In Student City Part 6 Prof Dr Piyush Roy crafts a sharply observant and darkly humorous coming-of-age narrative exploring loneliness, identity, youth culture, friendship, emotional alienation, and the absurd rituals of urban student life.

This evocative literary excerpt by Prof Dr Piyush Roy explores the emotional complexities of youth, relationships, alienation, and identity within an Indian postgraduate campus environment. Blending satire, introspection, humour, and social commentary, the narrative captures the anxieties of belonging, personality politics, friendship rituals, and romantic insecurities in urban India, while offering a deeply relatable portrait of flawed masculinity and emotional vulnerability.  

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I was never the guy who was loved instinctively. That essential special person for whom people would wait before beginning parties, and upon whose arrival everyone would stand up, smile, laugh, and shake hands for no apparent reason. There could be multiple reasons for the same — my bouts of intellectual paranoia, my self-consuming obsession with lonely claustrophobia, or a careless handling of relationships guided by a simple lethargic amnesia. Not particularly handsome, nor very intelligent or rich, my adaptive attempts at aping the affluent urbanites of my class were the stuff turn-offish PJs could be made of. Egged further by my current confession mode, I wouldn’t even mind admitting that if at all I decided to pen my autobiography, it couldn’t have a more apt title than Obdurate Habits of a Positively Defective Guy. 

Still, Tammy took to me and gradually followed the others. She gave me sex appeal, but what did she derive from me in return? Probably Madam Mona had an answer.

“My name is Mona Kapoor,” beamed the ‘Chubby Chow’, as Anisha had termed her unabashedly at first sight, though I found her quite cute. Rather “pleasantly plump,” as they say, she looked as if she was about to deliver. Of course, anything but a lecture! That was the last thing Madam Mona ever did in a class of fifty minutes. She discussed subjects only in the last ten minutes, religiously eating away our short breaks between periods and sizable chunks of the next faculty’s class. But that’s how this unique, multi-purpose faculty member was, who taught Organizational Behaviour, Relationship Building, Management Statistics, and French.

Which meant we couldn’t escape interacting with her at least twice a day, much of which was spent playing those insipid profile games that were supposed to discover and bring forth the hidden subconscious you to your class-conscious fore. I never understood how my invisible personality bits would be of any interest to anyone or, for that matter, my pathetic personal scores on the 16PF. The show went on for some time though, amidst an increasing but withheld discomfort, until I made an issue of it.

“I refuse a discussion of my personality analysis in public,” she declared definitively.

“But they are your classmates, dear,” started ‘Mona Darling’, as we had all by now renamed her after classic Bollywood villain Ajit’s famous moll from the iconic 1970s crime thriller, Zanjeer.

“These insights will help your friends know you better. They are confidence and faith-building measures towards the making of a balanced dream team,” she reasoned.

“Sounds like the preamble of a marriage bureau! I refuse to part with my privacy before strangers. I can’t. The very thought of it is so disconcerting and terrorizing,” I countered aloud.

“That’s the whole purpose of the exercise — to turn rank strangers into understanding buddies, my child.”

“I am not bitten by any ‘desperately seeking friends’ malady, ma’am. I am mature enough to find out my types; these personality scales can’t tell me any better.”

One good thing about being a student at the PG level is that the faculty can never bully you into submission. At the most, they can revert with restrained firmness or conscious avoidance. “Meet me after class,” mooed Mona, before strangulating her next victim. She derived a kind of cathartic pleasure in shredding hitherto hidden frailties in public, trying to emerge as that proverbial agony aunt with a spicy cure for all.

Among the others, the reactions ranged from interested sniggers to a defensive disdain, as evinced by me, though Manish had definitely fallen for her bait. To say he was smitten by her incisive peeks into the personality beyond would be more than apt; after all, he had just finished his fourth consecutive ‘coming out’ session with Ma’am Mona in a week. But he definitely emerged a more self-assured person, charged enough to even approach one of the most difficult girls in class for a relationship. He proposed that Tammy become his sister on the eve of the Rakhi festival, which she readily obliged out of a keenness for the accompanying gift. For brothers, she already had three, though Manish had only one sibling in the form of a biological sister. The tie-up too had happened off-the-cuff, and not as the consequence of any high-brow dramatics.

“You know, Tamanna, my sister also shares the same name,” Manish casually informed her while joining us for tea at his dad’s Madhuban. The always proper-to-the-foil lad consistently remained insistent on being the only one to call ‘our’ Tammy by her actual, registered, parents-given nomenclature.

“Nothing weird, for that’s quite a common name in this part of the globe,” Tammy replied, and not standoffishly.

“But often belonging to uncommon people, rather special persons like you.”

Tammy gave a thoughtful Am I? look before suggesting, “Well, since she is not around, I will tie the rakhi she’s sent for you.” Compliments always made her dole out crazy commitments. A sentimental Manish immediately obliged, for the offer perhaps was a windfall enabling him to reach two targets with one shot.

Courtesy of the rakhi concept, Indian boys are perhaps the only kind in the world who carry offers of brotherhood too on their sleeves for stranger girls, apart from the mandatory love or friendship options, as any other ‘normal’ man from the rest of the globe would.

Always on the lookout for a sister, though the reasons vary from the tame to the inconsistent. Possible options — the lady in question is the sister, neighbour, or best friend of a love interest they can’t gather the guts to propose to; a close confidante or a buddy who’s a girl but not a girlfriend; with the commonest of all being the girlfriend of your best friend.

Safe options. And in Manish’s case, perhaps the first one. After all, Tammy’s roommate was Rosemary. The tie-up sealed, I offered to take them both to my house, a few minutes’ walk down the road from our institute, for an impromptu house party.