by Nikita Singh
Laila suddenly gasped and pulled back. She jerked away from him, breathing heavily, trying to catch her breath. She felt as if she had just run a mile. Her throat felt raw, her eyes dry. All he did was pull me towards him, that’s all, she told herself. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
‘Is everything okay?’ JD asked uncertainly. His face was scrunched up in confusion as he studied her. ‘I mean, did I do someth—’
‘No!’ Laila breathed hastily. ‘No. You were fine.’
‘Then what—?’
‘Nothing,’ Laila said, plastering a forced smile on her face that she hoped would fool JD. She looked up at him briefly and nodded, as if that would assure him that all was well. ‘I’ve got to go now. Thanks for … bringing us home.’
‘Yeah,’ JD whispered, frowning. ‘Laila…’
Before he said any more, Laila got out of the car and crossed the street to her house. She opened the gate slowly, trying to minimize the screeching, and once inside, she turned back and waved JD bye, still pretending that all was well. He waved back unsurely, looking at her in confusion. When he didn’t drive away, Laila turned her back to him and walked away. However, she didn’t actually enter her house just yet. She knelt on the small patch of grass outside, trying to compose herself. A few minutes later, she heard JD’s car pull away. After he was gone, Laila put her face in her palms and closed her eyes.
Will this never end?
11
LOSERS
‘How the fuck are you asleep?’ Laila said as she walked in through the front door and threw her keys on the drawer against the wall. ‘This could potentially have been our biggest milestone so far for Cookies + Cupcakes. Bring out the tequila.’
‘I’m tired,’ Maahi mumbled, her face hidden in the sofa.
‘Get up!’ Laila went over and sat on top of Maahi, who was lying face down.
‘What are you doing?’ Maahi groaned.
‘I’ll just sit on you till you get up.’
‘I don’t mind. You’re not heavy and I’m getting a free back massage. Could you give me a shoulder massage too?’
‘Fine. Three minutes of sitting on your back and a shoulder massage. But then you have to get up and make me that disgusting ice cream cocktail thing from the other night,’ Laila said, squeezing Maahi’s shoulder. ‘Deal?’
‘Deal.’
Laila massaged Maahi’s shoulder, squeezing it extra hard to annoy her, but Maahi seemed to like it. They were quiet for three minutes, sitting in the light of a lone lamp by the dining room door, which made the room look a sickly green. Laila tried to focus on the moment and not let her thoughts drift back to what happened with JD just moments ago. She needed Maahi’s help to distract herself from it, but she couldn’t actually tell Maahi anything, or else it would become a whole thing.
Three minutes later, Laila ceased squeezing and began pounding Maahi’s back lightly. ‘Get up, get up, get up,’ she sang.
‘Fine,’ Maahi moaned. ‘Fine!’
Laila got off Maahi and they both went to the kitchen. While Laila brought out the tequila, Maahi flipped two glasses on the counter and started scooping ice cream into them. ‘Do you think we’re going to get it?’ she asked, yawning.
‘The account with Roast House?’
‘Hmm.’
‘I hope so,’ Laila said, thinking back to the last few days of preparation and then the party that night. The appreciation and encouragement they’d got from the guests still ringing in her ears. Their phones were constantly buzzing with all the likes and comments their posts had received. ‘I feel good about it, but even if we don’t, we gave it our all. So I’m still satisfied.’
‘Me too. Everyone else was really good too though, so anything can happen. Pour the tequila over these,’ Maahi said, holding out the glasses. ‘It’s going to be hard work for whoever decides.’
‘That’s why they have a whole team. At least that’s what JD said.’ Laila poured tequila into the glasses, filling up the spaces around the ice cream.
‘He said we won’t know for a while. They’ll meet to tally on Monday. Who knows how long it’ll take them to reach a final decision. Just discussing each of the twenty-seven bakeries that participated is going to take so much time.’
‘Dude, lighten up! This is not ideal 3 a.m. conversation. Especially not with these,’ Laila pointed to the drinks Maahi was stirring on the counter.
