In Love at 58

It was like being hauled up by the time machine and transported almost 40 years back into the teenage.

As it is, Professor Knowall Donothing, KD to the girls and Kamchorwa to the folks back home in Bihar, was feeling the tug for quite sometime.The uneasy sensation of something pushing him back into the youth had started tingling his balding head from the moment that breezy little Dolly, with long black hair, walked into his chamber the other day looking for nothing in particular.

KD had gasped and Dolly had blushed. The campus was abuzz with gossips. Like the little Jack Horner who sat in a corner, KD had pulled out a plum assignment for the breezy little thing.What the assignment was, nobody knew. But everybody knew that it required hours of consultations between the professor and the understudy.

“Probably the assignment has something to do with the impact of art and theatre on the contemporary literature,” guessed Prof. Goodfornothing, who had failed in his latest attempt at convincing Miss Silly Ninkompu about the importance of doing research on the impact of comics on modern management techniques.

Prof. Goodfornothing’s guess was based on the campus grapevine which had received reports of KD and Dolly frequenting defunct art galleries and empty cinema halls.The only time one found KD under public gaze was when he stood before the full-length mirror outside the NCC office combing his thinning hair and looking at himself from different angles. KD had already crossed the point of no-return where public gaze, howsoever intense that might be, did not matter.

Having observed KD attending to toiletry before NCC office’s magic mirror half an hour before the scheduled arrival of Dolly, Callmenot pattawala had picked up the pugnacious habit of asking him if he should order for two cans of coke from the campus canteen.

Coke, comics and disco were the only topics KD was interested in those days, besides, of course, Dolly’s favourite Mills & Boon on which KD could give discourse for hours. The KD-Dolly duo was a living encyclopedia on these subjects with the difference that no guy or gal could dare approach them for an update or a cross-check.

The time machine that had set to work from the day Dolly entered the campus had transformed KD’s appearance completely. The shock of gray that dangled like a rope earlier had turned into jet black, its shape fashioned after Gregory Peck. A denim jeans and jacket had replaced the Jawahar-cut churidar and achkan. And, his tortoise-shell rectangular reading glasses had been discarded for a pair of 22-carat gold-plated Christian Dior.

Dolly’s folks arrived one day from Jhumritalliya to take her back for the prospective groom to see.“Arrey! Yeh to Kamchorwa buzaata hai,” (Behold! He looks like our Kamchorwa) exclaimed Dolly’s dad in ecstasy. Her folks had fixed Dolly’s marriage with KD’s nephew Bobby.

The time machine whirred back, bringing KD to the present.