It was another lazy afternoon, Aakash was lying flat in his room sleeping as 2^nd half was a GT.His slumber was disturbed by the gtalk notification sound, someone had messaged him.

“Ah…… “,he thought. Should have logged out before I went to sleep. He woke up to see who it was.

It was Priyanka, his pen friend, he had never met her but still she was a very good friend of his. The message said,

“Hi, u there?”

“No”, he replied and went back to sleep.

“Ah cmon how much do u sleep? Today also there’s a GT isn’t it? All u people do is hit GTs and sleep”, came her reply.

“All hard working people deserve a break and we don’t hit GTs everyday”

“Yeah right” she said.

Aakash was a B.Tech student in IIT Kanpur pursuing his degree in Computer Science, computer geek that he was, he had met Priyanka on Orkut and since then they had become very good friends.

Aakash was a very introvert kind of guy. He loved reading, particularly fantasy novels and was a hardcore Harry Potter fan. He was a nerd to be precise and hardly had any friends, not that he didn’t want them, it was just the fact he didn’t talk too much. So, having Priyanka as a friend was very special for him, for she was one who kept talking and talking he loved listening to her, many a time he would remain quite for so long that she would ask if he is still there.

Everything was going very smoothly for Aakash. He was the topper of his class, every professor liked him and he was beginning to make new friends. Suddenly one day Priyanka disappeared from orkut and when he mailed her no reply came, even her mobile no. was not reachable.

It took him a few days for him to exhaust all possibilities of finding her and telling himself that he would not get to see her ever. After that he grew cynical over the attitude of girls and as far as possible avoided talking to them. He concentrated on his studies and nothing else. His CGPA at the end of the four years was 9.35 and he also had scored 99.94% in GATE which ensured him admission at IIT Delhi for his M.Tech. All this success had helped him forget Priyanka and he had become more sensible and started behaving normally and after a very long time he was happy again.

At IITD he met a girl named Ishita, his classmate in the M.Tech course. They became friends and they came very close to each other and Ishita had even started to love him by the end of the two years. When she finally made up her mind to tell Aakash she asked him to meet her one day.

“I wanted to talk to you about something”, she said.

“Talk……why are you behaving so formal?”, replied Aakash.

“Err…….I don’t know how to begin”, she said confused.

“What are you so afraid about……….as if you are going to say ‘I love you’”, he said and chuckled at his own joke.

“Shut up, can’t you be serious sometimes?”

“Hmm what do you think of girls?”, she asked.

“You really want to know?”he aksed.

“Yes”.

Then Aakash told him all about Priyanka and how after that episode he had started believing that all girls are mean and he would never be able to love any other girl.

If Ishita was shocked and devastated she didn’t show it, for she diverted the topic to some other conversation. But as soon as she reached her room, she flung herself on her bed and started crying. She couldn’t think what she would do. She had to make him believe that all girls were not like Priyanka. She was struck with an idea, it seemed implausible but she had to try.

She turned on her computer and logged onto gmail.com and entered the user id as the email of Aakash.Then came the hard part, what was his password. She knew he was a hardcore Harry Potter(HP) fan and even his profile pic on orkut was HP only. She started trying the names of the characters and places in the HP series but every time it said incorrect password. She was about to give up when she entered “balderdash”* as the password and the Inbox opened.

Delighted, she searched his chat history for Priyanka and read all his chats with her. She knew what she had to do. That day in the evening when Ishita met him, she told him.

“I am Priyanka”.

“What??.....Yeah right and I am Shahrukh Khan, nice to meet you”, he commented.

“I am serious”, she said and then started telling him everything she had learned about his friendship with Priyanka from his chats which made Aakash believe that she was indeed Priyanka.

“But your name is Ishita right” asked Aakash.

“Oh c’mon, Priyanka was just an alias”.

“But why didn’t you tell me before”, he asked.

“I didn’t recognize you were the same Aakash”.

“I don’t believe you completely, I need time to think over this, leave me alone for some time”.

“OK” she said and left.

He went to his room unable to think and confused. He turned on his computer, his best friend and decided to check his mail as Google had contacted him for a job and he was in between negotiations with them. He opened his gmail account and was checking his mail when suddenly he saw something at the bottom of the page, it read

“Last account activity 5 hours ago,IP 122.168.191.147”.

“What the hell? “he thought. He hadn’t opened his account for 2 days.”No problem “ he thought. He used his skills to track down that IP to the local network IP of IITD.What he found out was shocking…..it was Ishita’s IP, he remembered her IP because she always connected to his DC++ hub. He figured out what had happened but he wanted to hear it from her. So the next day he called her and asked her to meet him.

“You broke into my gmail account yesterday?” he asked.

“What??......Nooooo……I mean yes”, she wasn’t surprised that he had found out, when Aakash was concerned with computers, the sky was the limit.

“And may I ask why?”

“Haven’t you figured it out?”she asked.

“So I have but I want to hear it from you”.

“Cause I Love you, you dumb”.

“And here I thought no girl will love me ever” wondered Aakash.

“You never gave them a chance”, she said.

“Poor them, lucky you” he said and both of them burst out laughing. After that they got married and lived happily ever after.

Happys Ending.

*balderdash is the password to the Gryffindor common room in the fourth book in the HP series.