‘I just finished some work and took care of Nani. She has caught a stomach bug. How was your day?’ He was always keener to make me talk.
‘Nothing major, I was free as usual. No work for me!’ I laughed a fake laugh, but he could see through me. He knew that I wanted to get back to the work life soon.
‘Work will happen in its due course. You should just take care of your health and relax.’
‘I know. I am relaxing as much as I can. How is Tamanna? She called me and I missed it. When I called her back, she didn’t pick up . . . must have been busy,’ I said.
Even though Tamanna and Piyush fought all the time, I knew now that they loved each other. Their fights are their way of telling each other how much they care. If only I had known it then . . .
‘They are good. I spoke to Piyush a few hours ago. They are super busy with Adira. Wooow . . .’ this was when Samba jumped on him to say hello to me.
‘Hey baby, how are you?’ I asked Samba and saw Ronnie’s shoulders stiffen. I realized that my words had caused unnecessary confusion. They were not meant for him and when I saw him react, it made me feel bad. It was all unintentional, I was not playing games but I had noticed his reaction so I had to set things straight.
‘I didn’t mean you,’ I clarified stupidly and he nodded.
‘Did you do something new? Painted today?’ he asked. I had taken up painting for the past few days. It was a new hobby, and I was really bad at it but Ronnie didn’t care. He loved all my paintings. I wondered how bad a judge of art one had to be to come to such a conclusion.
‘Nah! I tried to but I was not inspired enough,’ I told him and added, ‘I made a new friend, by the way. He lives across the street. His name is Siddharth.’
I saw his face change colour but he schooled his expression in an instant after it gave him away, cleared his throat, and said, ‘Great! So how is he?’
‘I don’t know yet; we had a very funny encounter which involved a drone.’ I giggled and told him what had happened. Surprisingly, he looked a little off but was happy that I was happy. I knew him to be protective and jealous at times but now that we were not together, I did not know why I felt a little hurt with his lack of emotion. Maybe I wanted him to get jealous. It was a little twisted of me, to say the least; I wanted him to want me, and yet I wanted him to move on. I wanted him to tell me he still loved me and then I wanted to reject his love by telling him that I had fallen out of love. Maybe I wanted some revenge or maybe I was still in love with him and just pretending not to be.
I shook my head; it was all so confusing!
‘You should talk to people more and try and go out a little after the lockdown is lifted,’ he told me, sounding genuine.
‘Ya, I will,’ I replied absent-mindedly. I will make new friends, I will go out and live my life again, I told myself again after the phone call ended. He had to go and attend to Nani. She was unwell.
I prayed for Nani before pulling my covers over my head. I recalled my time in her house as her PG. The woman was strong and deserved to live a longer and healthier life.
At around ten at night, after tossing in bed for ages, trying to concentrate on a random book on my Kindle, I stretched my arm and picked up the folded paper with Siddharth’s number on it. I traced my fingers on the lazily scribbled numbers. It was a little late but I decided to drop him a Hi.
Me: HI, ADIRA HERE
To say that I was not impatient would be wrong. I was impatient. For the last several months, people who had come to me were all known to me. They knew the pre-accident Adira. I could never un-see the pity, the sorrow, the comparisons in their eyes, even Mummy’s. I needed someone who would see me as me and talk to me about things without knowing what I had gone through. Therefore I felt that I needed to make new acquaintances and I needed to find new friends.
While I was waiting for Siddharth’s response, I received a few baby pictures from Tamanna. Baby Adira engrossed me as she was adorable and my best friend was a hands-on mommy. I smiled watching their antics. Siddharth had still not responded.
Adira
Siddharth, or Sid as he had asked me to call him, is a fun guy. He made me laugh and I heard my laughter echo in the room after ages. I felt like myself again after just one phone call. I am no fool and realized that he was interested in me. However, I made it clear from the word go that I was looking only for friendship with him. Times were tough and I am not only referring to my accident but also to the state of everyone around me. COVID came like a hurricane and uprooted everything. While I was mostly at home, the thrice-a-week visits to my psychotherapist were also cancelled. I was still better off as my mother had funds and papa still transferred a good amount of money to my savings account as my ‘pocket money’. I never touch it, but I know it is there if needed.
Sid was like a breath of fresh air in my life. He reminded me of no one in particular and yet he felt like a friend I’d always had. He was shy like Ronnie at times and bashful like Piyush. He gave me my privacy just like Tamanna and was eager to know everything like my mother. After talking to him, I did miss my old life a little more and I had this strange nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to talk to Ronnie. I could not pinpoint the exact reason why I felt the need to talk to him at two in the night, especially after I had decided on my own to create a little space between us, but I did and there was no reason to it. I checked my phone for a message from him. Would he message me so late at night? I wondered what he was doing at this hour. He was most likely sleeping, with Samba. Ronnie had this habit of slightly drooling while he was asleep, and I loved lifting his chin to close his mouth as he slept. I do not know why but a smile appeared on my face thinking of him splayed across the bed, his arms in all directions and his mouth open enough to let a fly in and out. I could always envision him sleeping peacefully, I could hear his soft breaths and feel his warm arm under my head. No matter how much one tries to get someone out of their head, their heart betrays them. That was exactly what was happening to me. No matter who came into my life, everything reminded me of Ronnie and us. There was no message from him, I stared at the phone for a few moments as my fingers hovered over his number on the screen. I finally gave in; one has to listen to their heart at times and that was exactly what I was doing—I was listening to my heart.
