If It’s Not Forever: It’s Not Love

by Datta, Durjoy

  It turned out that Ragini had always been in love with Nigel, she tearfully admitted, and Nigel had broken up with his girlfriend because she couldn’t bear Nigel being so close to Ragini. Their teary reunion and confession of love brought tears to my eyes too, though my reasons were a lot different from theirs. But I am not that selfish. I would still love her and be happy for her. It would take a lot more than Nigel to make me not love her. And anyone would say that Ragini and I would make a better couple than Nigel and her. Nigel is too tall for her. And he’s Christian … What about Ragini’s conservative parents?

  As they sat in front of me and held hands, shared private jokes and anecdotes from their days in Delhi, I felt jealous. The only silver lining to the dark cloud was that he left today. He had to rejoin work and he said he would be back soon. I am not looking forward to that. I don’t know whether it’s my mind playing tricks, but Ragini looked even more beautiful today. Had I been Nigel, I would never have left.

  Ragini looked happy and I was happy for her. They were made for each other. They were perfect. They were the best of friends and had seen some tough times together. It’s a perfect fairy tale. Nigel loves her too. It’s evident in the glint in his eyes and the warmth in his touch. Nigel deserved her. And she deserved him. I was an outsider the day I had started stalking her, and maybe that’s how it’s going to be.

  Ragini asked me to start dating someone too. I tried not to tell her that she was the only one I wanted. As I sit on my bed and write this, I can feel a few tears trickle down my cheek and wet the diary in which I am writing. I plan to be okay tomorrow. We are meeting again. She wants to catch a movie though she is not sure whether she can bunk her class. I wish she does. I don’t know if I will be as special to her in the days to come as I am now.

  I wish I could see her tomorrow.

  Piyush Makhija

  It’s becoming embarrassing now. I can’t take my eyes off my own girlfriend, the girl I’ve been dating for five years. My jaw had dropped the moment I’d seen her walk out of the hotel door and I have not returned to normal yet. I thank Shrey for it. Avantika and I have been driving for the past six hours and it is the best drive ever. She has mastered the art of seduction. Though, I should add here that my threshold is shamefully low. At times I have gotten seduced seeing her brush her teeth.

  But today is off-the-charts awesome. Avantika has been slipping her hands in … everywhere! I liked her anyway but I like the new her more. But it’s bothering me. She does not have to pretend in front of me. That’s not what people in love do, right?

  ‘You really don’t have to do this. I think you’re still fun and awesome.’

  ‘Why do you think I’m doing this for you?’ she says and looks at me.

  ‘I don’t know. I mean, Shrey said those things and you—’

  ‘I am doing this for myself,’ she says. ‘Shrey was right. I have grown up. I shouldn’t have. I have been the sane, mature person in our relationship. Maybe it’s time to switch places. I will be the stupid, irresponsible one now.’

  She winks at me. Her winks are like the lull before the storm. Sometimes it means let’s-go-home, other times it means you-are-so-owned … and so on. I wonder what it means this time. I have to admit that I’m a little scared. I have seen the ‘Tiya part’ of Avantika and it’s infinite times crazier than anything Tiya does. I don’t think I can keep up with that now.

  Slowly the sun turns orange and sets across the horizon. We have taken a million detours and I’m still not confident that we are on the right track. The maps are all awry and the people around are as clueless as we are. But they still try to help us by giving us wrong directions. Silly helpful people.

  A little later, we find ourselves on a long road that doesn’t seem to have an end and our car is the only one for miles around. Shrey scar can give way anytime and I’m sweating just thinking about it. I look at Avantika and her eyes are closed. She is least bothered that there is absolutely nothing in sight. No motel. No dhaba even.

  ‘Do we drive through the night?’ I ask.

  ‘Why not? I can drive if you feel tired,’ she says and looks at me. She really isn’t concerned.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing in sight. We don’t have an option.’

  Contrary to what I’d expected and hoped for, she doesn’t panic. Instead, she asks me to switch and takes over the driving wheel. She puts on her iPod earphones and starts to drive along.

  Soon, the only light in the pitch-black night are the headlights and the stars above, and the only sound is the rumble of the car’s engine. The darkness around us is a little disturbing. Try driving on a deserted road with the car’s headlights off. I can bet it’s the most uneasy you would ever feel. We are all used to the light around us; darkness unsettles us.

  Avantika, I am sure, is not thinking about it. I look at her and she is bobbing her head to the music on her iPod. Soon, I am asleep.

  I wake up with a start. I look groggily all around and notice that Avantika is still driving.

  ‘Finally!’ she says.