‘Right.’ Maahi sighed. She finished mixing the drinks and handed one to Laila.
They walked back to the living room and sat down on the carpeted floor, across from each other with the centre table separating them, their backs resting against the sofas. Laila looked at Maahi apprehensively. It was strange to see her so subdued and quiet, even considering that it was the middle of the night. Maahi had never been very good at masking her emotions. It was just as easy to spot her sorrow as it was her joy or excitement. Laila decided it was best to let her friend be—at least for the moment. If something was bothering her, Maahi usually told Laila herself anyway.
But the vibe only got weirder from there. Laila didn’t want to think about JD, so she needed to be talking, or listening—be actively involved in a conversation in one way or another. Maahi looked exhausted as she sipped her drink slowly. Her eyes were unfocused and she kept sighing. When she didn’t speak at all for the next few minutes, Laila couldn’t take it anymore.
‘What’s going on with you?’ she finally asked.
Maahi looked up from her glass. ‘I miss Siddhant,’ she said shortly, taking another sip of the disgusting cocktail.
Laila nodded slowly. She was unsure how to handle this, of what to say. They usually talked about boys flippantly, without paying them too much attention or taking them too seriously. This, however, seemed serious. Unable to find a way to redirect the conversation, she said, ‘I’m listening.’
Maahi drained the last of her cocktail and said, ‘Let me make another one,’ before going into the kitchen and returning with the bottle of tequila, two tubs of ice cream and a large spoon. She sat back down and began mixing her drink wordlessly, if not a little furiously. It was as if she hadn’t even heard what Laila had said.
Laila was getting genuinely concerned. It wasn’t like Maahi to keep things bottled up; that was Laila’s defence mechanism. Maahi talked things through—that’s how she dealt with her problems. ‘Maahi,’ Laila said.
‘Yes.’ Maahi stopped stirring abruptly and sat back. Her face contorted and she began speaking very fast, in short sentences. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing to say. You were there. You saw what happened. What I did.’
‘Do you think you would do things differently if you could go back?’ Laila asked evenly, unaffected by Maahi’s tone.
‘I can’t go back—that’s not how it works!’
‘Humour me.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course, I would’ve done things differently, especially with Kishan. I wouldn’t have let him back in … after everything …’ Maahi shook her head repeatedly. ‘I’m so stupid, stupid, stupid.’
‘Not with Kishan—he doesn’t matter. I’m talking about Sid. Would you have done things differently with Sid?’
‘I …’ Maahi paused, as if suddenly losing all energy. She shut her eyes as her face screwed up. She threw her head back, chin in the air. Eyes still closed, she muttered, ‘I don’t know. Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t know! It got so messy towards the end with so much going on, I didn’t know what to do, about anything. There was Kishan and Siddhant and Cookies + Cupcakes. I felt so suffocated. I just needed to get out of it. End it. Breathe.’
‘Which you did.’
‘Laila!’
‘Hey, I don’t mean it in a bad way,’ said Laila. She remembered vividly how miserable Maahi had been after ending things with Sid, and the weeks and months leading up to the break up. They had been struggling to set up their first Cookies + Cupcakes shop and Maahi had also been facing a lot of pressure from her family, who then weren’t en
tirely supportive of her decision to open a bakery. To add to that, her relationship with Sid had become increasingly strained because despite being so much in love with each other, they were both setting up their careers and simply hadn’t made enough time for each other. Sid had just finished medical school and was interning at AIIMS, which was all-consuming, and Maahi had started college and was also working tirelessly to set up a start-up. It simply wasn’t the best time for a new relationship to develop.
No matter how hard they tried, there were more and more disappointments and letdowns. The final nail in the coffin was the return of Maahi’s ex-boyfriend, Kishan, the only other man she had ever truly loved. When she was eighteen, Maahi had moved to Bangalore and enrolled in an engineering college to be close to him, and when he had left her, it had destroyed her. She hadn’t seen it coming, and was completely blindsided. She had returned to Delhi and built back her life from the ground up. And then he had reappeared, a few years later, and disrupted everything.
