Half Torn Hearts

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  ‘What if they still insist that you get engaged to that elderly guy first?’

  ‘They will. I know. And I’ll get engaged. Actually, I kind of feel sorry for him. His first would-be-wife will never be his wife!’

  After another paroxysm of mirth, Afsana continued desultorily, ‘But I can’t be married off against my wishes. I’m a minor now. By the time I finish my graduation, I’ll be grown up enough to manage my own life without the need of a stupid husband or even my parents. Therefore, there’s no question of ever coming back to them.’

  ‘All this is so exciting!’ Raisa exclaimed.

  The following evening, Nirmaan ran to Raisa’s place after school. On the verge of ascending the stairs to her floor, he noticed her in the stairwell, going further up. Curious, he followed her and realized she had a guest.

  ‘What are you two doing here?’ Nirmaan exclaimed. He was shocked to see Afsana. Then he noticed the cigarettes.

  ‘You girls smoke?!’

  ‘Nirmaan, shut up and listen: first thing first. This has to be a secret!’ Raisa shushed him.

  ‘Secret? I just saw her photograph in the “missing persons” section of the local newspaper. I came to tell you about it and now I see this.’

  The missing persons’ report made Afsana and Raisa share an enthusiastic high-five. It confused Nirmaan even further.

  ‘Are you girls on drugs?’

  ‘We were waiting for Afsana’s parents to file a police report. Now you’ll have to help us a bit, Nirmaan,’ Raisa beseeched, her palms pressed together.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We need to inform Affu’s parents that she’ll come home only if they give it in writing that they’ll allow her to study science in plus two.’

  ‘Study science? Is this what this is all about? She absconded because she wanted to study science?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll never get it. Are you going to help or not?’

  Nirmaan nodded, knowing fully well that he didn’t have any other option.

  ‘Please help, otherwise we’ll have to toss you out of the window,’ Raisa said.

  That night, Raisa telephoned Nirmaan and asked him to smuggle some food out for Afsana because there were guests at her home and her mother wasn’t letting her out of her sight. Nirmaan somehow managed to steal some food from his home, excused himself citing a post-dinner walk and reached Afsana. As he watched her eat, Nirmaan could see that she was famished.

  ‘Can I tell you something?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Afsana said.

  ‘I think you should just go back home without making any demands at all. They’re your parents, after all. They’ll understand whatever it is that you want them to do.’

  Afsana paused to glance at him and then resumed her meal. This was the first time they were meeting without Raisa. When Afsana was done, Nirmaan stood up to leave.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ Afsana asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You could have just given me the food and left. You didn’t, why?’

  The response came a few seconds later, ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just courtesy to be there when someone is eating.’

  Afsana felt he wasn’t telling the truth. She took out a cigarette from its box. She flicked the lighter a couple of times but couldn’t light it as the window was open. Nirmaan cupped his palms around the lighter’s flame and helped her. Although he didn’t say anything, he noticed the brand that she was smoking.

  ‘Bye,’ Nirmaan said and was at the door when her voice stopped him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Rice apologized for that cannabis-in-the-roshogolla thing. I didn’t get a chance to.’

  ‘That’s all water under the bridge now.’

  ‘Then this is a long-overdue apology,’ Afsana replied. They smiled at each other and then Nirmaan was gone.

  The next morning, Raisa told Nirmaan not to go to Afsana’s hideout.

  ‘Why, what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘She said she’ll go home on her own.’

  Nirmaan couldn’t help but smile.

  It was evening when Afsana returned home. Although her parents agreed that both her engagement and wedding would only take place after her graduation, they insisted on the alliance that they had chosen.

  Afsana joined science tuitions. Although Raisa followed suit, she slept through most of it, and everything that the teacher taught went over her head. In no time, the board exams arrived. Raisa spent most of the time cooped up with Afsana, studying. The exams took place and two months later, the Class X board results were announced. Nirmaan topped not only their school, but also the other schools in eastern India. Afsana scored enough to secure a seat in the science stream for her senior secondary. Raisa failed in four subjects. She had to repeat Class X with neither her best friend nor her soul-sister.

