Letter 15

Hey Sec and Cos,

Sec, I wonder why you have started quoting existentialists… but that apart, it was great to have your letterNow as to why I mention this you can fairly understand I suppose. The HST-Air student’s murder of the young girl, Rashmi, has been reported in media from a certain point of view but I am more interested in the point of view of the girl who died as Juhi would know. The motive of the murder seems to be Vinu’s jealousy- he couldn’t stand the fact that Rashmi had affairs before he met her (I saw this on TV, which as you know reports 100% reality all the time)!

How should it matter to anyone on earth if his/her lover has had lovers in the past before he/she met you?

Sec, tell me... would it matter to you if Sam confesses to you about his past affairs? I know you hate Sam, but can that hate be subverted by any such admission on his part? I don’t think so. Then why should there be any change in love? I fail to understand why love is said to operate on a scale totally different from any other emotion.

Meanwhile, as you know, I am extremely bored and out of work. Not that all my work is done, thing is, I do not feel motivated enough to work. I feel lonely and sad every now and then, which is a contagious disease.

My computer is also going nuts by the day and I have to access everything from the task manager. This reminds me of days when Dugald would instruct me how to go about repairing my computer, but alas those days are quite over because I no longer talk to Dugald frequently. And if I do not talk to someone I can not possibly ask the person to instruct me to repair something as personal computer!

I wish it was a boat then I could consult Rehan or was it an airplane, I could consult Rohan.

To tackle my boredom I googled ‘HST + Crime’. And guess what? There were entire histories of HST-ans indulging in various crimes. How exciting! Isn’t it?

One case of HST-Fire says that a guy from that institute took phone numbers of the girl friends of all his friends without their knowledge and then rang the girl’s from unknown numbers asking for their fathers. And to the respective fathers he said that he would inform them about their daughter’s wayward whereabouts along with the name of their lovers in return for money. He negotiated for online transfer of money and duped his own friends. The police later caught up with him. And then he confessed that he was doing what he did to have a luxurious lifestyle.

Now what I wonder is why would he do so much for a ‘luxurious lifestyle’? How dumb can HST-ans get… he should rather have ‘luxuriated’ (whatever that means!) with the hot girl’s whose numbers he stole! I wish he had taken my advice.

I asked Rohan whether he knew about this episode in his institution. He claimed he didn't know anything about this fraudulent guy but I think Rohan’s recent break up with Pichku owes to this act of notoriety going on in his institution. May be it was that fraud who informed Pichku's father or something about Rohan?!

Personally, I hate Pichku because it was due to her that Rohan and my fiery start never ever took off and our summer fling dwindled. Pichku was seeing Rohan even then, but he never admitted to seeing her. This sort of affair I call one-eyed affair: only one party admits to ‘seeing’.

So I suppose I should have left him to his denied lover Pichku but, as you know, I am generous and large-hearted. So I let him engage in repartee with me for summer. However, I did not expect him to slide off as easily as he did- he could afford to do that because once he was back in his HST premise, Pichku from the neighboring locality kept meeting him and his focus on me got totally diverted. So now I am loving his separation from Pichku.

As for the new kid on the block- things are simmering there now. He is from HST-Space, called Renoy and is slightly difficult to understand. In fact, I am still not sure what to make of him but I took an instant liking to him because both of us like the marvelous singer called Altaf Raja and we keep discussing Raja’s 90s masterpiece : Tum Toh Thaire Pardesi, Saath Kya Nibhaoge?.

Renoy uses Saussure-Derrida to deconstruct the lyrics and I use Gayatri Spivak and Adrienne Rich. So we have the convergence of multiple theoretical perspectives while discussing the seminal performative text of the last century. By the way, as you must have understood now this Renoy knows a lot about our disciplines of study and interest. In fact he does not even like HST. Of course, Dugald and Rohan also told me once in a while that they do not like HST but Renoy seems more certain of his opinion this way.

Another good thing about Renoy is that he shares Cos’s habit of counting things. He looks into the mechanism of manufacturing and maintaining calculators in HST.

I am quite tired today. Will continue from here in my next letter.

Ciao!

Tan.

letter 14

hey Tan and Cos,

How long will you be away Cosie?? I know you are enjoying your trip to the dry part of the world very much but you know how much me and Tan miss you. We both are missing your letters and I am dying to get more info about Nike. He must have done something weird in all these days. So girlie come back soon and help us catch up with some hot and happening news about the weirdos we love so much..;)

And Tan its really nice to know that you are using your deo bottles in a productive manner these days rather than emptying them on you. hehe.Just kidding. And guess what, I have tried to find an explanation for Sud's fascination with female innerwear. I think Brecht's words have made a great impression on him. And here I quote Brecht: "From the cradle to the coffin, underwear comes first". :P I dont know how much literary-minded this guy is but for sure whatever he must come upon this line somewhere. You know what let me know something about the new kid on the block. I am just so curious. People might think that I am too curious about these HST-ans but what can I do, they are so interesting(in a good way or bad, whatevr it is, you just cannot deny that they are interesting).

But what shocked the hell out of me day before yesterday was what I saw on the idiot box. And then my friend Juhi called me up and said that she knew the girl Rashmi who was murdered by the HST guy. You people have met Juhi once when she came to our college last year. She is the fair and tall girl. I knew that these weirdos are frustrated individuals, they are sex-starved and all but I did not know that they can be dangerous also. I mean Rehan makes and repairs boats, Rohan makes paper-planes, Sam mugs up every book he gets ---this was all fine. They were doing what HST was teaching them. They also behave weirdly specially with girls but that also is understandable because of their existence in almost out of the way places where no human beings but only HST-ans can survive. But what I did not know was that they can get ferocious when jilted in love. I dont know if they know the meaning of love but i guess they also "fall" in love. And in every sense of the term they "fall". This guy from HST-Air named Vinu has brutally murdered the "love of his life"( this is what he used to call her). What Juhi was saying was that, the guy was always a bit of a show-off. He kept saying publicly that he loved Rashmi "madly" (ya sure, he was mad, now that he has murdered her). Rashmi used to be irritated with such kind of behaviour. She was also studying in a prestigious institution and was a brilliant student. They were having some problems regarding this but then both of them had gone to a hill station to celebrate Rashmi's birthday. You people must have seen what happened after that on the TV. I just dont have any words to say. If this is what "falling" in love for the HST people mean and if this what loving "madly" means, then I admit that I had not known the meaning of these words before correctly. I just cant say how much disturbed I am as Juhi kept crying on the phone but I didnt know what to say to console her. Rashmi must have been of our age only and I cant believe her life just ended because of the whim of a pathetic loser. Just dont know what else to say about these weirdos. We thought of them to be silly but they are not--- they are vicious. I just pray to God that all HST- ans dont turn out to be so.

So much for today...Love ya both...Write to me soon ....

Sec