It was during this emotionally tumultuous time that Raisa opened up to me. She had no friends, then. I was a stranger and perhaps that was why she felt she could confide in me. I always looked up to her as an elder sister. I wept at her pain and that is probably why I became a part of the story—her pain absorbed me into her world.
One night, a month or so after Nirmaan confessed to her about his yearning to reunite with Afsana, Raisa packed her bags and left. Nirmaan was asleep when she applied deep red lipstick and kissed him on his chest. Her only kiss to him in all those years.
I’m not sure if Nirmaan looked for Raisa, although I’m sure he realized what that kiss on his chest meant. I stayed on to work there. Raisa had made sure to teach the vada preparations to a bunch of girls (including me).
There was no news of Raisa until, a couple of months later, I received a call from an NGO. They informed me that Raisa had acquired a rare skin disorder and was admitted to a hospital in Cuttack. I went to her, and pleaded with her to reconnect with Nirmaan, but she didn’t. She made me swear I wouldn’t tell him either. She died forty-eight hours after she was admitted to the hospital.
One month after her death, I dared to send you a voice note for the first time. As they cremated her body, I resolved to give her soul some peace. I tracked down Afsana in Kolkata to reach her and in the process, learnt about you.
You must be wondering about the choice that I had mentioned in my first voice note—the choice that you need to make now. I’ll tell you everything, but for that I’ll have to meet you in person, Shanay. Now that you know the story of Raisa, Nirmaan and Afsana, we must meet to bring about the most important part of their story: the end.
If you’ve heard the voice notes till now then I hope you won’t say no to meeting me, Shanay.
BOOK FIVE
CHAPTER 1
Afsana and Nirmaan,
Bengaluru/Kolkata/New Delhi, 2018.
The first things that Shanay noticed when he opened his eyes were a butterfly hair clip and a packet of Classic Ice Burst cigarettes on the bedside table. A blue lighter lay on top of the packet. None of these belonged to him.
The next moment, Afsana stepped out of the washroom, the edges of her towel tucked in around her bosom, her wet hair still dripping. She threw him a cursory glance as she dragged the only chair in the room towards the window. The chair, Shanay noticed, had a notebook on it. He turned on his bed to get a better view of her, watching as she lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke through the open window and ensconced in the chair, picked the notebook up. A moment later, Afsana started scribbling something in it.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Ghonsla banane ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Ghonsle ke bahar ghoomke aane ka.
Unke beech ka waqt hota hai,
Ishq ki gehrai ko samjhne ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Nasamjhiyon ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Manmarziyon ka.
Unke beech ka waqt hota hai,
Khichaav ki chingari ko lagao ke aag mein badalne ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Aahankaar ko adhikaar samjhke jatane ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Khamoshi ko khamoshi se samjhne ka.
Unke beech ka waqt hota hai,
Rishtey ki umra bhadhane ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Apne saanson se uske jism ke panno ko palatne ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Akele mein usse mehsoos karke tadapne ka.
Unke beech ka waqt hota hai,
Apne aasmaan ko, uske zameen se milane ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Ehsaanson ko ubaalne ka.
Ek waqt hota hai,
Jazzbaaton ko halke aanch mein pakane ka.
Unke beech ka waqt hota hai,
Juda na hone ke iradon mein, niyat ka namak swad anusar milane ka.
She undersigned it Tushara before closing the notebook.
Shanay had been waiting for this day for some time now. Everything had gone exactly according to plan. Afsana had flown out of Kolkata on Friday night, telling her folks she had to shop for a few things from Delhi for her upcoming boutique. And that she would put up with a friend there. Shanay had picked her up from Kempegowda International Airport.
She hadn’t changed at all since the last time he had met her, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a new Afsana he was meeting. Now that he had been fed a lot of information about her, the voice notes had stripped bare her past for him, even though she was unaware that he knew. Shanay had once asked her if she had ever had a boyfriend. Afsana had promptly denied it. But now the voice notes were with him. Shanay didn’t want to believe the anonymous voice-notes girl, but the narrative had sounded too real to be made-up so a ‘what if’ lurked strongly in his mind. What if the story were true?
They had had a cosy dinner at Liquid in Hyatt, where they drove straight from the airport. Between the two, Shanay was more of a chatterbox, however, he had been at a loss for topics to discuss last night. He remembered Afsana picking up on this and his mind went back to the events of the previous night.
* * *
‘You seem a little off tonight? Is everything all right?’ Afsana asked, finishing her dinner.
‘Just a little tired . . . too much work,’ he prevaricated.
‘I can understand. I’m going nuts setting up this small boutique, while you have an entire business to take care of,’ she said.
After dinner, they drove to his spacious, fully furnished, rented apartment in DLF Westend Heights at Akshaya Nagar. She remembered that Shanay had told her many times that he detested living in pokey, claustrophobic cubbyholes. After they changed into their nightclothes, they chit-chatted for a bit and then it was time for them to go to bed. He half-expected Afsana to be somewhat hesitant about sharing his bed but she got into bed first and left space for him on it, clearly indicating that she expected him there. He switched off the lights and lay down beside her.
