Book one

I don't know what it is about crushing. The last time I had a serious crush on somebody, I was 13 and he used to sit next to my row except a few benches behind. Each time he asked a question in class or a teacher called out to him, my heart would skip a beat and I'd turn back and gawk at Keshav for as long as it seemed appropriate to do that. I remember looking for every opportunity I could to catch his attention. There was an obese boy in my class called Aditya Shantanu and one time, when I was distributing math papers to everybody, he poked fun at me and I retorted by calling him "dodo." For the couple of days that followed, my crush and his 5 friends continued to tease me by calling me "dodo" and echoing it whenever I happened to be around them. Being the quiet, repressed and bashful child that I was, I would blush and run to my girl friends but turn around to look at my crush one last time before I left his vicinity. 

"338900! 338900! 338900!" exclaimed Keshav as he placed my school calendar in my hands after I'd forgotten it on his desk in the recess. That day, a fortunate stroke of serendipity led him to discover my phone number. The boy I was completely smitten with now had my phone number...