Sex, Lies and Eternal Paranoia: The NLU Club

I first met Arun in my first year. We were both interning with an NGO in Bombay. We had grown up in fairly affluent suburbs of two different metropolitan cities, been introduced to the idea of law school at LST career workshops in each of our high schools and had eventually made it to two different NLUs. Here we were in my home town, teaching underprivileged children, exchanging life goals (lofty) and graphic novels (graphic) for the brief period of one month, after which we would go back to our separate lives in our separate cities across the country from each other. If this were a movie, we would have passed each other as two friendly ships in the night, but this was not a movie. Meeting Arun was actually my initiation into a club I didn’t yet know existed - the tiny, occasionally claustrophobic, frequently incestuous, unfailingly frightening NLU community – and this was not the last time I was going to meet him.

But I didn’t know that yet.

Arun and I got along excellently. Having grown up in different cities and gone to different schools, we had no common friends so we were foreign countries to each other. He went to one of the older NLUs, I to another, and being too junior in our respective colleges to have cultivated much chest-thumping loyalty we happily swapped all sorts of information in an unbiased fashion. We compared our respective colleges’ food (terrible), our CLAT ranks (close), our ambitions (animal rights’ activist and famous litigator respectively). When we discovered that we both loved the Sandman novels, our friendship was sealed for evermore. Or so we thought.

A couple of weeks after I’d returned to college, a senior came up to me during the lunch break and said “I went to school with Arun, cool guy.” A ten minute conversation later, it was arranged that I would be going to Ambagarh for the weekend with “some of the guys”. Ambagarh is a nondescript town a few hours from college, famed only for a Shiva temple that we would certainly not visit. I was going to be with some of the oldest, coolest biker dudes in my college and I was elated; I was a part of The Club! And all thanks to good ol’ Arun. I thought fondly of Arun and mentally thanked him. The elation did not last; in those two days, I fell off a horse, broke Arun’s friend’s camera and drunkenly hit on his girlfriend. We had to return to college early and the guys were not pleased. Over the next week, everyone in college heard of my stupidities. Arun was given a terse report of my uncoolness, which he must have greatly enjoyed, because he told everyone from my home town in his class about it. Among those people were my classmates from school – a couple of good friends and a girl I had had a crush on since Class 7 (What? My loyalty is old fashioned) who we will now call “Crush”.

The two good friends called me to inform me that: 1. I was an idiot and 2. Arun was a creep for slandering my good name before Crush. I was hurt that Arun would seek to gain social currency against my humiliation and annoyed that out of all the people in his class, he would choose my soulmate (shut up) to snitch to. Seeing no other way to vent my frustration, I decided to hit below the belt. “Hah, he thinks he is one big person, but his CLAT Rank was 45 less than mine” I said snidely to my friends and sniggered. My friends dutifully sniggered with me and as per NLU-Club protocol, faithfully went back and informed Arun of my jibe. If Arun had begun plotting for my death yet, I didn’t know because I was also, by this time, preparing for a major moot court competition whose speaking rounds were coming up quickly.

Do you know what happens when two months of hard work culminate in a moot win? You go berserk, and so we did, at the after-party. There was an open bar – whose genius idea was that, by the way? – and very little light on the dance floor, and one way or another I got to talking to a girl from the semifinalist team about the finer points of my argument, and at some point, ably assisted by alcohol – whose great idea was the open bar, you said? – we were, how shall I put this, caught in a passionate embrace (thanks, Mills & Boon!) before an amused and attentive audience of my brethren, who I was joyfully oblivious to. The next morning I awoke, my head populated by a thousand tiny men wielding jackhammers and got busy getting on a train back in college. Stories of my indiscretions had reached college before me (of course) and I was fully expecting to be ragged about them. I wouldn’t have minded that; pretty sure I’d have quite liked it in fact. What actually happened was that I was hauled before the Disciplinary Committee for violation of my college’s Honour Code in my capacity as representative of my institution at a moot court competition. When I had finished my awkward attempt to defend quasi-sexual activity before the 300 year old Proctor and Vice Chancellor, I pieced together the back story with my friends’ help.

