After All This Time

by Nikita Singh

  ‘Lavanya, we talked about this, didn’t we? We said it was going to be easier once you were away for some time. You needed space and time, and we agreed that would help you.’

  ‘It didn’t.’

  ‘I have trouble believing this. How can something that happened such a long time ago still affect you this way? You can’t even look at him, or say more than two words to him? Do you talk to him at all?’

  ‘No.’ Lavanya’s voice was flat.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You know why! You know better than anyone!’

  Shourya was silent. Lavanya’s eyes were troubled. She looked much older than she had ten minutes ago. Shourya noticed the physical changes that had taken place in her over the course of years. Her eyes were the same, but looked different; her eyebrows were arched more neatly, prominently. Her cheeks had lost the slight roundness they had in her teenage years, making her cheekbones more pronounced. Her lips were curved downwards again. It seemed to be their natural resting state these days.

  He kept looking at her, but Lavanya never looked back. She continued glaring at her fingernails.

  After a while, Shourya decided to let it go. He had no other choice. He had known something was bothering her, and he had waited for her to bring it up, but if she did not want to, he was not going to force her. He saw no point in pursuing the topic if all she would do was ignore him and pick at her nails.

  He hefted the guitar from his right to his left hand. ‘Let’s do this thing.’

  8

  Lavanya was reading her twelfth Phantom comic of the day when her phone buzzed. It was an email from Paxton-Stark-Meester reminding her that she had not shown up for work in weeks, and asking her to check in with them as soon as possible. Another one of those. She put her phone away and went back to reading Phantom

  As a teenager, she had been obsessed with the Phantom. She used to find old comic books, dating back to the 1940s online and through other comic book enthusiasts and would read anything and everything that had the Phantom in it and was written by Lee Falk. Sometimes, the older comics, being classics, were priced beyond her buying power. She had promised herself she would hunt down and buy every last Lee Falk Phantom ever published once she started earning.

  However, she had since forgotten about it. But after the guitar lesson with Shourya turned out to be such a disaster, she was intent on getting the second thing on her list ticked off as soon as possible. When her list told her she was supposed to find all these comics and read them, it turned out to be easier to achieve than she had expected. They were all available for purchase online at insanely low prices. She found fifteen books in the series she was looking for, and decided to devote an entire day to reading them.

  She generally preferred reading books on digital platforms, but reading comic books on an iPad just felt wrong. She missed the delicate, worn-out pages infested by silverfish that threatened to turn to dust at her touch. She was not used to seeing the Phantom in vivid colours and HD. She remembered the images on the physical books being grainy.

  It took her all afternoon to read twelve of them, and after that she simply could not bring herself to pick up comic number thirteen. She yawned and stretched her limbs. She was committed to her Lame Girl Dying Wish-List, and she kept telling herself she was having fun, but in truth the Phantom marathon had been nothing short of self-inflicted torture.

  At least she had Toughy to keep her company. The poor puppy kept wiggling his tail in front of her, urging her to take him out to the lawn and play with him, but she had a wish list to complete. After a while, when he realized she was not going to play with him, he settled for lying down with his head on her lap.

  Lavanya pulled out her list and put a tick against Read all Lee Falk’s Phantom comics. On impulse, she also checked off Learn to play the guitar, scribbling ‘tried’ next to it. Her fingers were aching. Shourya had not gone easy on her. He had been angry about her refusal to discuss her situation with her father, and no matter how hard they tried to move past it, their mood was too sour to enjoy what they were doing.

  He had asked her to cut her fingernails before they began, but she had stubbornly declined. Her nails, uneven and chipped from being gnawed on, had not performed well on the guitar strings. Her fingers would slip and she got minor cuts and bruises all evening. The terribly tuneless sound that came out of the guitar only made things worse. Nor did the fact that Shourya turned out to be a terrible teacher. He had picked ‘Hotel California’ for her first lesson, a song she had never heard before. He said it was a classic, the best acoustic guitar song of all time, but he never played more than the first few strings for her, before handing the guitar to her and asking her to play. And then he became frustrated when she could not. He had a problem with her nails, her posture, the way she held the guitar—everything.