‘Listen, I was there and I saw what was happening,’ Laila said. ‘You hated the power that Kishan had over you, but you got sucked into it all over again. I don’t blame you for it; love is complicated that way. But think about it—if we remove Kishan from the equation altogether, do you think staying with Sid would’ve been a good idea with things going the way they were?’
‘You mean, did Siddhant and I still have a chance if I hadn’t cheated on him by kissing that asshole Kishan?’ Maahi said angrily.
‘You didn’t cheat on Sid. You didn’t kiss Kishan. Stop beating yourself up for it. That dude messed you up. He did it once before, years ago, and he did it again last year. He confused you and took advantage of the way you felt about him. Right from the beginning—you were a teenager when you first met, he was five years older than you. He manipulated you!’
‘It’s not quite that black and white. He didn’t do anything against my will. I was an adult and I was in love with him, I was actively involved in everything—all the bad decisions I made, all the dumb things I did—everything. He never made me do anything.’
‘I’m sure that’s the way you see it,’ Laila said. ‘Maybe he sees it that way too. But the truth is that he was selfish and unkind and he always put himself first. You were never a priority to him, which is really sucky. You should be a priority to a person who claims to be in love with you. You did all of that because you were in love with him, but what did he do for you? You moved away from your family, moved all the way from Ghaziabad to Bangalore when you were eighteen, joined a college you didn’t actually want to for a course you weren’t actually interested in, just so you could be closer to him when he moved to Bangalore for work. And what did he do? He didn’t stop you. He knew you didn’t want to be an engineer, but he was selfish. And once he settled down in his new job, met new people, made new friends, how long did it take him to get rid of you?’
‘Laila!’
‘I don’t mean to sound like a bitch. I’m just telling it like it is. He left you, and didn’t care about what it did to you. It took you years to recover. And when you finally had things back on track and you were finally starting to be happy, that pathetic loser, he returned and fucked everything up for you all over again. He knew you were engaged to Sid; he knew you needed to concentrate on the bakery you worked your ass off to build; he knew things were stressed in your family, he knew you were vulnerable and defenceless, but he didn’t care about any of that because he never cared about you. He only cared about himself, and what he wanted. And that shameless piece of shit, that manipulative, devious lowlife, he went ahead and ruined your life once again.’
‘He didn’t mean to … He apologized and he told me he still loved me,’ Maahi said softly, her expression pained, her voice lacking conviction.
‘Stop fucking defending him! You see what he does to you? You’re stupid when it comes to him. You, the wonderful, smart, talented human being who never loses hope in the toughest of times and is always vibrant and kind and caring—he turns you into this anxious, obsessive mess and you don’t even realize it. Damn Kishan with his mind games and arrogance. He constantly put you down, never appreciated anything you did, made fun of …’ Laila shook her head in frustration. ‘See, this thing—us still talking about him after he’s been out of our lives for so long, I hate it. I hate him.’
‘You’re biased.’
‘Well, yeah. Maybe I hate him more than he deserves to be hated, because I’m on your side. Because I love you, and so I hate him. But you have to agree that most of this hatred is justified.’
Maahi nodded slowly. She’d finally finished mixing the drink, the ice cream completely melted. She passed one across the table to Laila. ‘I hate him too. And never again—he’s toxic, he clouds my judgement, he plays with me, he makes me dumb, I hate myself when I’m with him and I don’t even know it till it’s too late.’
‘Stop talking about him in present tense,’ Laila said, gulping down the warm cocktail that was now more disgusting than ever.
‘Right. He’s dead to me.’
‘Better. Anyway, what I was asking you is—even without Kishan’s rude, unwanted interference in your life, do you think you and Sid were working?’
Maahi swallowed and looked straight at Laila. ‘I love him. I love him, Laila—present tense. Letting Kishan kiss me and then ending things with Siddhant … doesn’t seem like a good decision to me right about now.’
