Half Girlfriend

There isn’t much to see in Dumraon. Yet, she found everything
exotic.
‘Sueh cute roads,’ she said, as we walked along the narrow
chicken-neck path outside my house.
‘You should see them in the monsoon. Not so cute then,’ I said.
We came to the Shakti Cyber Cafe. A bunch of local guys sat
before dusty computers.They pretended to look at news websites, even
though they were probably downloading porn from other open tabs.
‘Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”,’ she said as she opened
YouTube.
Hungry for you, foolish for you, I thought.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘What?’ she said as the video took time to load.
‘I thought of something in English.’
‘Excellent. What?’
I quickly shook my head and watched the video.
‘You want subtitles?’ Riya said. It was magical how she could sense
what I wanted even before I thought of it.
I nodded. She had already picked a video with subtitles.
Steve Jobs had founded Apple Computers. He had competed with
Bill Gates of Microsoft, the man who I had to give a speech to. It was a
perfect situation in which to use a word I had learnt in English classes
—ironic.
Steve, a thin, balding white guy in graduation robes, stood on a
podium at Stanford University. I listened to the speech and read the
subtitles.
‘I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest
I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you
three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.’
I was immediately hooked. I didn’t know this guy but I liked him
in seconds.
He spoke about how he was born to an unwed mother who had
put him up for adoption. A CEO of a major global company speaking