E-Paper
Love & physics
Whenever Khojika entered the class in her trademark chiffon sari, everything around us would come to a sudden halt. Only she was alive in the classroom.
I had gone to a coaching institute for tuitions in PCM (physics, chemistry, maths) for the first time in Class X. I was sitting in the institute’s office with my mother when suddenly a stunningly beautiful 20-something dressed in a pink salwar-kameez entered the room with the admission forms. As she spoke, I just stared blankly at her, completely mesmerised. The ‘women’ in our batch were still ‘girls’, but this lady was... was... Khojika Khemlani.
On my first day I learnt, to my utmost disappointment, that I wasn’t the only one in love with Khojika. She was to teach us physics, and all the boys in the class had discovered they loved Pascal and Newton. The Laws of Physics were on everybody’s lips like lyrics of a ballad. Boring and difficult sums of ‘specific gravity’ and ‘calorimetry’ had suddenly become interesting. Whenever Khojika entered the class in her trademark chiffon sari, everything around us would come to a sudden halt. Only she was alive in the classroom.
In an attempt to impress her, I gave her a heart-shaped card on Teacher’s Day with an accompanying note. Five years after passing out of Class X, I was still awaiting a reply to the card-cum-note. Then, a few weeks ago, I was sitting alone in a restaurant when I saw a pregnant lady with a child, accompanied by a man. The woman seemed very familiar, but I failed to figure out where exactly I had seen her before.
I was walking past her when I heard her calling out my name. Bashful, I walked towards her anxiously and offered my apologies for having been unable to recognise her. She introduced herself as Mrs Khojika Bajaj. It was Khojika Khemlani! Our physics teacher had got married and was pregnant with her second child! The pain of knowing that she had become someone else’s hit me. But what also upset me was how, in a short span of five years, she had changed.
That day I realised that the proverb has got it bang on — love is skin-deep. Beauty, like everything else, perishes and nothing lasts for ever. Better to have learnt it late, and from my ex-physics teacher, than never.
