I was a little surprised to see her there. Sulabh had told me in the morning that their chemistry tutorial class was free today as the concerned lecturer was on leave. Since we still had a very limited faculty, in situations like these, if there was no other free lecturer available, one of the lab assistants would take over the class. They were not supposed to teach. Their only job was to keep the students in check and not leave them unattended. This was one big problem with private engineering colleges. They were run like a school.
Sameena was in Sulabh’s tutorial batch. Generally, this free lecture is spent by the students in gossiping. So it was a surprise to see Sameena here in the Physics lab. Which errand brought her here? I too started fiddling with CRO even though my eyes would steal a glance at her conversation with Prof. Gupta after every few seconds. Naturally, my heart skipped a beat when he called out my name.
‘Oops! Did she notice me stealing a glance at her?’ I wondered as I ambled towards Prof. Gupta’s desk.
“Anshuman, have you completed Single-slit diffraction experiment?” he asked.
“Yes Sir” I replied a bit hesitantly. I was still nervous about what was coming next.
“Good. Help Sameena in doing that experiment. She had joined college after the second round of counseling and so she is lagging behind others. She is having a free lecture right now and wants to complete at least one of them. Can you help her?”
I had to try really hard to stop myself from flashing a stupid smile. Even though I was elated, I made a serious face and replied with utmost sincerity
“Definitely Sir”
I opened the door of the darkroom and, after giving a cursory glance at Ashwin, who was still immersed in understanding the functionality of CRO, I followed Sameena inside the room.
“So we meet again in Physics lab only?” I couldn’t stop myself from saying this fact as soon as we entered in the room. Her only response came in the form of ‘Hmm’. I felt a tinge of embarrassment and so to counter that I quickly asked her to follow me to the part of the room where the apparatus related to the experiment had been set up. All the lights had been turned off in the room and the only source of light was a table lamp situated in the corner near the door. All the darkroom experiments of the day had already been completed by all the groups in my batch today. So I was surprised to find Chandan bent over the optical bench.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, “Your turn of this experiment was last week.”
“I wanted to do the experiment again by myself” he answered without looking up “Dinesh had taken all the readings then. Why do you bother? You have already done it”
“Prof. Gupta has asked me to help Sameena complete this experiment. Due to her late joining she is behind other students and needs to catch up with the rest of us soon” I answered.
“Oh” now he looked at us “Give me few minutes, I am almost done.”
I looked at Sameena who nodded in affirmative. I didn’t mind this delay at all. It had given me an opportunity that I was looking for many days – to have a conversation with her.
“He will be done in few minutes,” I said as we stood by the solitary source of light situated at the other end of the room.
“No problem. There are still around 25 minutes to go before the next tutorial. I hope we will be done by then” She said.
“Yes, yes, definitely. It is not that tough experiment” I tried to assure her.
She nodded and then turned her face in the direction of Chandan. I could see that she was eager to get to the experiment table. She had sacrificed a whole free lecture to complete the pendency and each passing minute was perhaps making her realize that. I didn’t have time to lose. If I wanted to know anything about her, this was the right moment. So I quickly jumped on to a question.
“So, from which school are you?”
“Actually I am not from Jaipur. My hometown is in Ajmer. I did my schooling from there.” She finally moved her eyes away from Chandan.
“Ok” I said quickly “It’s a nice place. I have been there 3-4 times. The city is surreal”
She smiled and a second later her eyes again moved in the direction of Chandan. Something came to my mind and I couldn’t resist asking that question.
“What was your rank in PET?”
She looked at me with a fair bit of surprise. She had found this question pretty odd. Sensing that, I quickly corrected myself
“Actually” she chuckled “I was asked about my rank by a couple of students, but it was on my day one here. That’s why I was surprised a bit. My rank was 1255.”
“1255” my mouth fell open. JEC was a new college and it had not attracted a lot of good ranking guys for obvious reasons. A few like me with respectable PET ranks had landed here owing to different reasons. But there was no one in the vicinity of the top 2000 ranks in the college – until now.
“What are you doing here? You could have easily got any Govt. engineering college in the state? How did you end up here?”
I didn’t get any answer. All I could see in the next 5 minutes was a stoic face with an uninterrupted gaze in the direction of the experiment table. I was livid with myself for asking that tricky question. Thankfully Chandan left the experiment in the midway and so we were able to get out of that fairly awkward situation.
For the next 15 minutes, my eyes didn’t move from the experiment table where Sameena completed the Single Slit Diffraction experiment seamlessly without asking me even once after I had given a short demonstration. The confidence on her face as well as her mannerism had told me that she was more than an above-average student. She definitely deserved a far better engineering college, at least a State Govt. one if not an NIT. The same question which had stumped me while chatting with her some time back hit me again. How did she end up here?
“Thanks for the help,” She said as we turned off all the apparatus related to the experiment and stepped out of the darkroom.
“You’re welcome” I gave a sheepish smile. I now knew that she could have done the experiment easily even without my guidance by just reading the lab manual. I had just saved that time.
“Ok, see you later” she smiled and went to Prof. Gupta to show him the readings of the experiment. He asked her a couple of things and then nodded his head. That meant he was satisfied with the readings. Sameena quickly glanced at the clock and left the lab.
I was relieved that she had not taken any offense. But even then I couldn’t help but wonder about the reason that had forced her to take admission here.
To be continued ...
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
