Wednesday Blues - PART I...TO BE CONTINUED.

That evening she was clad in black trousers and a velvet top with a tiger print pattern. That was when she saw him first. She entered the tiny room with its odd sized tables and rotatable stools with their bottoms broken at the most and an occasional tear in the rexine that had a typical chocolate hue, the tear courtesy to the guys sitting around and having a good time ‘apparently’ with their compasses. I say apparently because guys of this age are neither adolescents nor complete adults and assumed for the most to be having a good time ‘all the while’. Her entry was marked with one of the guys passing a remark that was inaudible to her or indeed it did seem or perhaps she didn’t care. She had come for a ‘make-up’ class or that was what Mrs. Sen called them, their Physics teacher. It’s a class you make up for, when you’ve missed it; Mrs.Sen a thorough professional, a pioneer in her business ‘giving tutions’, an aluminous of those ‘oh so famous’ schools in Calcutta which have but nothing to their credit.
Anoushka came and sat down in the stool in front, the one that was located at an immediate corner to the vast expanse of a blue colored sun-mica table that lay before her. Surprisingly that day there were fewer girls than usual, the Wednesday batch was an all boys group and more to her surprise was a boy who sat immediately on her right. The guys do not usually come up in front she thought but changed her mind as she glanced through pages of homework that had been set the previous day. He was square jawed, tall, tanned and fairly handsome in a checked green sweatshirt and white jeans. For her they were all unfamiliar faces for she had not arrived as per schedule last Friday and sat burying her head in her notebook although she did not as much need to, with the guys behind blabbering something about the latest disc in town. Then there was this sudden familiar voice calling “Anoushka have you done your homework? I bet you haven’t tried them, you had exams last week, didn’t you?”
“Oh!” she said “I tried them but couldn’t get very far”.
She had to look past the boy to glance in her direction. It was Shaonli who was sitting on one corner of the room with an extended and rather long look. She too had come for the class. Shaonli gave a soft sigh “Sen won’t excuse me then, she finally concluded, I did not even try them!”
Under normal circumstances Anoushka would have spoken to anybody beside her but this boy had this distinct aura about him, which in a rather ambiguous manner repelled her or perhaps endeared him to her, she did not know. It was five by then and Mrs. Sen stepped in accompanied by an aroma of Liril soap and talcum powder. “I hope you people have pepped up your math this weekend cuz’ I’ll test you on your numericals”, she announced. “ So how were your exams Abhishek?”, she asked the boy who was sitting beside her. “Cakewalk”, he announced with some of the boys breaking into a series of wolfish howls and an occasional ooh or wow.
The test duly commenced with the class elevens arming themselves playfully with their pens and calculators. On this occasion Anoushka could not help borrowing a calculator from the boy beside her for she had forgotten to bring her own .He helped her with some of the sums and smiled charmingly as
she tried her best with the others. To her till then he was just this normal guy who had been sitting in the first row and the incident attached no further meaning to her entity.