Shanay kissed her, tentatively at first. And the next thing they knew, they were naked, passionately kissing each other all over. Shanay felt as if he had a point to prove to her even though she had never asked him to. The fact that there had been a person in her life whom she hadn’t mentioned to him could mean one of two things: one, that person no longer mattered or, two, her mind-space was way too intimate to be shared with another person. Feeling her nakedness between the sheets, his sexual instincts took over. Shanay sought not only his own pleasure, but also to erase whatever emotions and memories she had of her past. His soft kisses soon turned into feral passion. His mild touches became hard squeezes. All the sexual positions they tried were with him dominating her. Afsana didn’t complain even once. She didn’t even wince in pain when he entered her, or so Shanay thought. When they were done, they slept without cuddling. It was 3.45 a.m. when Shanay opened his eyes and it was then that he saw her step out of the attached bathroom.
‘May I ask you something?’ Shanay propped his head up with his elbow, watching Afsana blow a smoke ring into the air. She had stretched out her legs on to the windowsill.
‘Sure,’ she replied.
‘Were you a virgin before tonight?’ It came out easier than he thought it would.
Afsana smirked, ‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘Just like that,’ he said.
‘Is it because I didn’t cry out?’
Shanay hung his head in an I’m-so-busted manner.
‘It’s not a necessity,’ she said.
Shanay knew it wasn’t. Nevertheless, he wanted to hear it from her. Their eyes met.
‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’ Afsana asked.
‘Do you want to tell me anything that I don’t know about you?’
Afsana took her time before she asked, ‘Can I ask you something, Shanay?’
‘Sure. Anything.’
‘Is it important for me to tell you everything about myself? If so, why?’
‘This “as much as we can” is actually “as much as we say”, isn’t it?’
‘It is. And that’s why I’m asking,’ he sat up in bed.
‘Do you think one can really tell another person everything about oneself overnight? Or even over several nights?’
‘What other options do we have?’
‘To discover as we go along. Let me be to you how you interpret me and not what I say about myself to you.’ She stubbed out the cigarette butt on an ashtray and rose. Shanay watched her drop her towel to the floor wholly impervious to her nudity in his presence. She slipped on her panties, extracted a tee from her bag and put it on and joined him in bed.
‘We should sleep now,’ she said and turned to face the other way.
‘Good night, Affu,’ Shanay whispered. A second later she turned around.
‘What did you call me?’
Shanay, completely immersed in his thoughts, hadn’t realized the slip—he had never ever called her that. Raisa and Nirmaan had.
‘Affu. Why?’ Shanay asked cautiously.
‘Nothing. Don’t call me by that name. Please.’ She turned away and slept. In the in-between silence, he felt unsure whether she hated the ones who called her that . . . or loved them too much. He wanted to shake her and wake her up, to ask if there had indeed been a Nirmaan and a Raisa in her life. But he was scared. What if there had been? What if there still were . . . ?
After a couple of hours, a sleepless Shanay sat up on the bed. He went over to her phone and drew the password pattern that he had inadvertently watched her draw when he had driven her from the airport. He quickly pulled up her contact list. There was no Nirmaan there. He checked her phone further: the photo gallery, her social media messages, emails. Nothing. Shanay sighed with relief. He looked at a sleeping Afsana. He wondered why the mere mention of ‘Affu’ had made her turn around.
CHAPTER 2
The month following Raisa’s sudden disappearance, Nirmaan contacted every possible person he thought might know about her whereabouts, but all his efforts were in vain. He hadn’t gone to the police because he knew that she wasn’t missing or been abducted, she had just upped and left. She had deliberately left the lipstick mark on his chest indicating her absence to be one of choice rather than coercion. Why did she leave so suddenly? And why now—just when the sun was about to shine on them after all the shitty miles of life they had travelled together.
The lipstick mark of her lips . . . was it a clue, a confession or just a plain goodbye? It was during the third week that a new thought struck him: what if Raisa had gotten in touch with Afsana in Kolkata? A week later, Nirmaan received an email from Raisa. It had only three lines:
Reach out to Affu. Tell her I’m sorry. Don’t try to find me.
Nirmaan immediately e-mailed back:
Where the hell are you? Get back ASAP. I’m waiting.
No response. Nirmaan tried to track the email’s IP address. It said Kolkata. He immediately packed his bag and took the next flight to Kolkata, intending to visit the place from where they had both run away thirteen years ago.
He checked into The Park on Park Street and took a cab to the RBI Ultadanga quarters. The place, although it was actually the same when he left it, seemed to Nirmaan to have shrunk in size. Everything seemed to close in on him. Or was it the memories that came flooding back into his mind? He went to Raisa’s flat, hoping against hope to find her parents there and a possible clue as to where she might be. He found neither her parents nor any clues. On the verge of taking the elevator down, he took it to the topmost floor instead. He ascended the stairs to the mezzanine floor below the terrace. It was here that Afsana had been provided sanctuary by Raisa. Life had been so simple then. He remembered the night he had smuggled her dinner. She had apologized to him for something but he couldn’t quite remember what that something was. That was the first time he had noticed her in the only way that a young heart could notice another. With the tumult of past scenes hurtling through his mind, Nirmaan quickly walked out of the housing colony.
