Shashank will call in an hour. Fingers crossed. Checked email. Still no word from Dufresne on joining dates or exact salary package.

7 p.m.

My life is ruined. My worst fears have come true. I see little point in living any more. Gouri Kalbag will never look at me the same way again. And, as of now, I have my heart solely set aside for her admiration.

Shashank spent forty delighted minutes giving me a blow-by-blow account of my last twenty-four hours on campus. Gouri featured only for ten minutes. However, they were the worst ten minutes possible. The worst ten minutes of my life.

Apparently I was at the party in the common room, sipping vodka and orange juice while chatting up the crowd. My first drink went by without much ado. The second was much faster but, it seems, I was still in control of my faculties. By then other drinkers had begun to notice something unusual with the vodka.

I had not.

I don’t remember any of this. At some point, after my second drink, my brain switched off. Sigh.

According to Shashank, I had just thrown back my second when I suddenly passed out and fell over the TV trolley. The trolley, you will recall, Diary, had been fitted with functioning wheels ever since the Sleepless Warden-Jenna Jameson Anthology incident in January. Unhindered by any friction, it rolled out into the stairwell before anyone noticed. I lay on the floor mumbling incoherently, while everyone ran out to grab the trolley—and the TV—before it proceeded down the stairs. The TV landed on the first floor ‘in a pile of little electronic parts and cathode ray tube fragments’.

Petrified of what would happen if one of the security guards found out that the TV had been destroyed, the mob decided to stash the wreckage in one of the rooms and feign innocence. Since I had led to the loss of the appliance, and was currently sprawled senseless on the floor of the TV room, they decided to dump everything in my room.

Fifteen minutes later, when Shashank returned to pick me up, the room was empty. I was nowhere to be found.

Shashank, thankfully, is a friend who truly cares. He set out to locate me. He found me sitting on the divider on the main road outside. By then I had somehow managed to lose my shirt. As you can understand, Diary, I was not in top shape; preparing for exams and placements left little time for jogging and the gym.

So there I was, wearing only a bright orange lungi, drunk, mumbling senselessly, sitting on the bloody divider in the middle of the road, with a bewildered Shashank standing over me, when Gouri walks by on her way to some bastard’s room in the dorm.

Left with no other option Shashank asked her to help carry me back to my room. Gouri, sweet soul, agreed to help. As they were dragging me back to my room, I … fuck! Fuck! FUCK!!! … threw up.