‘Same here. But the last time I saw her was like a couple of months ago and the worst part is that I’m realizing this only today,’ he looked conscience-stricken.
‘Same here,’ said Afsana.
‘Does it happen with every relationship?’ Nirmaan wondered.
‘My friendship with Rice is far from dead.’
‘Of course! But . . . you know what I mean. I’ve seen how close you two used to be and now you’re also seeing her after a long time.’
‘Perhaps our priorities change as we grow and we no longer remain the persons we were,’ Afsana said philosophically as she gathered up the two plates and carried them into the kitchen.
‘I think,’ Nirmaan was right behind her, ‘As we grow, we consciously get away from our basic selves and get more and more conditioned by our surroundings.’
They entered the kitchen. ‘I never thought there would be another girl in my life who could be closer to me than Raisa, but now I have you.’
‘And I never knew I could ever love anyone so much,’ Afsana kept the plates by the kitchen sink. She noticed a covered bowl beside the gas stove. She raised the lid and inhaled the aroma of the chicken gravy.
‘Wow!’ She dipped her finger in the gravy and licked it clean.
‘Mmm! Rice’s mother is an excellent cook,’ Afsana said,
deeply appreciative.
‘Raisa cooked it.’
‘What? She’s a natural then. It’s yummy,’ Afsana dipped her finger again and gestured Nirmaan to taste it. He leaned forward and sucked the gravy off her finger.
A moment later he said, ‘Now I’m confused. I think your finger is tastier.’
‘Oh yeah, Mr Romantic? Let’s get back to the books now. Exams are round the corner.’
VOICE NOTE 32
A month and a half had gone by since their senior secondary board exams. Returning from one of his tuitions one day, Nirmaan halted his bicycle by the Ultadanga footbridge. It had been almost twenty days since Nirmaan had met Afsana or even heard her voice. She had been bulldozed into accompanying her family on a Europe tour after their last board exam got over.
They had met in the evening at this very footbridge before she had left. When they had hugged, Nirmaan realized the significance of what had happened between the two of them in the last two years. They had become deeply attached. Although he was aware that she was only going away for a vacation, he felt as empty as one would feel staring into an oblivion.
‘What if some day we don’t remain together?’ Nirmaan asked as he embraced her.
‘Shut up,’ Afsana whispered in his ear and tightened her hug.
‘The more I’m drawn to you,’ Nirmaan continued, ‘the more vulnerable I feel because while a part of me believes that our connection is more permanent than anything else, the cynical side of me says it could be just as transient as everything else.’
‘Honestly, I too feel the fear uncoiling within me. Our board results will be out in a few months. I’ll have to introduce you to my parents otherwise they’ll set me up with another boy. And—’
He broke the hug and completed her sentence, ‘—and I’m a Bengali and you are a Marwari.’
‘I honestly don’t know how my parents will react to that.’
They strolled hand in hand and sat on the steps of the footbridge. She took out a cigarette. She understood Nirmaan noticed the box a little too intently.
‘You don’t like that I smoke, isn’t it?’ she asked.
Nirmaan was quiet.
‘You can tell me. I won’t smoke,’ she said, toying with the cigarette between her fingers.
Nirmaan though for a while and said, ‘Affu, I don’t want either of us to dictate ever what the other person should or should not do. If you want to smoke, you should; if you don’t want to, don’t.’
Afsana smiled at him and put the cigarette back in the box and stuffed it in her bag.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Don’t feel like smoking now. And you are right. Just because people are in love doesn’t mean that they have to control each other,’ she said and leaned her head on his shoulder, still holding his hand, as he slipped his arm around her waist. They sat quietly with their emotions oscillating between calm and chaos for two hours before it was time for her to go home. Nirmaan dropped her home. The moment Afsana reached her room, the first thing she did was pen the thought that had struck her in the last hour.
Duniya uss rishtey ko kamiyaab samjhti hai,
Jo ek kitchen, ek bistar aur,
Roz ki daud mein qaid ho.
Humare rishtey mein koi ghar nahi hai,
Na electric bill, na doctor ki fees aur na hi koi EMI.