While we forgive others, we need to forgive ourselves too.
We need our own forgiveness as much as we need air to breathe.
Ronnie
It was like 2017 again. I felt a pang of jealousy creep in and flush my face and neck. Time and again, I had told myself that I would let her choose and not influence her choice. I wanted her to come back to me, to remember what we had and give those feelings another chance and I was happy to do that at her pace. I had warned my heart more than a few times that there was a possibility of Adira not taking me back, of her never reciprocating my love and it was okay for her to do so. But that was the moment when I realized how easy it is to feel strong and in control when the situation is hypothetical. The moment another person stepped into the scene, my walls crumbled like a cookie. I was exposed, my feelings were out there to be hurt and despite her telling me that he looked like a friendly guy who meant no harm, I knew the effect she had on me. If I could lose myself in her, someone else could, too. She is the kind of girl many dream of.
It was very easy for me to pretend that there was no other person around her, but her mother and her encounter with Siddharth was one-off because somewhere deep within me, I believed that her moving on from me was not a possibility. We loved each other and we were meant to be—this was embedded in my heart.
However, the mere mention of another guy who approached her for her phone number brought back the insecure Ronnie. ‘Love needs to be giving’, ‘love is forgiving’ and love means to be happy for your loved one even if that means staying out of her life—this is all crap! As she chatted and told me about how it all happened, I tamed my face to look neutral. My hands curled into fists and
I could feel my nails digging into my flesh, nearly drawing blood. She looked happy and I was not happy for her. Am I ashamed that I was not feeling the love books tell us about? No! I am not ashamed for feeling the most human feeling. I was feeling jealous and angry and that was love for me. I have always imagined her happiness with me. I knew that I was being a selfish jerk who was only thinking of his happiness but isn’t this how humans are? No matter how many times the world tells us, no matter how many times romantic books and songs feed into our heads that true love means to be happy for your loved ones, whether or not we are a part of their lives, we still want their happiness to begin and end with us. We are selfish for we cannot see them happy without us, we cannot find happiness in their happiness alone. I am no different, I am no saint. I want her, I want us; and this new development in her life, even though it was a happy one for her, was not leading towards a ‘Happy Us’. And so, I was upset.
When Adira called me, I was over the moon. The conversation started well and slowly it drifted towards Rohit and Sagarika.
‘I never heard from either of them,’ Adira told me and I went silent for a moment as I knew. I knew that they had been missing but I also knew the reason why. Since the night of the accident, Rohit had time and again repeated that he was responsible for what happened to Adira. Had he taken charge of the situation, things would not have gone so badly. She would not have been lying on the road losing blood. No matter how much I tried to tell him that there are sometimes bigger things at play and we have no control over everything, he couldn’t bear to face her.
Sagarika on the other hand had been trying really hard to save her marriage with Rohit. They have been seeking therapy in Delhi and hardly have the time and patience to entertain friends and relatives. As family, we are all trying to give them the space and support that they need to come out of the situation stronger than before. Their start-up, too, was facing the brunt of their domestic issues and had lately become difficult for them to manage.
‘They have some issues; they need to sort those out. It’s nothing against you,’ I told Adira and added, ‘I, too, just get a customary message nowadays from Rohit every Diwali and on my birthday. He is a different person now.’
‘People change; I have changed so much, too. We have all grown up,’ Adira responded and then steered the conversation towards Sid.
I have never been good at hiding what is going on inside me. She could always read me like a book and I love that about her. My happiness morphed into angry jealousy somewhere in the middle of the call and I became quiet.
‘Are you upset that I talk to him?’ Adira asked and I wanted to scream ‘Yes!’ But that would have been wrong on my part. Even in the state of mind that I was in, I knew it. ‘No! I think you should talk to people more and try and go out a little after the lockdown is lifted,’ I said to her as I patted Samba. He had fallen into a deep slumber and was now snoring.
‘Samba has gone to sleep and I need to check on Nani, too. Shall I call you tomorrow morning?’ I told her and waited with bated breath for her response. Did she want to talk to me the next day? I had to find out. Talking to her all of a sudden felt the same way it felt when I used to talk to her in college—there was an undefinable anticipation, wait, and a sense of insecurity.
‘Ya, I will sleep in some time too,’ I could hear a smile as she answered. I switched the call to video mode and she switched over. She looked tired with puffy eyes, the room was dark and all I could see clearly was her face bathed in the light from her phone.
‘Goodnight, love you,’ I said, just as I did every night. Every night she just replied with a ‘Goodnight’ or sometimes added ‘Sweet dreams’ and it was enough for me. But not today, I knew that I had been wrong in the past and was getting punished for my own mistakes. But for once I wanted to hear her say that she loved me too. She didn’t. She just looked at me, with her big, brown, almond-shaped eyes and whispered a throaty ‘Goodnight.’
