14. Danish Roy

I was inappropriately happy on the second day of my new job. The first day had gone off smoothly, apart from that one moment where the girl, Aisha, made me want to crawl beneath the desk and stay there for a really long time. Today, will be better, I told myself. Last night, I had spent a few hours on the Internet and read up manuals on how to tackle sexual queries from young people (without making an utter fool of myself). My highlighted notes lay securely in my duffle bag. All I needed was a little revision and I would whoop some ass today. I reached on time and found Aisha waiting on the bench.

  'Hi, sir.'

  'Aren't you supposed to come later in the day?' I asked.

  'I needed to talk to you about something. I can do that, right?' she asked, innocently.

  'Of course, just give me a few moments.' I entered my room, closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

  Calm down. You can do this, Danish. She's just a little girl. Just be confident and straightforward.

  I placed my pad on the desk and found myself fixing my hair in the reflection of my computer screen. Now why would I do that?

  'Sir, may I come in?' she said from outside the door.

  'Come in.'

  She came in, closed the door behind her, and sat in front of me.

  'So, tell me, what's the problem?'

  'Umm . . . It's not so much a problem. It's more of a question really,' she said.

  'Go on?'

  'I wanted to tell Megha that you were really cute. But—'

  'Excuse me?'

  'I'm sorry. But that's what I wanted to talk to you about. But before I could tell her that I found you cute, she told me the entire college had started calling you cute.'

  She waited for me to say something.

  'So?'

  'You're okay with that?'

  Okay? This was the best day of my life. What if they were half a decade younger than I was?

  'Can you tell me clearly what's bothering you?'

  'I will try,' she said. 'So like you are cute to the entire school now, you will forever be only that. People won't talk about how happy that eighth standard guy was when you let him off the hook with the weed-smoking incident but they will talk about your cuteness. And that can be sort of a good thing and a bad thing.'

  'Okay. So?'

  I dreaded a loaded question at the end of it all.

  'But what if people thought about you as a pervert? Like what if I had started telling people you had hit on me when you really hadn't?'

  'What! But I didn't—' I panicked.

  'Of course, you didn't,' she smiled. 'Okay, let me give you another analogy. What if there was a rumour that a student committed suicide just after he attended your session? Now there might be no correlation between your cuteness and the student taking his life but then everything you did before or will do after that would be looked through that lens of you being cute, right? Like people will say you're cute, but clearly you're not that great a counsellor because that kid died. Or like what do you expect out of him? He's too busy being cute! Or like it's okay if you just look at him, but don't expect any counselling from him. And those two things have nothing to do with each other!'

  'You're kind of right.'

  'And whose fault will be that?'

  'Whoever talked about it first, labelled me as just cute,' I said. 'Not my fault, necessarily. The best I could do is to try to move past it.'

  'Fuck.'

  'Language, Aisha. And can you tell me what really happened?'

  'You're going to judge me.'

  'Of course I will judge you if you did something wrong. But I will also forgive you if you do something to undo it,' I said.

  'So, I did something to a girl years back and I don't think she has moved past it yet.'

  'What did you do?'

  'I put her in a little box like I was about to do to you. Only it wasn't labelled as cute, it was labelled slut.'

  Aisha told me about Namrata, a girl who had joined this school a few years ago. A nice, talented girl whose life Aisha had single-handedly destroyed by labelling her as a slut.

  'So what are you going to do about this?

  'I don't know.'

  'Talk to me again only once you finish talking to her,' I said.

  'But . . .'

  'You can go now.'

  'See, you're judging me?'

  'I am. I now think you're the kind of person who has the courage to accept she did something wrong and will prove to me that she has it in herself to apologize. You can leave now.'