The girl who had starred in my Night of Passion was, impossibly, Arun’s ex-girlfriend. My team’s liaison officer at the hosting college was, impossibly, Arun’s best friend. The result of these impossibilities was that a letter was soon drafted with the girl’s consent, addressed to my University, alluding darkly to all sorts of misbehaviour on my part due to which my college’s reputation had been lowered in their eyes. The Proctor promptly issued me a notice to ‘show cause’ and kindly sent one copy home. My father, in turn, called me and reduced my cell phone to a smoking pile of scrap metal solely with his venom; worse, he refused to arrange for me a promised internship with Big Shot Litigator because of my bad behaviour. I had been counting on this internship as the first step to black-robed stardom and would now have to intern with a *shudder* corporate firm instead. Arun’s memory turned to soot in my mind.

This was war.

Fast forward one month, I walked into the intern room of the firm only to see – who else – the man himself, seated insolently at a desk. This should have been impossible since I? already knew he had failed two papers (next post: “The Law School Grapevine”) and should not have been able to get this internship, but – “The partner is my uncle.” – ah, of course. I approached him and said in my snidest tones, “I thought you were going to be a wildlife activist.” to which he said equally coldly, “I thought you were going to be a litigator.” Overwhelmed by each other’s wit, we fell to silence and spent the rest of the internship trying to get each other in trouble. The internship ended; I got excellent reviews and a callback, and Arun got shortchanged because his tracking Associate was a good friend of mine. I celebrated by going back to my PG and attempting to share my smug joy with my only roommate; I was rebuffed (he was Arun’s ex’s current boyfriend’s best friend and uh, yeah, he’d heard about me, no, he didn’t want a cigarette, thanks, you creep.)

Arun retaliated by returning to college and promptly getting into a relationship with Crush.

I found out when my best friend (studying at an NLU neither Arun nor I go to) called me and said dude, do you know Crush is now going out with Arun. How do you know! I said, clutching my chest. I know because my Rakhi sister’s own brother is Crush’s Rakhi brother and she tells him everything, said my friend. No escaping it, then, I thought glumly, for if it came from the Rakhi brother of the sister of the Rakhi brother of Crush, it must be an indisputable fact indeed. I sighed and proceeded with the rest of my life, although it were but sordid and joyless in the aftermath of my heartbreak. Well done, Arun, I thought gamely, in my mind, well played.

A few months later Arun and I faced off at the same corporate firm again. One short, bloody battle later I got the job and he didn’t. We went our separate ways and I forgot about him until a year later when I saw him across the negotiating table from my team, representing another firm on a deal. When we were introduced, he simply said, “Oh we’ve been introduced before” and ostentatiously refused to offer me his card. If not for this, there would have been no evidence of our strange history that spanned three law schools and five years. An epic story. Like Veer-Zara, but without Priety Zinta.

The star of this long and torturous story, however, is neither him nor me; it is the tiny, terrible club we belong to by virtue of studying in an older NLU. Arun and I would have continued in blithe ignorance of each others’ idiocies if his classmate had not been my senior, my crush had not been his classmate, his classmates had not been my classmates, my indiscretion had not been his ex-girlfriend, her friend and my liaison officer not been his best friend, his uncle not been a partner at the firm, my friend not been his tracking associate and my best friend not been his girlfriend’s Rakhi brother’s sister’s Rakhi brother. The whole thing reeks of impossibility to outsiders – indeed, I would have laughed at the preposterousness of it but a few short years back – but today, even though I know that in theory, a tally of parallel batches of NLU students would add up to a few hundred people, I have come to suspect that the entire NLU community is actually populated by only about ten people and that you will spend your entire life coming in contact with only these ten people. If you encounter anyone else, he/she will be either their husband, wife, boss, best friend, girlfriend or boyfriend.

And they will know everything about you.

This theory makes Facebook more interesting and gossip more salacious. In turns, it disgusts you, depresses you and frightens you. Eventually you develop a reluctant affection for it (Google “Stockholm Syndrome”), but you never stop looking over your shoulder to see if anyone’s watching you screw up, because you are a paranoid wreck.

…all of which is a long way of saying, “This is why I blog anonymously.” HELL yes.

Source: Bar & Bench