Ek khula aasmaan hai bas,
Aur kabhi na khatam hone wali udaan.
Nirmaan cycled on hoping the remaining days would fly past and Afsana would be back from her holiday soon. As he cycled into his lane, he saw Raisa by the pharmacy. He got off his bike and joined her.
‘Ma has a fever,’ she said. They entered the RBI quarters together, chatting and catching up on their studies and this and that.
‘Let me meet Aunty once,’ he said. They went to her flat. It was her father who opened the door and flung some papers on her face.
‘What the hell are you up to, you little bitch?’ he yelled at Raisa.
VOICE NOTE 33
‘Nirmaan, go home,’ Raisa said quietly. Although he wanted to stay, seeing her father in such a rage, Nirmaan realized it had to be something acutely personal. So he left baffled.
Almost the entire RBI colony was set by the ears hearing abuses being hurled at Raisa by her own father. Nobody knew why. It was only when some of the concerned neighbours went to check on the family did they realize that Raisa was getting beaten. When his office colleagues sternly commanded Mr Barua to behave himself, he stopped beating his daughter and ordered her to get out of his sight.
Mrs Bose asked what had happened, but Nirmaan had no answer. He wanted to telephone Raisa, but realized this wasn’t a good time. After dinner, Nirmaan, glancing out through his window, noticed Raisa sitting alone on a stone bench in the colony’s courtyard. He didn’t waste a single second to reach her.
‘What happened, Raisa?’ he asked, sitting beside her. She was sobbing and couldn’t speak for a long time. Nirmaan was at a loss and he placed an arm around her, gently patting her shoulder.
Suddenly the words came tumbling out, ‘Two months ago Mihir and I made out. It was his birthday and he wanted my virginity as his gift. I loved him so . . . we did it without any protection. A month later I started having strange symptoms that scared me. I secretly visited a doctor and discovered that I was pregnant.’
Nirmaan felt like he was in a trance as he listened to her. He didn’t want to believe a word of what she was saying, but he knew he had to because her eyes were swimming with tears and her woebegone demeanour told him it was the naked truth.
‘I told Mihir and he broke up with me because his parents would kill him if they got to know of this. When I threatened to go public with the news, he mocked me saying I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone that I’m pregnant. He was right. I couldn’t even tell you,’ she hung her head as the tears cascaded down her cheeks unchecked.
‘Are you really pregnant?’ Nirmaan asked.
‘I was. Mohini, my friend from school, has a friend who took me to this clinic where I underwent an abortion in secret.’
‘You aborted the child?’ Nirmaan felt he was sitting beside a total stranger and not the girl he had known since he was eight.
‘You actually underwent an illegal abortion?’ Nirmaan rephrased to himself, still shell-shocked.
Raisa nodded and said, ‘I was almost out of it unnoticed but—’
‘But?’
‘The doctor gave me ten days to pay his fee, failing which he said he would inform my parents.’
‘How much money?’
‘Fifty thousand rupees. My dad recently booked an apartment in Ne
w Alipore and he was going to make part of the payment in cash. I planned to steal the money as soon as I had a chance.’
‘And you didn’t get a chance?’ To Nirmaan this all seemed surreal and more like a bad dream.
‘I waited, but Deuta didn’t bring home any money. The doctor grew impatient and this evening he visited my dad with the paperwork and told him everything. He went away giving him a two-day deadline to cough up the money,’ Raisa wept.
When Raisa returned to her apartment, she received an international call from Afsana. Raisa faithfully promised to relay her message to Nirmaan, but didn’t mention a word to her soul-sister about the upheavals in her own life.
VOICE NOTE 34
Two more weeks flew past and before Nirmaan could wrap his head around it, it was the day before the IIT entrance exam. It wasn’t merely an exam for him, it was the door to a future involving both Afsana and him. He was dying to talk to her but there was no way he could. On an impulse, he called her house but nobody answered. They’re still in Europe, he concluded with a heavy heart. The following day, he left home in good time to make it to the exam centre that had been allocated to him. But he never made it to the examination hall.