  VOICE NOTE 19

  Hi Shanay,

  Raisa loved both Afsana and Nirmaan. It was as if the creator had sliced her soul into three sections: the one part within her yearned for the other two. If Nirmaan completed her, then Afsana embellished that completion. The failure in studies didn’t hurt Raisa. She had never had big academic aspirations anyway. However, it was hard to believe that two people who were not related to each other by blood or class, could form the most essential and most basic part of one’s existence. It was as if the other two had been there in the creator’s subconscious when one was being created and the connection was felt the instant they met. Have you ever wondered that the most important experiences of one’s life aren’t caused by events but by a few specific people? And when you see them moving ahead in life, there are bound to be emotional repercussions. The fact that Raisa had to repeat a year while Afsana and Nirmaan went on ahead in life tore her from within. Landmines of queries filled her, which exploded as fear. Raisa was sure that both Afsana and Nirmaan would miss her as well, which they did, but there was something else that she wasn’t ready for. It was something that changed her life forever.

  You’ll know what I’m talking about from my next voice note onwards.

  Shanay was supposed to be in an important meeting with one of his product’s distributors in Hyderabad. That’s what he had told his fiancée two days ago, but the truth was that he was on leave—his first since he had started the online operations. He also told his fiancée that he wouldn’t be taking any calls for these two days. The first reason for this lie was that he needed some time alone, away from everything and everyone.

  He had stayed put in his Bengaluru flat for the last forty hours. The chaos he was feeling within after the last voice note made him skip dinner. This turmoil was the second reason that he had lied. The voice notes gave him a hint, or so he thought, about how exactly he might be related to the story being narrated to him. The more he thought about it, the more he felt that the initial voice note could well be true: that his very life, perhaps, would actually change when the story ended. But what was the end? The question only exacerbated his ferment.

  His phone vibrated. It was his fiancée calling. He had told her he would return that night from Hyderabad. Shanay kept staring at his fiancée’s name flashing on the phone’s screen. It stopped ringing. For the first time since they had met, he hadn’t picked up Afsana’s call.

  BOOK THREE

  VOICE NOTE 20

  Afsana and Nirmaan,

  Kolkata, 2003–05.

  It was a hot and humid April day. The more she perspired, sitting by the rocks surrounding a big banyan tree a few metres outside her new school campus, the more she felt her wound stinging.

  Afsana, like all the other freshers in Class XI, was asked to draw cat-whiskers on her face with a sketch pen and introduce herself to the seniors. The five other newcomers, in the science stream, happily obliged their seniors without missing a beat, except Afsana. She stood her ground even after being warned that she would pay dearly for it. And she did. Right after school, she was ambushed in the c
lassroom by four seniors. But they had underestimated Afsana. She pulled out a knife from her bag, but not before one the seniors, enraged by her rebellion, stabbed her in the leg with a broken ruler. However, when Afsana brandished the knife, they reluctantly let her go.

  Her sweat trickling into the gash exacerbated the pain in her injured leg.

  As she sat wondering what to do next, she heard a bicycle bell. She turned her head to see Nirmaan.

  ‘Afsana?’ he said, astride his ranger bike.

  ‘Are you in this school as well?’ she exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘I did get into a few others, but chose this one because it’s the closest to my place. Saves time for my tuitions.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘Waiting for someone?’ he asked.

  Afsana raised her injured leg with some effort to show him the reason for her sitting alone beneath the big tree.

  Nirmaan immediately parked his bicycle and came over to her.

  ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘The ragging went out of control. Why, weren’t you ragged?’ she asked.

  ‘I was. We were asked to slap ourselves twenty times saying aloud mera baap chor hai,’ Nirmaan replied sheepishly.

  ‘I don’t like people telling me what to do.’ Afsana presumed that Nirmaan must have complied with his seniors’ demands.

  ‘That’s why you get hurt,’ Nirmaan said wryly.

  ‘Whatever!’

  ‘By the way, I didn’t either. They slapped me fifty times.’

  ‘Oh!’ Afsana was taken aback.