Unable to think rationally, and not wanting to spoil what was left between us, I disconnected the call. I covered my face with my hands and rubbed my palms over my eyes. A desperate groan escaped my mouth. The world was falling apart for me; the lockdown had taken my parents to a place from where they just could not catch a flight. There were barely enough flights and people fleeing different countries were ready to pay any amount of money to get back home. My parents decided to stay over to help my sister, Nani was so unwell, and I was utterly lonely.
In one’s teenage years, we feel that our friends are all that we need, we take the family for granted and the perks that come with living with one’s family are not even counted as perks. In a nutshell, we are privileged. But as life happens, your friends move on and they make their own families. That is when you know that friends are not all that we need. We need more—we need our families, we need a partner, we need home-cooked food, we also need our father’s lectures, mother’s cuddles, grandparents’ wisdom-laden anecdotes—a routine in life and so much more.
I missed my parents a lot every time they went to the UK to help their other child, my sister. But never in my life had I been so emotionally drained due to their absence, because every time they went, I knew that if need be I could join them or they me—it is only a seven-hour flight. But it was no longer a seven-hour flight; they were in a different country and we just could not be there for each other. In the same way, I could not be there for Adira no matter how much I wanted to, as she was in another state and the lockdown would keep us apart.
I took Samba to his bed and then walked over to mine. The dog has a serious problem; he just needs to cuddle and thus we eventually ended up in my bed, snuggling. He started snoring again as soon as his head hit the bed but I could not. I was having one of those moments when you seriously want to sleep but your brain has other ideas. The past kept replaying itself in my head and bothering me.
At midnight, I picked up my phone to check the time. Before I could turn the screen off, a number flashed across the screen. It was my Nani’s nurse.
‘Bhaiya, Nani is unwell and they are taking her to the hospital. They suspect COVID. I will have to go into isolation too if it is COVID,’ she said, out of breath as if she was running.
‘Who is taking her to the hospital? Don’t take her anywhere, I am coming over.’ I panicked and Samba woke up startled next to me.
‘You cannot, bhaiya. Curfew is in place and the ambulance is here. They won’t even let me go with her,’ she reasoned.
‘I am making a video call on this number, please do not let anyone take her, okay? She has cancer, did you tell them?’ I asked, but she had disconnected the call. Frantic, I made a WhatsApp video call on the nurse’s number which she picked on the second ring. The video was blurred but I could figure out that she was outside Nani’s house.
‘Where is Nani? Move the camera towards her, please.’ The nurse had a blue mask on. She turned the camera towards an ambulance and I saw Nani hooked on to an oxygen cylinder. Men in PPE kits surrounded her. ‘Take me close to her, let me talk to the doctors, please,’ I begged the nurse.
‘They are not allowing it, bhaiya, they will not hold the phone to avoid contamination. I will ask them in front of you.’ She asked the PPE-clad men what would happen next. They were taking Nani to the nearest government hospital as she was unable to breathe on her own. They suspected a COVID infection and asked the nurse to get tested too. Once Nani recovered, they would inform us when to bring her back home.
‘She has cancer,’ I broke down, telling the nurse to inform them.
‘I have told them, bhaiya, that is why it is more important for her to go and get the necessary care as she has a major underlying condition. She will be okay, don’t worry,’ the nurse consoled me.
As the call disconnected, I felt very uneasy and broken. I didn’t know how to help Nani whom my parents had left in my care. There was a lockdown and COVID protocols. If the doctors suspected COVID, they would not let me see her. It was no use chasing the vehicle as
that would be illegal. I had to call other family members and tell them what little I knew. I texted Piyush and my sister and calls started flooding my phone. Everyone was as worried and clueless as I was. I don’t know when I passed out on the couch, waiting for a call or text from someone.
I woke up at around seven in the morning, my phone had run out of battery and I had a splitting headache. I plugged my phone in and switched it on. As it powered up, I went to the washroom to come back to a buzzing phone. It was an unknown landline number from Delhi.
The pain, anger, loneliness, hurt are a part of me now. Their presence is constant and I only feel detached from them when I sleep.
For when I finally sleep, I feel nothing!
Ronnie
My world came crashing down with that one phone call. Nani was no more. She had suffered a heart failure in her sleep the night they had taken her away. My hands shivered as I tried to make sense of what the person on the other end of the call was saying.
I had lost my Nani! I was to take care of her and last night, as she was being taken from her home, I had hoped that she would be back soon. She and I used to joke so many times about beating cancer and neither of us knew that she would leave us all because of something else. COVID caught us all off guard. I offered a silent prayer to god asking him to give peace to Nani’s departed soul. She was strict and made us work, but that was her being her. She was a strong woman who used to go for her chemotherapy with a smile on her face and later when she could talk, she would make jokes around it.
‘We will cremate her body, it is the protocol . . .’ the person on the other end continued, but I was too deep into the emotional turmoil to fully understand his words and tears started filling my eyes, blurring my vision.
‘But her children would want to do it! We want to see her one last time. My mother is not even in the country . . .’
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