Midway to the exam centre, a car drew up alongside his bicycle. Two burly men got out, grabbed Nirmaan and bundled him into the car where he was immediately blindfolded. Although Nirmaan hollered, they quickly gagged him as well. The car drove around in circles and Nirmaan was held captive for the duration of the exam time. When the car eventually stopped, he was thrown out in the same place where he had been picked up. Nirmaan yelled and chased after the car, but it wasn’t of much use.
Feeling wholly defeated, he reached home. Seeing Nirmaan’s bedraggled state, although Mrs Bose understood something terrible had happened, she didn’t badger him with questions. When Mr Bose called later that afternoon to find out how the exam had went, Mrs Bose said Nirmaan was asleep. It was only when he came home in the evening, all excited about his son’s entrance test, that he learnt what had happened. Nirmaan hadn’t been able to appear for this coveted exam for which he had been preparing for years. Mr Bose was thunderstruck.
‘Who were they? Where did they take you? And why?’ he asked. Nirmaan had no answers.
‘Did you do this because you never wanted to be an engineer?’ Mr Bose’s final question struck Nirmaan dumb.
This was only the beginning of a father–son verbal duel at the end of which Mr Bose lost his rag. He accused Nirmaan and all his generation of having grown up with all the amenities of life without having had to work hard for anything. Mr Bose was obdurate in his conviction that Nirmaan had intentionally skipped the exam because, contrary to his father’s engineering aspirations for his son, Nirmaan was determined to become a businessman. Both Nirmaan and Mrs Bose did their best to reason with him, but he was intransigent.
‘He can always try again next year, can’t he?’ Mrs Bose had tears in her eyes by now.
‘Of course, he will,’ Mr Bose said sternly, ‘but on his own.’ He walked out of the apartment.
‘If that’s the way he wants it, that’s the way it will happen,’ Nirmaan said to his distraught mother, stormed off into his bedroom, locking himself in and skipped dinner.
The next evening, Raisa called him. They decided to meet on the footbridge.
Raisa’s jaw dropped at Nirmaan’s misadventures of the previous day.
‘But who were those men who kidnapped you?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you fight with someone recently?’ Raisa asked.
‘Tarun,’ he said almost to himself.
‘Tarun, who?’
‘Afsana was supposed to marry him. He came to meet her outside the school some time ago and was manhandling her. I had kicked him hard. The alliance was eventually called off. It has to be him.’
‘Where will I find this guy? I’ll kill him,’ Raisa hissed. Nirmaan fell silent, ruminating. After a while, she ventured, ‘So, what’s the plan now?’
‘There’s no plan. I’m waiting for Afsana. Then I leave my home for good.’
‘Leave? And go where?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll decide only after Afsana returns,’ Nirmaan said and abruptly stood up to leave. Raisa stopped him as he started ascending the stairs on the bridge.
‘Nirmaan, listen. There’s something I didn’t tell you,’ Raisa said, her throat going dry.
‘What?’
She held his hands tightly and said, ‘Affu is never coming back to India.’
Nirmaan failed to find any humour in Raisa’s expression although his mind screamed that this had to be a bad joke. A really bad joke.
‘What do you mean?’ he snapped, snatching his hands free of her grasp.
‘She called me. I wanted to tell you, but I was waiting for your entrance exam to get over. And now—’
‘What happened to Affu? Why won’t she come back?’ he interrupted her. She could tell that they were teetering on the brink of an emotional landslide.
‘I’ll tell you, but you must promise that you won’t cry or do anything crazy,’ she said.
‘Just give it to me straight, Raisa,’ he gritted through clenched teeth.
‘She called me last week, the night my dad crucified me in public. She called to say she had tried your number several times, but couldn’t get through. Her parents had conned her into believing it was a Europe tour, but she soon realized that she was to be admitted into a grad school where one of her cousins is a student.’
‘How could she—’ Nirmaan trailed off.
‘It’s not her. It’s her parents. They tricked her. She specifically asked me to tell you not to wait for her because it’s possible she’ll never return to India again. Not for several years at least,’ Raisa spoke haltingly, but enunciated each word clearly.
