My Rogue Romeo

Rohit acted as though he deserved a red carpet welcome wherever he went. And he had been like that, right from his childhood days.

I still remember the day I met him for the very first time. We both were in Class VII at that time. I had recently shifted to Hyderabad from Delhi due to my father’s transfer and was admitted into an Army school. Almost all the children at that school were having parents who served in the armed forces.

I hardly knew Rohit at that time. I hardly knew anyone in the class for that matter except for my bench-mate Ritika. Due to this, I moved around the school quite awkwardly.

That day, as Ritika and I were walking towards our classroom after lunch, I got splayed with blue ink from a fountain pen. I looked up in shock and caught sight of Rohit impishly laughing at me. He was amongst a bunch of his friends.

The boy standing next to him said “you really did it, you rascal.”

“I told you I would,” Rohit said locking his eyes into mine.

Giving a high five to his friends around, he walked away slowly leaving me totally dumbstruck. It was very clear that I was witnessing the scene of Rohit having won a bet he had placed with his friends about what he did.

I felt so very humiliated that I wished I could simply vanish into thin air. I ran back into the bathroom trying to hold back my tears. Ritika followed me inside. I checked my uniform. I was glad that the pinafore was of a very dark blue color which hid the stain very well. Except for a small blotch on the tucked-in shirt in red and white checks, I was clean. I washed the stain on the shirt with Ritika’s help till it became almost invisible.

By now the initial shock had worn off. I found myself seething within as Ritika explained “He is Rohit from Section D. He was in my class earlier. He is very naughty. I remember him doing the same thing to another girl last year. I am told he carries a fountain pen with him for this very purpose. Otherwise, who would carry such a vintage one these days? But he gets away with most of these things as he is very bright and is the teachers’ pet. I believe his parents are also quite influential.”

From that day onwards, I would always refer to Rohit as “Rogue”. I vowed to myself that I shall bring him down to his knees someday. For my part, I decided to ignore him as long as I was in that school.

Within a couple of years, Rohit’s father got transferred out of Hyderabad and I forgot about him. And then as fate would have it, I ran into him once again in Bengaluru at Wipro office where I landed a job as a Technical Program Manager after quitting my earlier job at a consulting firm.

Rohit had joined Wipro into its hardware division soon after completing his engineering. We ran into each other at the office canteen. It was Rohit who recognized me.  I was amused to see glimpses of the same swagger and arrogant stance in the grown-up Rohit, that I had seen in him on that day in the school as he stood defiantly amongst his friends.

I wished to shrug him off and ignore him but then something held me back. During our conversation, I found him to be bright and competent. He had landed himself into IIT, Delhi, and had got picked up by Wipro from the campus itself. He had grown quite well on the corporate ladder within the Company.

As I got to know him better, I could see that he found it hard to take any kind of defeat in his stride. I, who had lost my father by then and was dealing with a mother who was suffering from depression, had learned to accept crises as part of life. I often pointed out to him how fortunate he was in life.

Our meetings in the evenings and weekends became quite common. We found it easy to be in each other’s company and Rohit started to share his frustrations, ideas, and thoughts with me quite openly. That’s when I began to see the soft layer that lay beneath the tough “I-care-too-hoots” kind of veneer that he had put up for the world.

That evening Rohit had organized a special dinner in a restaurant in Jubilee Hills to celebrate my birthday. After dinner, when he dropped me home, he said he had a surprise gift for me. I invited him into the apartment. I could see that Rohit was not quite himself. He was sweating profusely. He asked for a glass of water. He gulped down the entire glass at a go and placed the empty glass on the table.

All of a sudden, he dropped to his knees shocking me out of my wits. In his outstretched hand, I found this beautiful ring. I gasped as he said those magic words of his proposal to me.

Only when he jumped in joy and held me in his arms, I realized that “Yes” had escaped my lips quite involuntarily. After a few moments, I sat him down to update him about how I serendipitously succeeded in bringing my ‘Rogue Romeo’ onto the knees after all those years!