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student.
    At first, I
refused to believe it but Adil showed me his log of the times
Sameer Sir had read the post about Rupa Ma’am. Rupa Ma’am had been
very graceful, but she was also nearing 50 and none of us had the
hots for her, but it made perfect sense that old Sameer Sir should
have been smitten by her. Oh, it was hilarious, but it was sneaky
too. It was like watching someone from behind a one-way mirror.
     
    I wonder how Adil
managed to keep a straight face when he met Sameer Sir that
evening. The old teacher must have felt duty-bound to treat him to
some moral wisdom. How did Adil keep himself from laughing aloud?
When I met Adil over coffee next morning, he told me Sameer Sir had
an old scroll of the Ten Commandments hung on his drawing room
wall. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, hahaha, Rupa
Ma’am wasn’t his neighbour’s wife, right?”
    I laughed with
Adil but I also felt uneasy in his company. Was he a sincere chap?
Wasn’t it time I asked him to leave?
    ***
    About Zeba I
didn’t know until the night before, and had I known I wouldn’t have
allowed Adil to carry on his game. But now it is too late. I was at
work when he called for me at the hospital front desk, telling the
receptionist that it was urgent. They are taught to ignore such
panic calls but when the caller says they are calling from home,
the receptionist can’t very well tell them to go take a walk.
    Adil hadn’t ever
called me away from work like this before, but still, I called him
up to ask what the trouble was. Come home, he said, not sounding
like his calm, unflappable self at all. I rushed to the flat and
found him setting at the edge of the sofa with a mug of coffee in
hand. There was another empty mug before him. He never has two mugs
of coffee together, says the second mug never feels as good as the
first. Obviously, something had disturbed him deeply. But I was not
in a mood to crack mysteries. In fact, I was fairly annoyed at
being called away from work. It better be a good one, Mr Adil, I
was thinking, waiting for his explanation at the door.
    “Zeba is coming
here,” he said, looking at me with pleading eyes. “Here!” I jumped
and looked questioningly around. “She’s in India. She wants to meet
me the day after,” he said. No, no, this wasn’t the true story.
This couldn’t be the true story. After the heartbreak and the
bitterness all those long years ago, this couldn’t be happening
just like that. There was obviously something I didn’t know, or
hadn’t been told.
    I had lost touch
with Zeba after she got married and went abroad but I had known her
longer than Adil. She had been my friend in school since we were
little kids. Adil had come into the picture much later, when he
joined our school in class 8, and I had mediated in so many of
their quarrels when their romance started after leaving school, or
had it been on even before that? Neither of them admitted to being
in love while in school, so I don’t know. Anyway, that was a long
time ago and even their breakup was years behind us.
    I sat down facing
him and stared into his eyes. There was guilt there. “What have you
been up to?” I demanded, sensing at the same time that I had
probably, unwittingly played a role in whatever was happening now.
“Nothing,” he said firmly, “absolutely nothing, old chap. I haven’t
done a thing. It’s she who wants to see me”.
    I shook my head
disbelievingly and waited. “How...why? You haven’t been keeping in
touch, the two of you, have you?”
    He rocked back and
forth slowly, gripping the empty mug in both hands, and then smiled
mischievously after considering my question for a few moments. “I
wrote to her, but only recently. She’d been trying to get in touch
for a long time. Don’t try to pin the blame on me.”
    “What does she
want?” I said.
    “Search me,” he
said, again with that mischievous smile.
    “Look, Adil, stop
fooling around if you want my help. Otherwise, I ought to