  In the end, they stopped speaking to each other, conversing exclusively through glares and sighs. She was relieved when, after an hour of torment, Shourya suggested they call it a day.

  They had made a pact to help each other, but after the way the first item on the list had gone, Lavanya did not expect or even want any help from him. She had completed her second thing too. It did not matter that it had been no fun, as long as it was done.

  Lavanya looked for something else in her list that she could do. There were a bunch of things she would not need any help with and could be done in a few hours. Colour hair red. Get a tattoo. Belly-button piercing.

  She decided to start with hair colour.

  Lavanya looked up the nearest salon and found one that was ten minutes’ walk from the house. She made her way towards it, following the map closely. She remembered all the streets, but not what was on them any more. All the shops had changed, the buildings were not the same colour, even the smell was unfamiliar.

  It was late afternoon, and stepping out of the house felt good. Artificial heating inside homes could not hold a candle to natural sunlight. It seemed a strange thought for her to have, one that would not even have occurred to her a month ago. After all, all her time was spent in artificially heated places and the only part of her body that ever came in direct contact with sunlight was the area below her sunglasses and above the collar of her suit.

  She wondered if it was a side effect of the news.

  It could be. Or maybe if she had cared to take a walk in the sunlight with nothing more urgent than getting her hair coloured, she might have experienced the wonders of sunlight before. Her mind as a corporate lawyer at PSM had constantly been cluttered with things she had to do and things Mr Cather told her she had done wrong.

  When she reached the salon, she was surprised to find it was one of the big posh ones that charged twice the market rate and had hair dressers who looked down on you even though you’re paying them to serve you. She pushed open the door tentatively and walked in.

  A middle-aged female receptionist looked up, stretched her lips a mere three millimetres in what Lavanya assumed was a smile. ‘HowmayIhelpyou?’ All five words tripped over each other.

  ‘Hey,’ Lavanya hoped her smile was wider than three millimetres. ‘I want to get my hair coloured.’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  The receptionist looked up at her in surprise. She asked, ‘Have you met with one of our hair colour specialists for a consultation?’

  ‘No. Is that a problem?’ Two minutes in and Lavanya was already sick of being judged.

  ‘Unless you consult with a specialist, we cannot be certain what shade is going to suit your skin colour and hairstyle. Also, we must determine the duration of leaving the bleach in and the strength of the developer to apply. We can show you a palette and decide the shade, and then advise you about highlights, lowlights, streaks, dip dyes and several ways we can go about colouring your hair. You will also be advised about after-colour care and precautions—’

  ‘Is there someone here who can colour my hair?’ Lavanya interrupted the receptionist.

/>   ‘Ma’am, we do not recommend colouring your hair without a consultation first. We can offer you a package deal—hair colouring with one post-colour care treatment and two spa sessions. Consultation comes free of charge with the package.’

  ‘Thanks, but I am not interested. For today, can I please just get my hair coloured?’

  ‘I will have to insist. We are professionals, trained to cater to our clients’ every need. We have a whole series of packages you can opt for. Hair colouring is just one step in the process of hair beautification, not the entire process.’

  ‘But it’s hardly invasive surgery, is it?’ Lavanya’s chuckle was met with a cold stare. ‘Just hair colour, please?’

  The receptionist did not attempt to hide her displeasure as she guided Lavanya inside.

  ‘Thank you.’

  And that was only the beginning. Her hair dresser, a girl in her early twenties named Ishi, was vehemently against colouring Lavanya’s hair red. No matter how hard Lavanya tried to convince her that it was not about how she was going to look, that she did not care, it was just a tick mark on a list for her, Ishi did not give in.