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Five? And you have been driving?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says and smiles. She has driven through the night. Six hours.

  ‘Six hours?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I ask her to stop the car and she does. We brush our teeth and wash our faces with a few bottles of mineral water we had picked up on the way. I take over the driver’s seat.

  The sun is slowly coming out and there are some trucks at a distance. My neck hurts for I had slept awkwardly. Avantika, on the other hand, behaves like it’s just another day. Even though she hasn’t slept the entire night, and her hair is a mess, she looks amazing. Those svelte legs and her perfectly sculpted body is just what you want to see early in the morning. The warm morning sun pales in comparison. She leans back on her seat.

  It’s only been fifteen minutes when I see the diary on the dashboard with the bookmarks inside it. It’s so distracting. At certain levels, it takes me back to my college life. The screwed-up life and times of the dead guy bring back some strange memories. I drive on.

  Avantika has dozed off and my mind wanders to the times I’ve spent with her. I see many couples around and I don’t know how much they love each other, but I know for sure that our love is way better. She completes me. No matter where I go, what I do, she is always on my mind. Anything I do or strive for is meaningless if I don’t have Avantika by my side. Cheesy as it may sound, life without her is meaningless.

  I know I’m not the best-looking or the smartest guy Avantika can get, but one thing I know for sure, she won’t ever get someone who loves her more than I do.

  Three hours more of driving through empty, wide roads brings us to Bhopal. The city is still sleeping when we get there. We cross a few mosques, a huge lake and a couple of parks. But I know we wouldn’t be doing much of sightseeing on this trip.

  I stop outside a small hotel, ask the receptionist for the rates, negotiate a little and finalize it. Avantika is still fast asleep. I pick her up in my arms and carry her to the hotel room. Apart from the fact that I just love watching her sleep, I think carrying her in my arms is an incredibly romantic thing to do. I am sure it’s something she will brag about to her girlfriends.

  I tuck her inside the blanket and lie down right next to her. Almost immediately, I fall asleep. It’s nearly noon when I wake up. Avantika is already up and around. She has a cup of coffee in her hand. She is looking out of the window and looks enchanting.

  ‘When did you wake up?’ I ask her.

  She looks at me lovingly, comes near me and sits on my lap. ‘It’s been a couple of hours.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’

  ‘You look cute when you’re sleeping,’ she says.

  Aha! That’s exactly what I think about her.

  ‘Thank you.’ I blush. It’s been years but st
ill I turn into a red tomato every time she says something nice about me.

  ‘Aww! Look at you.’

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘You’re blushing, Deb.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I am a guy. I don’t blush.’

  ‘Achha? I thought it was cute. Anyway, if you say you weren’t blushing …’

  ‘No! I was.’

  We both laugh aloud.

  ‘Oye, I was waiting for you to get up. Let’s go meet him. I can’t wait,’ she says and I nod. I can see the diary in her hand. Obviously she’s been reading it again. Suddenly her face droops and she looks away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We need to meet Nivedita too,’ she says. I nod again.

  I can see that Avantika is more curious than I am about meeting Piyush. We stand outside the office Piyush works in, holding his business card. We are about to know the name of the guy whose initials are etched on the diary. Needless to say, I am freaking excited.

  It’s a smallish office, and I see the designation—‘Design Engineer’—on the card. I hope he isn’t busy and gives us time. After all, we have some bad news to give him. His best friend from school is dead. That’s got to mean something, right?

  I follow Avantika into the premises. She always takes the initiative for all the things that require extreme confidence and I usually just hide behind her.

  ‘Hi, I want to meet Mr Piyush Makhija,’ she says. ‘I’ve come from his hometown. His father sent us.’

  The receptionist looks up at Avantika, dials Piyush’s extension number, and lets him know. She asks us to wait in the adjacent room. I wonder if Avantika is thinking what I am thinking—what will we say to him?

  A little later, a guy dressed in a crisp, white shirt and a well-ironed pair of trousers walks into the room. He has a slight paunch, but his bright, fair face distracts me from it. He looks intelligent and hard-working in his rimless spectacles and cropped hair. So, this is what hot guys from school grow up to be?

  I don’t know, because as a kid, I was the fat, ugly one, who used to be ridiculed all the time. I was a favourite for all the bullies in school, and used to spend days crying on the last bench.

  He gives us a confused look but puts his hand forward.

  ‘Hi, I’m Avantika,’ she shakes his hand. ‘And this is Deb.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asks. He looks confused.

  ‘Your dad gave us your number and address,’ Avantika says. ‘Actually, we wanted to know something from you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We found a diary,’ she says and pauses dramatically. ‘It’s of a friend of yours from school. We wanted to know something about him.’

