Club You to Death by Anuja Chauhan (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📗

Kashi had stammered that what she was proposing was wrong for at least six different reasons. She’d shut him up with a kiss then, a sweet, warm, very clumsy kiss, which had gone on for far longer than it should have. Her body was under his, with her hands flattened against his bare chest by the time he found the strength to roll off and away.

‘No!’ he said forcefully, moving back when she tried to reach for him. ‘No, Bambi! No! Get off me. Stop it, now!’

She slunk away to her side of the bed and wrinkled her nose. ‘You sound like you’re disciplining a puppy.’

‘Then stop acting like a puppy!’

Her eyes raked his face boldly. A lock of honey-brown hair fell across her face, making her look incredibly sexy and just a little demented. She tossed it back and met his eyes, straight on. ‘Why not?’

He leaned forward and fired a counter-question. ‘Are you in love with me?’

‘Hai hai!’ She had abandoned her sexy lounging pose, and sat up, genuinely horrified. ‘No! Lame! Who even talks like that?’

Hugging his pillow to his chest in his barsati in Nizamuddin, Kashi recalls how hard his heart had been thudding when he asked that question. And how, when she’d made it clear that the idea was ludicrous, it had seemed, for a moment, to stop.

He’d said curtly, ‘You’ve spent the entire summer raving to me about Jaibeer Kanodia, and how he won’t give you any bhaav and now, randomly, you want me to kiss you?’

She’d nodded serenely, not seeing any problem with this. ‘Ya.’

‘Well, I don’t want to kiss you if you’re going to be closing your eyes and thinking of Jaibeer Kanodia!’

Reaching forward, she’d smoothed his tousled hair. ‘Maybe if you kiss me thoroughly enough I’ll stop thinking of Jaibeer Kanodia. He’s gonna pass out this year, anyway.’

Kashi had leapt off the messy bed and started looking for his shoes.

‘You are truly the most selfish person I’ve ever met! I’m not a bloody rehab centre, you know. I’m a person with feelings. What the fuck is wrong with you?’

She’d sat up in bed, finger-combing her hair and rolling her eyes. ‘Oh my god, Kashi, why’re you overthinking this? Besides, I have feelings for you! I like you – I trust you.’

‘Piss off,’ he’d said tightly, and stalked out of the massive house.

After that, he couldn’t get her out of his head. He’d dreamt the same damn dream every single night – he asked her again if she loved him, she answered with a yes instead of a no and he pulled her in close, wound his arms around her sweet, cinnamon body, pushed that frilly little birthday dress up her gleaming thighs and showed her what the best-bod-on-the-Dosco-squad could do.

And so of course, when he came home from Doon later that year, he’d ended up back in that pink bedroom, kissing her.

Later, she had told him that she’d made up all that stuff about liking Jaibeer Kanodia just to make him jealous. He’d accepted this explanation because he wanted to believe it, and thus had started the messy, magical hooking up years, every time he was back in town. On his nineteenth birthday, they’d gone official as a couple at his insistence, continuing to do the long-distance thing with no trouble at all while he studied law in Bangalore and she went to college in Delhi, till she told him, one fine day when he’d just started working, that her family was looking for a boy for her, and that she ‘could never not do what they told her to’.

Numb with pain, Kashi had put a message on Jaipur House Soccer Squad and the Doscos had showed up at his parents’ house in Noida almost immediately. They had drunk his father’s whisky, eaten a shit ton of pizza, held forth with great eloquence on the themes of other fish in the sea, the joys of singlehood, and the fucked-upness of women in general and bloody Bambi Todi in particular. Much FIFA was played, Pyaar ka Punchnama watched and at 5 a.m., they marched him down to the Sector-44 swimming pool, stood him on the highest diving boards, completely naked, and made him shout, ‘I declare Bambi Todi cancelled’, before he leapt into the pool. The love that had begun with a cannonball leap into a pool at the age of five had ended with this drunken, teary finale.

He had made a brief final appearance in the role of childhood friend at Bambi’s glitzy, ill-fated engagement a couple of months later, and then dropped her entirely. And two years later, he had met Kuhu.

Thinking of which …

He rolls over onto his stomach, hauls out his phone and finally opens the email she’d sent him yesterday, right after they’d spoken on the phone.

From: kuhuban@gmail.com

To: akashdogra20@gmail.com▼

SUB: Goa

Kash, like I tried to tell you just now, the newly elected MLA wants the school ready in time for his mum’s birthday, which is in two weeks. So all the deadlines have been advanced. The dude’s funding the whole thing so I have to listen to him.

And like I also tried to tell you when you started being so cold and polite and you-do-you, he dropped this bombshell on me at the last minute.

And yes, you were right. I could leave my foreman in charge of the site for three weeks. He’s entirely competent.

But here’s the thing. I don’t want to.

This school is my dream. These kids have become my family. I’ve put blood, sweat and tears into this project for months and I don’t want to abandon it when it’s almost done. And it’s not fair of you to expect me to.

Are we Over?

Could you please let me know?

We have a tremendously loud machine here that cuts through reinforced concrete and steel rods like they were butter, and breaking up with you will hurt as badly as feeding myself into its jagged jaws. Just saying.

But fine, if you’ve decided what I did was