You Were My Crush: Till You Said You Love Me! by Durjoy Datta, Orvana Ghai Page A

to. You know that! I love her too much.’
    ‘It hasn’t even been a year since you two have been apart. Give it time, maybe you will get over her. It’s not the first time you’re breaking up with someone!’
    ‘I don’t want to get over her,’ he complained.
    ‘I know, Dada, and, well, I like Avantika, but you know you shouldn’t get into something like marriage without being sure,’ I argued.
    I was never against relationships, but I had seen Mom in a loveless marriage.
    ‘Benoy, I know why you’re saying this, but not every marriage breaks down,’ he continued.
    ‘I read somewhere,
All weddings end in either divorce or death. Nothing good can come out of it
, Deb!’ I coaxed. ‘Plus, if you get married, I will lose a brother. I can’t have that! You’re the only family I have, man.’
    ‘C’mon, Benoy. I will always have time for you. You just have to call and I will be here.’
    ‘Oh, fuck off. Either you’re busy in your business or busy wagging your tail around Avantika. I’m not even sure she likes you any more,’ I ranted.
    ‘Of course she likes me!’ he scoffed.
    ‘Do whatever you want to do! Why did you even ask me?’ I barked.
    ‘Because you’re the only one who understands. Dadcan’t care less, and Mom wants me to marry a Bengali girl,’ he reasoned.
    ‘I am on your mom’s side,’ I said. ‘And you’re so young, Deb. Like, you’re twenty-one!’
    ‘I’m twenty-five,’ he countered.
    ‘You look twenty-one!’ I exclaimed.
    ‘I just want to know you’re with me on this one,’ he said.
    ‘Fine, whatever. Don’t run after me when she refuses and tells you that she has a boyfriend far better looking than you.’
    He laughed.
    With Deb engaged, I would need a girlfriend at least. He left my place after an hour. Nothing I said could change his decision. He was going to do it, much to my disappointment.
    Once he left, I switched on the laptop. Shaina had posted three new poems on her blog. I couldn’t understand one of them. I suspected the leaking boat in the poem was a metaphor for life, but I wasn’t sure. The other two poems were just twenty lines long, and I cursed when I finished reading them in a few short minutes; her sentences always had a tinge of tragedy sprinkled in them—honest and beautiful. Like her.
    And I had not even met her.



Chapter Twelve
    Over the last few weeks, there had been two people who had been extremely happy. One was Eshaan. The other one was, well, me! Eshaan saw me in college every day and now he could go a little easy on project ‘
Help Benoy
’.
    Diya and I were growing close. Diya was fun and bitchy and really mean when she wanted to. The
look-at-her-boyfriend
type. I had slowly dragged Diya from her traditional sit-on-the-first-bench-and-write-everything approach to listen-to-only-those-professors-who-matter approach.
    The best part about her was that she smiled and laughed at whatever I used to say. She made me feel that I was the funniest guy in the whole world. It was a great ego boost. I liked spending time with her; she was insanely funny, and she laughed at all my jokes (that was new!). After a long time, I had found someone like that, like a breath of fresh air.
    ‘This is so boring,’ I whispered in her ear.
    ‘Shut up,’ she said, as she jotted down something that the professor said.
    ‘HEY!’ the old professor shouted and looked at us. He warned us to stop talking or he would throw us out of the class. I wished that he would, and the next time he caught us, he did.
    ‘I told you to SHUT UP!’ she said angrily.
    ‘I did! It was you who was talking. You asked me to shut up and that’s when he caught us.’
    ‘But I had to ask you to! You just keep on talking like you have something important to say but all you say is bullshit,’ she said, as she angrily walked towards the parking lot. I was laughing and that was pissing her off.
    We instinctively went to the coffee shop we used to go to. Her anger fizzled out in