‘Did she leave any contact number or anything where I can reach her?’
Raisa shook her head sadly, ‘No.’
Nirmaan looked at the busy city roads below the bridge. Everybody seemed to know exactly where they were heading, unlike him.
After a few minutes of silence, Raisa clasped his hands tight, ‘I’m already fucked. Now you as well. What do we do now, Nirmaan?’
He gazed into her eyes. Life was going to change here on.
VOICE NOTE 35
Hi Shanay!
Last year, during a festival, I looked at an idol and pondered: man creates an idol, people carry it home, worship it, then immerse it in a sea or a river and pray that it returns to them, when it’s actually they themselves who will recreate it when the time comes.
It’s so much like the ordeal of love. We create this emotional deity within ourselves that we know we can’t hold on to forever and yet we believe we can. We follow all the rituals only to watch ourselves immerse it in the river of our emotions eventually.
Realization awakens within the soul like a deep spring to quench the anguish of the loss of love. These realizations sometimes surprise us to the extent that we start hating ourselves because we know they aren’t something we had sought while we were in love.
But then again, those realizations make us feel powerful and glad that we followed the rituals.
My next series of voice notes will have the second most important part of the story, so please listen with care, maturity and a free mind.
BOOK FOUR
VOICE NOTE 36
Raisa and Nirmaan,
Bhubaneswar, 2012–17.
‘Babloo bhaina, may I borrow your bike?’ a twenty-four-year-old Nirmaan asked as he emerged from Shri Jagannath Sarees, a legendary shop in Shashtri Nagar, which was the biggest retailer of the famous Sambalpuri sarees and Baluchari sarees in Bhubaneswar.
‘Leaving early today?’ Babloo asked, tossing the motorbike’s keys to Nirmaan.
Nirmaan nodded, unlocking the bike. He seemed unusually hopeful that day because something for which he had diligently worked for years was going to come to fruition at long last.
As the bike sped through a lonely road, the wind rushed through the raised helmet’s visor on to his face fiercely, taking him back, for some reason, to the day he rode his bicycle for the first time with Raisa’s encouragement. Although nothing as fierce as now, the thrill of the wind on his face was as it was then. The memory evoked others and slowly the past started playing in his mind with vivid clarity.
Seven years ago, when Nirmaan boarded the Dhauli Express from Howrah station at six o’clock in the morning, two nights after he’d sat with Raisa at the Ultadanga footbridge, he knew that leaving home was his way of accepting his father’s unspoken challenge.
Mr Bose had opted to disown his son, obstinately refusing to accept the explanation of Nirmaan’s abduction on the way to the examination hall. Nirmaan took it upon himself to prove his mettle to a father who considered Nirmaan a typical product of his generation, spoilt silly and an ingrate. According to Mr Bose, Nirmaan was a rebel without a cause and had deliberately sabotaged his father’s dreams of a wonderful engineering career for his son.
With little possibility of Afsana returning to India any time soon, there was no reason for Nirmaan to stay on in Kolkata. His only ally was Raisa who also had been ostracized from her family. It was at Raisa’s behest that he had left a note for his parents vowing to kill himself if he ever got wind of them looking for him.
That morning, Raisa and Nirmaan had walked hand in hand into Howrah station without a destination in mind. The only thing that they were sure of was that they had to go away, far away. And ‘going away’ was as vaguely adventurous a feeling when they entered the chaotic station as the idea’s allure had been to them the night before. Raisa learnt at the enquiry counter that the next train to leave the station was Dhauli Express. With no time or cash to buy any tickets, they boarded the train just as it started to chug along the track. When the ticket-checker came along, they had nothing to show him. He was on the verge of kicking them out at the next station when Jaya, a eunuch touting the train for baksheesh from passengers, noticed them. She pleaded in vain with the ticket-checker to spare the kids. She resorted to raising her voice and, in a flash, five more eunuchs materialized in the vestibule to which the ticker-checker had directed the runaway teenagers. The eunuchs surrounded him, clapping and raining racy comments on the hapless railway official until the man let go of Nirmaan and Raisa to avoid further embarrassment.
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