetings. Every moment spent together was full of blissful happiness, every second apart felt like an eon. Like out of the pages of a Mills and Boon novel, they found themselves living and breathing the cliches all of us have come to know and cringe at, only they found bliss in it.

But alas! Fate played its cruel hand. The lady passed out from the institute the next year. She lived in Lucknow, a good 4 hours away from Stud's heart. The boy was to remain in Kanpur for 3 more years. But they stayed in touch, exchanging amatory words and secret messages, blushing at what the other said, exchanging their innermost secrets, and living as one soul. Suddenly all the things in the world made sense: the romantic movies, the people risking their lives for love, the mushy conversations that usually make one wince, the fuzzy feeling in the pit of one's belly, the Beatles' songs, being on top of the world, the raw unadulterated happiness, the best half hour of the day when they would talk to each other. As a kindergarten student learning spelling would say, they were in l-o-v-e.

Then one day came The Call.

The girl told Stud that her parents were going to a neighboring town for the weekend. Finally, an opportunity to see the other's visage! Stud wasted no time. He was on a Lucknow-bound bus in 15 minutes flat, and reached her house some 3 hours later, picturing her in his head the whole time. Her colony. Her house. The welcome mat. The doorbell. The footsteps. Her beautiful face. He was rejuvenated by its sight.

He had no time to make any romantic proclamations. A rapping thud on the door announced the parents' return. Maybe they forgot to take their tickets? Why do people always forget their tickets? There was no time to contemplate. Stud scurried up the stairs like an unfaithful husband dashing away from his rolling-pin-armed wife. He zipped into the first room he could find and quickly scanned his surroundings for a place to disappear into. There was none. The closets, locked. The space under the bed, occupied. The space behind the curtains, too obvious. Leaping out of the window from the second storey, too adventurous. Like a video-game addict in a free-to-play arcade, Stud was stuck. 

Trying situations bring out the best in people. Normally, Stud would not have dreamed of being brave enough to jump two floors. But as he heard his lover's parents climbing up the path leading straight to him, Stud discovered a cache of courage hidden deep inside his conscience. As the voices got closer, Stud wasted no time in pulling the latch, pushing the window and hurling himself downwards.

It is no secret that the flexibility and endurance of the human anatomy can be improved with practice.  Certain disciplined individuals can train themselves to swim a dozen kilometers, cycle two dozen and run three dozen, one after another. Other springy individuals can coach themselves to contort their bodies like a mobius strip on acid. But Stud lacked this elasticity, never having had the time to practise leaping off buildings. He knew he wasn't bendy enough to survive this fall unscratched. As the hard concrete ground wrapped his descending anatomy in a loving embrace, his ankle bone bent and pushed up against his calf bone, and Stud let out a horrible, piercing, blood-curdling scream that woke up every non-drugged baby in a dozen kilometer radius.

It took no time for a sizeable crowd to gather around Stud, attracted by the abnormally loud howl of his acknowledgement of his body's shortcomings. The girl's parents were soon at the scene, and things were not looking good for our hero. Based on the location where he fell, an amateur trajectory-calculator could conclude that he had leapt from the house of the girl. The parents undoubtedly had some questions for Stud, but they first asked their daughter if she knew the gentleman lying spread-eagled on their porch.

All eyes were on the female. Stud could hear his own muffled breathing in the silence.

"No, I don't, I've never seen him before. I didn't allow him inside the house, he must have broken in."

Mob mentality is a frightening thing. One does not realize how soon they can be stirred to action with an avalanche-like exponential speed. All it takes is a good initiator. It is very scary. They have strength in numbers. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Good Initiator: "A crook! He broke into the girl's house in broad daylight! Let's teach him a lesson! Don't spare him!"

Poor Stud. He was given a sound thrashing on top of having a broken foot and that too in front of his darling. They always said that love is painful.

The poor girl (not as poor as Stud though, he could literally feel the pain) had to see Stud get pummeled and it was because of her. Once the pugilistic public had their way with him and left, she could not even utter some words of apology and consolation, as she had to shepherd her parents as far away from Stud as possible. Stud's college wing-mates had to come down from Kanpur to put his injured, humiliated soul in a homebound bus.

And this is the tale of Stud, an anecdote of youthful crazy love, which must be kept in secret isolation from the adult society, due to the so-called rules of  proper and decent behaviour imposed by them. The optimistic storyteller would say that one day, lovers like Stud will be able to express their love-dovey feelings in the open, without fear of public bashing and two-storey-falling. But I am a practical storyteller, and hence I say to all the young couples out there: next time, make sure your parents don't forget their tickets.