‘You can only look back and judge it clearly now because you’re out of it. When you were in the middle of that mess, it was the only thing to do. Kishan coming back shook the foundation of your relationship with Sid. You couldn’t just get over it in a second. Sid certainly wouldn’t have been able to. Sid and you both needed time apart, with yourselves, to decide how you felt,’ Laila said. She and Maahi hadn’t discussed Kishan or Sid very often since the mess last year, certainly not at this length, but Laila had thought about it a lot and she knew that Maahi had too. ‘I think it was the right decision.’
‘To end things with Siddhant?’ Maahi looked surprised.
‘Yes. It gave you both a possible future. If Kishan could disrupt everything so quickly, both you and Sid knew you clearly weren’t over Kishan for whatever crazy reason. Or maybe you were over him, but not over what he did to you and how it made you feel. In any case, you needed time to sort it out. And again, even taking Kishan completely out of the equation, you guys weren’t working. It was as if Kishan’s return sort of exposed the weaknesses in your relationship with Sid. I’m not saying you weren’t in love, or that it wasn’t real, but we … we often think that it’s in our hand, love. That we can decide what we want and ensure the way it’s going to be. We forget how powerful timing is. It wasn’t the right time for you. If you’d stayed with Sid, it would’ve got worse and worse till you reached a point of no return. You wouldn’t have been able to come back from that. You would’ve started hating each other—resentment, grudges, failed expectations … In a way, Kishan’s return didn’t break the relationship, it just exposed it. It showed you and Sid that both of you weren’t ready just yet.’
‘I think I know that. We wanted to be together, but we were frustrated because we never were around each other enough, and it just wasn’t working … and we wanted it to work so desperately, but neither of us had the time to actually make it work.’
‘It’s like a writer with a beautiful story in his head, sitting in front of a laptop with an empty document. He has thoughts and ideas, his laptop is charged, his pencils are sharpened, his notebook is open, his brain is caffeinated, his stomach is full … but he simply isn’t writing. There’s nothing stopping him, nothing in his way, except fear. Everything’s in place but unless he actually writes, it’s all useless. You guys had all the raw material for a perfect relationship—except time. Neither of you had any. You were both driven people who loved each other, understood each other and wanted a future together, but neither of you had any time. You barely had a chance to talk, let alone meet.
The story was never written.’
Maahi was quiet for a long time after that. Laila could almost see her rehashing everything she had just said in her head. Finally, Maahi sighed and said, ‘You’re a very smart person.’
Laila snorted. ‘I’m glad that’s the conclusion we reached after this long chat. Ooh, wait, I thought of a better analogy—it was like chemistry class—you guys had all the raw materials and chemicals but because there was no interaction, there was no reaction. You’ve got to put it all in a beaker, make them meet, heat it up and what not – that’s the only way there could be magic!’
‘Mmm.’ Maahi made a face. ‘I like the writer one better. I’m not sure that mixing science with magic works.’
They laughed. The room was steadily becoming brighter, the dull light coming through the windows indicating early dawn.
‘I wish we could afford to stay closed tomorrow.’
‘We can’t. We’re poor.’
‘True.’ Maahi pointed at the empty glasses on the table. ‘How much did that last drink suck?’
‘A lot. We’re such losers—on the floor, the second week in a row with our sob stories and tequila!’ Laila laughed. Then she asked Maahi evenly, ‘You’re in touch with Sid, right? You guys ended on decent terms, stayed almost friends?’
‘Not really. It was just unbearable to accept that we’d never see each other, so we decided to stay friends. But we’ve only texted, like, once a month or less so far. We bumped into each other, like, six months ago, I told you. He looked good.’
‘You guys don’t talk now?’
‘Nope. We were cordial that day, smiled, asked each other what’s up, but I don’t know … After that, it was just too awkward to text. He hasn’t texted either.’ Maahi pursed her lips.