  ‘I, too, hate being told what to do,’ Nirmaan shrugged.

  Afsana thought this was a different Nirmaan whom she was meeting in the new school.

  ‘Is someone coming to take you home?’ Nirmaan asked, glancing at her wound.

  Afsana shook her head. ‘No. I’ve already told my dad that I don’t need his car any more.’

  Nirmaan shot a what’s-wrong-with-you look at her and then asked, ‘Do you want me to call a rickshaw for you?’

  Why is he suddenly so caring? Afsana wondered and said, ‘My house is too far away for a rickshaw ride.’

  ‘In that case . . . ’ Nirmaan pondered and then looked at his bicycle. Afsana followed his gaze.

  ‘Only if you don’t mind,’ he said.

  She couldn’t fathom why he had offered to take her home on his bicycle. Also, she couldn’t understand why she had said yes. It was awkward to perch on the top bar of the bicycle without bending the knee of her injured leg.

  ‘You’re such a weakling!’ she grumbled as Nirmaan panted, pedalling with the extra weight on his bicycle.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ Nirmaan gasped, understandably annoyed. ‘It’s just that I’m not used to carrying someone on my bicycle. You are the first one to sit on it.’

  ‘Not even Rice?’

  ‘No. She thinks I can’t cycle well and that she may fall off.’

  Afsana sensed he was smiling as he said this.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Did you know that a long time ago, back in Guwahati, it was Raisa who taught me how to ride a bicycle for the first time?’

  ‘It’s a good thing she did, otherwise it would have been difficult for me to get home today,’ Afsana said.

  ‘Do you mean she taught me to ride so that one day I could drop you home on it?’ Nirmaan asked in a thoughtful tone.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean anything like that. Moreover how would she have known that I would meet you someday when, back then, she herself was yet to meet me?’

  ‘Hmm,’ he grunted.

  Afsana knew Nirmaan was a topper but, talking to him, she found him a little slow on the uptake.

  ‘Don’t you miss Raisa?’ Nirmaan asked.

  ‘Not until today. We were together most of the time during the holidays until she went off on a vacation. But today, being the first day in this stupid school, no senior would have dared to rag me if Rice had been there with me. I think I’ll miss her even more in the coming days.’

  ‘I know. I missed her too in school. I so wish our last school had plus two in it,’ Nirmaan said.

  ‘Tell me about it. By the way, why do you miss her? You guys live in the same colony, no?’

  ‘We do, but when Raisa failed, my dad asked me to stay away from her.’

  ‘How mean! Had he not been your father I would have punched him for this.’

  ‘My father is like that. He only likes successful people. He believes losers should perish.’

  ‘Rice isn’t a loser.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. Nor am I staying away from her just because Baba wants me to.’

  ‘Still you guys don’t meet often,’ Afsana said.

  That’s true, Nirmaan thought.

  After fifteen more minutes of casual chit-chat, they arrived at her house.

  ‘Stop here,’ she said.

  ‘Is that your house?’

  ‘Yes. I’m the daughter of a rich man. Why? Is that a crime?’

  ‘Huh?’ Nirmaan didn’t get her.

  ‘Thanks for the ride. Bye,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Bye. Get well soon,’ he responded and cycled away.

  Nirmaan shared the incident with Raisa that evening when he chanced upon her during a post-dinner stroll. Raisa immediately went home and called Afsana.

  ‘I’ll kill those bitches,’ she said. ‘How dare they hurt you!’

  ‘Calm down, Rice. I’m good enough for them.’

  ‘How is your leg? Nirmaan told me about it.’

  ‘It’s better now.’

  ‘I’m happy that at least you two are in the same school. When I saw him go to a different school today, in a different uniform, I realized just what it was to be alone.’

  ‘I can understand. Thanks to Nirmaan though, I reached home on time today.’

  ‘See, I always told you he’s a sweetheart.’

  ‘Hmm. You know, I deliberately made him cycle extra today,’ Afsana chuckled.

  ‘Gosh, why on earth did you do that?’