  ‘I can give you highlights in a lovely shade of burgundy. It’s gonna look awesome in sunlight and it won’t stand out too much under the yellow kinda light they have in restaurants and stuff, y’know?’

  Lavanya told her she wanted red. Red, red, only red.

  ‘I’m gonna have to bleach your hair for that. And then colour it red. And trust me, it’s not classy at all. You don’t wanna go around looking like you have a . . . What is that huge red bird called? Ostrich, I think . . . On your head, do ya?

  In the end, Lavanya had to give up and let Ishi do as she pleased. It was strange how she had no control over the way the tasks on her lists were being completed.

  Shourya did not sleep well that night. Lavanya had not called or texted him even once that day, and he had relapsed and visited Deepti’s Facebook profile to check what she was doing. Always a mistake.

  He saw a recent status update, where she had put up Johnny Depp’s famous relationship quote about how if you love two people at the same time, you should go with the second because if you actually loved the first, you would not have fallen for the second.

  Bullshit!

  Was she trying to tell him that what they had had was not real? That she was the innocent one in the equation, because she could not stay faithful to one person? It was very easy to use general statements to justify one’s actions, but nothing justified cheating. Even so, if quoting Johnny Depp was what she needed to do to be able to sleep at night, he was not going to take that away from her.

  In fact, he did not want to have anything to do with her at all. It was habit that took him to her page, and boredom. Sometimes, when he tried to remember what being in a relationship with her had been like, he couldn’t. There were so many images from after their break-up, so many incidents that crowded his head. He did not miss her. He only missed the thought of her.

  When he woke up from his troubled sleep the next morning, he dialled Lavanya’s number before he could convince himself not to give in.

  ‘Hey,’ she greeted.

  ‘Okay, so, you know you need to apologize, right?’ Shourya asked.

  ‘I need to apologize? For what? Being a horrible teacher? And a mean and terrible friend and human being?’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey! Only about fifty per cent of that is true about me. And it wasn’t my fault, Suryavanshi. You were being an impossible pain in the ass. You know I cannot handle secrecy.’

  ‘That’s your problem, Kapoor,’ Lavanya replied coldly.

  ‘And that’s not rude at all.’

  ‘Argh, fine! But I am not going to apologize, and since I am not even mad at you any more I do not need you to apologize to me either.’

  ‘Cool. So meet me at my place in half an hour?’ Shourya suggested, only too happy to let the matter drop. One day without her had affected him more than he was willing to acknowledge.

  ‘No. I am busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Getting a tattoo.’ He could picture her smiling as she said it, but was not sure whether or not she was serious.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  ‘You’re joking, Suryavanshi. You don’t have the balls,’ Shourya sat up on his bed. He had always planned to get inked some day too, but had never got around to it.

  ‘Come and see. And then tell me if this looks like a joke to you.’

  ‘Shit! Seriously? Where are you? It’s ten in the morning!’

  ‘I am leaving for the tattoo parlour. They also do piercings there. I’m gonna get myself one of those too,’ Lavanya said. ‘By the way, I also got my hair coloured yesterday. Since you weren’t delivering on your end of the deal, I decided to take care of my list myself.’

  Shourya sighed. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I ruined my day without your supervision too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lavanya sounded concerned.

  ‘I went back to her Facebook—’

  ‘NO! No. No, okay? Never do that. That is like the first rule, man. What on earth convinced you that stalking her would be a good idea? Are you stupid?’

  ‘I guess I deserve that,’ Shourya relented. Only Lavanya could insult him in a way that could make him smile. ‘We clearly do need each other—’

  ‘I don’t need you,’ Lavanya cut him off. ‘I ticked two tasks off my list yesterday, without any help.’

  ‘Okay, so that means the deal is off then, right?’

  ‘Ye— No! I mean . . . well, you clearly need me. And I suppose I could use a hand now and then, even though I’m perfectly capable of handling this on my own, trust me. So, you know, whatever. We made a pact—let’s keep it.’

