Unofficial Mills & Boon Club

  

Small towns have small clubs. I remember telling you about small town guys some time back. This time, let me tell you about a small club called Unofficial Mills & Boon Club.

Three years after I joined as the 17^th member, the club reached its peak with 121 members. Only 23 attended the last meeting though there are 76 members in the book. The founder-member is fond of telling the tale about how she was expelled from a convent school for having two M&Bs in her school-bag. For the generation after hers, it had lost its clandestine character but the books still offered hope and dreams. My first love introduced me to the first one. She told me that it is different, that there is a working class hero and a kid involved. I don’t remember the details. She left but my interest continued.

We meet for an hour at 2 pm, on 2^nd and 4^th Sundays, when we are least likely to be missed at home. In the early days, a rumour spread in town that our club is about free love and loose morals. In those days, girls in jeans and men in shorts had to face the same.

Not much has changed since I joined. Marie or Glucose biscuits and black tea are served before the meeting starts. Someone usually jokes about how it matches with caviar and champagne. The first part of the meeting is a quick review of what people have read. Then, we discuss about what we would like to read in future issues. Once, we sent a letter with these suggestions to the publisher. Since it is an unofficial club, there was some confusion as to who should assume responsibility. In the last part of the meeting, members read their own attempts at writing about love the M&B way.      

I am a back-bencher in these meetings. I like to listen, remain silent and relax. At times, I don’t even listen. Swathi used to sit next to me. She joined a few years back. We rarely talk during the meetings. After the meeting, we walk together till the market where she turns right and I go straight. Given the state of the roads, it is tough to talk while walking. She has a nervous charming girlish smile. It is her delicate face that captivated me and, of course, her eyes. I am not sure when we started exchanging notes during the meeting.

I have a notebook for these meetings. We jot down our notes in this. We did not touch on home or work. We wrote about the places we have visited, the people we met there, about what we observed, about relationships and light anecdotes. We started writing about the places we wanted to visit and the kind of people we wanted to meet. I would write about Macau and the casinos. She would ask if I would go alone or with company, then she would ask for details about the game I would like to play, why blackjack and not roulette. She would then write about visiting Simla. I have never been there and I would ask for the details. The notebook would pass silently from one hand to the other.

Then, we wrote about a place where we were together. A cottage by Kodaikanal Lake, sitting on the porch at night, watching the hotel staff light a bonfire. We would go for a late-night walk around the lake, or stand against those thick trees with branches drooping to touch the water. I would try to write about what she would like to read. I would lie about what I liked. I guess she did the same. We wrote about marriage and how we would give space to each other. We never got to kids. At each meeting, we would continue from where we stopped or start on a fresh day, a new morning or another night there.

We kept on writing, meeting after meeting, till that day she stopped coming to the Club. I could have got her address and her phone number from the Club register but I did not. I wondered if I had written something wrong. I checked in my notebook, in our story. I could not find anything amiss. I was worried if she was sick. I waited for her to send a message to me.

After the second meeting without her, I found two men waiting for me outside the meeting room. One, a lean man with intense eyes introduced himself as Vishnu and the other as Arjun. The latter remained silent eyeing me suspiciously from head to toe.

Vishnu informed me that they are friends of Swathi’s family. I blurted, ‘Where’s she? Is anything wrong?’

‘She is missing. 3 weeks now…’ Vishnu replied. I leaned against the wall, numb and shocked. He continued, ‘It is not the first time…the last two times, she returned after a week or two. This time, too…we waited…we searched her room once again. We came across this, hidden quite well between old books.’ He gave me a thick diary. I scanned the pages. It was a love story she had written on her own. I could make out that it was written with the typical M&B formula and I smiled.

‘What are you smiling for?’ Arjun asked.

‘This is what this Club is about…’ I tried to explain.

‘Just a story, is it, and not about you?’ he queried rather aggressively. I shook my head but he did not look convinced. ‘It talks about a guy telling the girl to escape from her house…to him…’

‘Look, mister…’ I responded, then controlled my anger and turned to Vishnu, ‘why did you come here…to me?’

‘She gets out of her house…outside her room…only…for these meetings.’ Vishnu paused before continuing, ‘…we asked some of the members here and they told us that you are kind of close to Swathi…’

‘Too close…’ Arjun added. ‘What have you done to her, man?’

I stared at them, unable to speak, clenching my fists, rage controlled only by my own thoughts about Swathi.

Vishnu moved to stand between me and Arjun.

He told me, ‘I think you know where she is.’

‘No.’ I said and walked away from them.

A cottage by Kodaikanal Lake, sitting on the porch at night, watching the hotel staff light a bonfire. We would go for a late-night walk around the lake, or stand against those thick trees with branches drooping to touch the water. We would continue from where we stopped or start on a fresh day, a new morning or another night there.