Proud Confessions

Ever since Teesta had joined his English class, Malay had been distracted. Not that he ever had good concentration. But now, when he was really trying to put up a good show, his mind would not stay put in one place. He had been caught gazing blankly at her in the last class, while the teacher was explaining Elizabeth's disapproval of Mr. Darcy. And of all the people who should turn back and look, Teesta! He thought she had smiled at him, but he was not very sure. He was not very sure about how she felt about him or even whether she felt anything at all.

He was a simple boy. Simple in thought. He could not think in convoluted ways, and had trouble handling more than one thought at a time. Thinking of her was a huge overload on his neural abilities. He could not handle the multitude of responses she evoked in him. She, however, seemed to be from another planet. Calm, confident, a very lucid speaker and she had a distinct halo about her. She had once said, "Hi" to him. He had stood there, fumbling, wanting to say something, anything. But all the words in the language, deserted him and ran for cover, the moment he saw her face.

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." Malay was reading out loud in class. The teacher had made Teesta read out Elizabeth Bennet's lines, while he emulated Fitzwilliam Darcy. He was trying hard not to look at her. He could imagine the paint on the walls of the room in which they stood, the smell of the air filled with her perfume intertwined with the tension hanging in the air.

"But I cannot -- I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly." Teesta's voice rose and fell with the emotion she read out, and he could see her become Miss Bennet herself. She seemed cold, almost indifferent to his existence. The aloofness of her behaviour made him feel alone in the crowd of his class.

"And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of expecting! I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected." He could not believe he had read that out. Malay could feel his heart throb a little faster. How could she? This was turning out to be most unfair. He wanted to protest, to tell her of every last morsel of feeling he felt for her.

"You could not have made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it." She spoke these words with such force, with such passion, with so much dislike. "From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike..."

"No! This is not me... not me... I like you so... so much"

Disclaimer: All portrayed events and characters are completely fictional and any similarity to real events and people, living or dead, is unintended and purely coincidental. Elizabeth Bennet, Fitzwilliam Darcy and their dialogues are borrowed from the Jane Austen classic Pride and Prejudice.