On a hunch he called the landline of his ancestral home from his mother’s side in Chandannagar, about thirty-five kilometres from Kolkata. When he asked for his mother, he found that she was there. In the next four hours, he reached the place.
Mrs Bose couldn’t believe her eyes. She embraced Nirmaan and nearly collapsed with sheer joy. Her son had come back to her! Nirmaan learnt then that his father was no more.
‘After you left, he fell ill and never quite recovered. He had a stroke. I begged him to find you, but he didn’t. You know how egoistic and rigid he was. Three years later, he had a second stroke that he didn’t survive,’ Mrs Bose was in tears.
She made all his favourite dishes for dinner, during which he brought her up to speed with his journey through life from the time he had left Kolkata.
‘How is Raisa?’ she asked.
‘She is good. We work together,’ he said, deliberately not mentioning that she had left.
‘I knew you two would get married. I always liked her,’ she said.
‘Ma, Raisa and I aren’t married,’ he said. The look he gave her discouraged her from probing further.
‘Do you know where her parents are?’ Nirmaan asked.
‘The last I heard, and that was almost a decade ago, they had shifted base to their hometown in Assam. I don’t know where to, exactly.’
‘Hmm. I’m going to be in Kolkata for some time. I’ll be back. You’ll stay with me from now onwards,’ he said. He hugged her, touched her feet for her blessings and left.
Despite the lateness of the hour, his car had to nose through traffic as it made its way towards his hotel. At a traffic light in the outskirts of Kolkata he noticed a huge billboard for a new boutique that was due to open the following evening. Above the address there was a name: Designer Afsana Agarwal’s boutique, Tushara, opens tomorrow at 5 p.m.
Tushara . . . the name nearly choked him.
That entire night and the following day he kept asking himself whether he should visit her or not. Then Raisa’s email ricocheted in his mind. Reach out to Affu. He decided to attend the boutique’s inauguration.
There was not much hullaballoo outside the boutique except for the entrance that was festooned with flowers and had a red carpet reaching halfway across the street. He stepped inside. There was a crowd inside—photographers, family members and many guests. There was also the man—her fiancé—whose photograph he had seen on Facebook once. In the middle of them all he saw her. Afsana Agarwal. He wished she had become only a name to him. She wasn’t. It was a name that harked him back to a story that reminded him of what he could have had but never did. What he once coveted but never got. What he once was but now wasn’t. He felt like he was walking into a lucid dream where everything was real and at the same time, unreal.
A warm smile touched his face. He had always longed for this moment but never for the life of him thought that he would actually see her again. Not even from a distance. He wanted to shout out her name like a victorious war cry. He wanted to run to her and hug her tight. He wanted to convince her that the last thirteen years never happened. But all he did was wipe the warm tears that misted his vision. Seconds later, he walked towards her.
CHAPTER 3
Afsana had developed a passion for dress-designing during her graduation years in Europe. For the first six months, she had stubbornly refused to study when she realized she had been tricked. She had hoped that poor academic performance would lead her to be rusticated from the grad school, out of Europe, back to India, back to Kolkata, back to Nirmaan.
When she got an opportunity to call him up, she tried his number but couldn’t get through. She called Raisa instead, and explained her predicament. Six months later, when she again got a chance to call Nirmaan, his mother told her that he had left home with Raisa. Left h
ome with Raisa . . . how was she supposed to interpret that? Unhappy thoughts assailed her all the time. Was Nirmaan’s love for her entirely fake? Afsana sank into clinical depression for a long time without talking about it to anyone. It was during this time that she started sketching dresses, in an effort to cheer herself up as well as a vent to her pent-up frustrations. Very soon designing clothes became a passion for her. She enrolled herself into a fashion design academy in Milan immediately after graduation. When she completed that, she joined a top designer in Paris as an intern first and then an assistant. Somehow or the other, she kept eluding her parents’ desire to get her married for the longest time. It was only when her parents flew down to Milan and under an emotional breakdown insisted that it was now time for her to settle down that Afsana returned to Kolkata with a dream of opening her own boutique chain. No matter how successful she had or would become, she could never find the answer to that one question: why did Nirmaan leave her? Why didn’t he wait for her?
The questions, repeatedly intruding her thoughts, seared her soul just a little bit more each time they made an appearance. Alongside the hurt and the betrayal she deeply felt, she ached for what might have been—a world in which she and Nirmaan were together. When she decided to name her boutique ‘Tushara’ she surprised herself more than anyone else. She realized, with a shock, that Nirmaan had become her soul’s fragrance and that nobody else could impact her, ever, to the point of erasing or replacing this fragrance. She was quite certain that she would never meet him, much less have him for herself, but it appeared that everything she did would, consciously or subconsciously, reflect his essence residing within her, just as the name of her boutique had done.
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