  ‘He was huffing and puffing, doubling with me on his bicycle. I wanted to see if he would complain.’

  ‘Poor guy!’

  ‘He didn’t complain though.’

  ‘I think it’s high time that you two become friends,’ Raisa declared.

  ‘Naw!’ Afsana said. But in her mind she agreed with Raisa.

  VOICE NOTE 21

  The injury kept Afsana away from school for the entire week. Raisa started frequenting her place every day after school for an hour. With Rick gone for higher studies in the UK, Raisa felt comfortable there. That Friday, Raisa looked a little disturbed when she visited Afsana.

  ‘Do students stare at you in your school and giggle?’ she asked, looking at her bust in a full-length mirror in Afsana’s room.

  ‘No, I’m not a clown,’ Afsana said, her entire attention focused on her butterscotch ice cream.

  ‘Then, is something wrong with me?’

  ‘Wrong? . . . As in?’ Afsana looked at her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Raisa was confused. ‘Just look at me properly and tell me,’ she turned around to face Afsana.

  ‘Nothing,’ Afsana said, carefully scrutinizing Raisa from head to toe.

  ‘Then why is it that the boys always stare at me weirdly and then snigger. That never used to happen before.’

  ‘Boys?’ Afsana said with a slight frown and then burst out laughing.

  ‘What?’ Raisa sat down beside her mirthful friend.

  ‘Dumbo, we’re growing up now.’

  ‘That I already know even though I hate biology. But so what, Affu, if we are growing up?’

  ‘So my dearest and cutest Rice baby, you have breasts now.’

  ‘As if I didn’t know that I had breasts. Why would any boy want to stare and giggle at them? Nirmaan never does.’

  Afsana could have kissed her for her innocence. She got out of the bed, fished out a brassiere from one of the drawers in her wardrobe and threw i
t at Raisa.

  ‘Try it,’ Afsana said.

  ‘Mom wears these,’ Raisa said.

  ‘Just shut up and try it.’

  Raisa turned her back to Afsana, doffing her school shirt and then the white shimmy that she wore beneath.

  ‘Nirmaan would never see you the way other boys do,’ Afsana continued, gazing appreciatively at the flawless and supple skin on Raisa’s back.

  ‘How do you know all this, Affu?’

  ‘You may have bigger breasts than me, Rice, but I’m way more mature than you.’

  ‘Hmm, true,’ Raisa agreed fidgeting to fasten the hook of the brassiere. Afsana stepped up and helped her with it.

  ‘Thanks,’ Raisa said, turning to her.

  ‘Now wear your shirt,’ Afsana recommended with a gracious smile.

  When Raisa had slipped her shirt back on, Afsana steered her to the mirror. Raisa was delighted to see her breasts in considerable control.

  ‘Wow! This is good.’

  ‘Our cup size is different, so ask aunty to buy you some.’

  Raisa hugged her tight and said, ‘I miss you so much, Affu. Nobody suggested a bra to me, not even Ma. She didn’t even tell me anything about sanitary pads.’ After a pause she added, ‘What a fool I made of myself.’

  Afsana knew her voice was choked.

  ‘It’s okay, Rice. Now no one will mock you.’

  ‘Thanks for being there for me.’

  ‘Don’t mention it because I miss you too, my sis-doll.’

  ‘I miss you more,’ Raisa broke the hug to look into Afsana’s eyes. ‘You don’t know this, but I no longer have any friends in school. My current batch mates were once my juniors. I don’t jell with them. I wear a plastered smile on my face because their jokes suck. They suck. In fact repeating this year without Nirmaan and you sucks!’

  ‘Don’t be upset, sweetheart. You have to work hard this year because I want you to be in my school next year, okay?’ Afsana said, breaking the hug.

  ‘I know I’m stupid. Nirmaan and you are the intelligent ones.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Deuta did. When I showed him my report card he beat me with a belt. See.’

  Raisa hitched up her skirt. A long reddish welt was faintly visible on her outer thigh. Afsana deduced that the mark wouldn’t have been quite so faint a month ago. As she gently caressed the scar, she could tell Raisa was sobbing.