I Committed a Sin - Chapter 3

I Committed a Sin

Chapter 3

A Matter of Perspective

My college was closing on towards its end.

     It was a close the management of the college was keenly waiting for; to get rid of the very first batch of students on whose contribution the college rose and held for the past four years. We would not be as useful for our chairman as our photos would be, and he dumped the things that ceased to be useful for him. He waited for the next two months so that he could carry on with dumping. I waited for the end of a segment of life that had brought up too much of misery with sudden turn of events.

     I could not place my college life for what it was. I joined B.E, Bachelor of Engineering, in 2007, a sheep among the flock herded into the course by haughty parents. The year I joined was the year my college started afresh. The name, Azhagammai, had its unique place when it came to education in Tamilnadu. Azhgammai College of Engineering was a grand success in Chennai. It is one of the first colleges to have all its seats filled once engineering counseling started every year, irrespective of the courses offered. 2007 was a sort of golden age for engineering courses. Mind you, the engineering courses, and not engineering in general. Scores of graduated engineers were sitting empty-handed in their homes or in shops where the Engineering courses they had studied at huge expenses, spending lakhs of rupees, were not worth wiping their asses. Still, sheep were sheep, parents were parents, greed was greed.

     Our college, Azhagammai College of Engineering and Technology, a branch of Azhagammai Institution in Madurai, was due to open a year earlier. Unspoken things should have befallen, at least that was my guess, and the opening had been postponed to my freshman year. New Engineering colleges in Tamilnadu usually take their place at the end of the colleges list. They sit there like novices following veterans, not hoping their seats to be filled until the counseling neared its end. The more famous the college, the quicker it filled to its capacity. Our college, however, was an exception. The fame of other institutions under the name, Azhagammai, gave it a charismatic look. It contested with other colleges in Madurai, my hometown incidentally, and soon proved to be a threat to the small group of indigenous institutions. I happened to be a passive contributor for that.

     I was one of those expectant youngsters looking forward for a colorful college life as manifested by movies and media alike when I walked into that campus. In addition, it was the first time in my adolescent life I would share a classroom with girls. The idea had brought with it a peculiar amusement. In the earlier days of my college years, it had been a matter of pride to gauge the beauty of girls in my class against those in that of my school buddies' colleges. In retrospect, it was all absurd beyond imagination.

     Thanks to my experiences with girls in earlier years, I respected all the girls. I had my personal list of beautiful girls in the class, but, at that point, they were safely away from the boundary in my mind where the adjective 'beautiful' morphed into the adjective 'sensual'. I had an involuntary belief in my mind, that being my equals, every girl should be given the same privilege as her masculine counterpart. Of course, there was a group of women, of a different age group, that I got sexually aroused by. Ironically, almost all of my peachy teachers who looked good fell into that category and none of my classmates did.

     My friends, some of them really close to me, used to talk a lot of sexual stuff. Thinking back, I could not come to think of any immediate practical laboratory class where we sat down determined to work as we did to talk. Surprisingly, topics for those discussions never seemed to be scarce. All it required was a word of interest. Like a crack in the glass. Once the mood was set, all of us were only too eager to contribute, and the crack spidered off unchecked into a myriad directions. One of those directions was girls.

     Girls, a little as in movie stars and next door chicks. Girls, a lot as in Divya sitting along your aisle, or Ramya who you were peeking at during EM.

     Whenever the conversation warded off toward the physical appeal of girls, I averted my face, as offhandedly as possible. I never did that on account of not liking the subject. I had erected a firm boundary in my mind, all of my own volition, that separated the women who were supposed to feed my sexual pleasure and who were not. I was strong enough to not violate this protocol for so long. To my aid, I was spared the anxiety to peek at beautiful girls too frequently like most guys did. On those days, I had a definite impression that the woman of my life could not have been present outside the confines of my classroom. All I waited for was to know her exact position within.

to be continued....