Paritosh couldn’t sleep. She wanted to wait for him. How tempting the idea was! He had asked her not to do so.

But perhaps she still would.

What he now knew for sure was that he was going to wait for her. Till today, he hadn’t known if she would reciprocate his feelings. Sure, he had noticed her appreciative glances every now and then. But that fleeting crush on a Ph. D. supervisor – an authority figure, whom you looked up to – was quite common. It usually subsided with time. Over the years he had developed an immunity to such glances. Those came and went away, he didn’t even notice them. Those didn’t mean that a student had really strong feelings for him or loved him. So, he hadn’t assumed that Rupali’s admiration meant anything either. It was not humanly possible to be happy about assuming so. Heart trumps brains when it comes to things like love and happiness. But he was definitely relieved. Because acting on those feelings was out of the question. So, it was better she didn’t have them. That helped him keep a lid of his own emotions too.

But now that check had disappeared. Thanks to a rash act by his brother. Now he knew that she was struggling with the same emotions as he. And her emotions were strong enough that she had blurted them out in front of his brother. Strong enough that she wanted to wait.

What will it be like two or three years down the line? Will they survive the tension between them? Will she still feel the same towards him by then? What if his brother was still in love with Rupali then and resented their relationships?

He had no answers to these questions. What he did know – he turned in the bed and thought again with a smile playing on his lips – was that he was going to wait for her.

To ensure that they didn’t slip up and make a mistake before their moment came, he will have to make some rules. He sat up, grabbed a notebook and scribbled something down.

—

Rupali realized that not only had Paritosh reduced the frequency of their meetings, but when they did meet, he would always come up with some excuse to meet in a public place instead of his office. He was punishing her, she concluded. She would put up with it, she decided. She was, after all, responsible for taking them both to the brink of a career suicide.

The consolation was that after a few days, when she had started playing along with his punishments, herself proposing to meet at the campus coffee shop, or one the open quads while requesting meetings, and making sure that she wasn’t the first one to reach for a group meeting or get-togethers, their conversations went back to normal. Even though it was at a public place, they would still spend hours discussing the latest papers either of them had read, or figuring out her research plan.

One day, about two months later, she felt bold enough to enquire. “Is everything fine at your home? Are Aniket and his mother okay?”

“Why yes – Rupali. You don’t have to bother about them.”

“I don’t have to. I just want to. Just normal human curiosity, you know!”

Her annoyance showed and Paritosh mellowed.

“Of course. Don’t be angry, Rupali. I just– I sometimes worry that you might get entangled in things and lose your way. But I am reminded as often that you know your way around the world and I needn’t act like a guardian to you. Not that I make a good guardian,” he chuckled here, “Look at how messed up Aniket has turned out.”

“Aniket doesn’t know how lucky he is to have you. Most fathers can’t care for their children the way you care for him.”

“One could say I have spoiled him.”

“He is fine. He will find his way, in time.”

“You talk like you are his grandmother’s age or something. You are the same age. And you know what you want from life. He mostly doesn’t even know what he wants the next hour.”

“I didn’t have a choice. I had to know what I wanted from life. Else nobody was going to give it me.”

Due to complications during her birth, Rupali’s mother had to have her uterus removed. She could not bear any more children and Rupali’s father wanted nothing more than a boy. Her mother died when she was ten. Her father didn’t remarry, which was surprising considering how badly he had wanted a boy. He wasn’t in the least bothered about bringing up of her daughter.  After her mother died, some relatives from the extended family took care of her for a while, but soon enough she was taking care of not just herself, but also the entire house. The good thing about her father’s indifference was that he never objected to whatever she wanted to do. She when she prepared for her engineering entrance exams, got admitted into the Computer Science program of one of the best colleges in India, and after that decided to go to the US for her Ph. D., her father did not stand in her way. He didn’t drop her to the college hostel on her first day as the other parents did. He didn’t even come for the convocation when she was awarded a degree as well as many other prizes. But he didn’t mind when she needed money for anything.

Now, with her fellowship, she didn’t even need money. So, she was practically living on her own.

—

To be continued