  ‘If putting it like that makes you happy, then so be it.’ Shourya rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I’ll pick you up.’

  When Shourya pulled up in front of the tattoo parlour, he had doubts about getting inked here. The place looked dingy and dark, and not at all impressive from the outside.

  ‘Are you sure this is the place?’ he asked Lavanya.

  ‘Ha! Chicken.’

  ‘This does not look hygienic at all. We can look around for another place, can’t we? What’s so special about this one?’

  ‘It’s the one closest to my place on Google Maps,’ Lavanya said simply.

  ‘And that’s it? I thought someone you know got inked here or you have some reasonably good testimony about the place at least. We can’t get tattooed here just because it is closest to your place.’

  ‘Why not? Watch me.’

  Lavanya stepped out of the car before he could protest. Strands of her hair shone red under the morning sunlight. She had confessed that she was not pleased with it, but he thought her hair looked much nicer than the vivid red she had initially planned on getting done. By the time he parked and got out, she had already entered the parlour. He had no option but to follow.

  ‘Let me see . . .’ she was telling the guy at the reception. ‘I want to get one word tattooed, here,’ she pointed to her forearm. ‘Can I see some font styles, please? Something in cursive, possibly?’

  The place had dim lighting and red walls, one of which was covered entirely in pictures of tattoos the place claimed to have done, held in place by push pins. There were some exceedingly grotesque ones there too, which did not do anything to convince Shourya that this was not a bad idea.

  There were numerous tattoos of skulls on the wall, but one of them was especially monstrous. One skull tattoo seemed to have three heads, and six eyes, positioned in a manner that made zero sense. But then, how could he expect sense from a man who got a giant skull inked on his back?

  ‘Lavanya, we need to go,’ he whispered in her ear.

  ‘Aw, you leaving?’ Lavanya asked loudly, looking at him straight in the eye. ‘I thought you wanted to get one too.’

  The man at the reception and the other three people in the
room looked up at him, waiting for his reply. ‘I think I will,’ Shourya finally said.

  ‘That’s more like it. Have you decided what you are going to get?’

  Shourya was a little annoyed at Lavanya’s behaviour. She knew he was not comfortable with the shady place, but she wouldn’t let him look up some other, better establishment. And she was enjoying putting him on spot, speaking loudly with everyone around listening in.

  ‘Definitely not a skull,’ he muttered. ‘What are you getting?’

  ‘I am going to get “always” written on the inside of my right wrist in this font.’ She showed him a basic calligraphy font.

  ‘Hmm. Book phrase? Isn’t “always” a Harry Potter thing?’

  Lavanya nodded. ‘Severus Snape’s eternal love for Lily Potter. And don’t you dare make fun of me for getting a young adult fantasy book reference tattooed. I have not grown out of HP. I never will.’

  ‘No, of course not. Potter’s the best. This gives me an idea too.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Shourya said. ‘Are you familiar with John Green’s Looking for Alaska? There was this amazing concept in it.’

  ‘Is this the same John Green who wrote The Fault in Our Stars? It is supposed to be really good, right? I have not read anything for the joy of reading since school, so I do not know much of the present reading trends.’

  ‘Same guy. But I personally think Looking for Alaska is a much better book; leaves you with more to think about. You should read it.’

  ‘Have you both decided your designs?’ a young tattoo artist interrupted.

  ‘Umm, I have,’ Lavanya looked up at Shourya. ‘You have decided too, right?’

  ‘I’m not sure . . . How is it gonna look to people?’ Shourya hesitated.

  ‘Come on. If it means something to you, get it. Who cares what others think?’

  ‘You can come this way,’ the tattoo artist motioned Lavanya before turning to Shourya. ‘Please go into that room. Michael will take care of you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Shourya leaned in and whispered into Lavanya’s ear, ‘Are you sure, though? This place does not look very hygienic to me. It is okay if you don’t want to do this. I mean, you don’t have to, just because it’s on your list. Or we could find a better place, maybe?’