  ‘Diary? I don’t get it,’ he says. The look on his face tells us that he thinks we’re two crazy people.

  ‘Did you hear about the Chandni Chowk blast?’

  ‘Oh yes, I did. What about it?’

  ‘A friend of yours died in the blast. Deb survived and found this diary.’

  ‘My friend? Who? I don’t—’

  She hands over the diary to him. He looks at the diary looks at us, and then flips over to the first page. He runs his hand over the initials and doesn’t look up. He has recognized the initials and the person to whom this diary belonged. He flips through the pages and his eyes tear up. He keeps turning the pages over without reading, and feels the burnt edges of the pages. We hear him sigh. The death of a best friend can take some time to sink in. After quite a while, with tears in his eyes, he looks up and says, ‘Are you sure?’ We nod.

  ‘Can you tell us his name?’ Avantika asks.

  ‘Ritam Dey,’ he says softly.

  RD.

  He pauses for a little while and asks how we got to him and we tell him everything. We show him the sentence in the diary that led us to him. He hands the diary back to us. We look at him with expectant eyes, hoping he could lead us to Ragini or Nivedita.

  ‘Don’t you want to read it?’ Avantika asks.

  ‘Had he wanted me to read it, he would’ve told me. And we didn’t end on a good note. So, I should probably not be reading this.’

  ‘What can you tell us about him?’ I ask.

  He starts, ‘We first met at the boarding school right after that incident with the guys …’

  He continues and tells us that Ritam was from Mumbai and that’s where he lived before coming to the boarding school. Piyush tells us that Ritam was an aggressive football player and that’s why he was drawn to him. Together, they made the most lethal forward attack that Dehradun school football had ever witnessed.

  ‘We made a great team on the football field. In the three years in which we played together, I don’t think we lost a single match. We were unbeatable. I can’t believe he’s dead …’ His voice trails off.

  ‘We are sorry,’ Avantika says.

  ‘He was a nice guy.’

  He tells us more about how they first met, grew and bonded as friends. Piyush’s voice trails off in the middle a few times as the news of the death of his best buddy from school sinks in slowly. He is in tears. I know how he feels. When I first saw Piyush, I had replaced his face with mine and imagined Shrey being dead. My heart shrank to the size of a peanut and I could barely keep my tears in. Yeah, I’m sensitive. Just that I don’t cry during movies.

  ‘He really missed you,’ Avantika says.

  ‘It’s in the diary,’ I say. ‘He thought you ignored him.’

  ‘Why would I?’ Piyush asks.

  ‘You were popular, a better player, better in studies and had a pretty girlfriend. He thought you forgot him in all that.’

  He takes a deep breath and sighs. ‘Sumi liked him,’ he says. There is a hint of nostalgia and a little favour of first love, and the first heartbreak, in his tone.

  ‘Sumi liked him? He thought she came to him because you had started ignoring her!’ Avantika says.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. Even when Sumi and I were together, Sumi liked him better. But Ritam was always a bully and Sumi was scared of him.’

  ‘So? What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘She said she was falling out of love with me. She wanted me to talk to Ritam about her since we were the best of friends. I still loved Sumi so I didn’t want to do that. I was too arrogant to hear that my girlfriend liked someone else. Worse still, my best fiend! I told her that Ritam and I didn’t get along well. I stopped talking to Ritam to make her believe that. But she just didn’t stop talking about him. So, I started talking to other girls to make her jealous, but it didn’t work. One day, she left me and went to him …’

  His voice trails off again.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She never came back and I lost both of them,’ he says and looks at the diary. It looks like he wants to read it.

  ‘He wrote in the diary that he is sorry that he envied you and stopped talking to you. He missed you,’ Avantika says.

  ‘I missed him too, but more than that, I was angry at him for dating my ex-girlfriend. I know it wasn’t his fault. We were best friends and I stopped talking to him. I shouldn’t have done that.’ A lone tear rolls down his cheek. I like him instantly. Tears usually don’t lie. They are the most honest form of expression. He continues to tell us fondly about their football victories. Piyush talks for long and speaks very lovingly about his friend.

  ‘It was very hard to understand Ritam at times,’ he says. ‘Sometimes, he used to act all angry and rough. But on other occasions, he used to seem like a very docile guy. It was amusing.’

  ‘Do you have a picture?’ Avantika asks.

  ‘Not right now. But I might have one at home.’

  Damn. Digital cameras—a few years too late.

  ‘So, you weren’t in touch with him after school at all?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I went to Rourkela for my graduation and got busy. My mother was not keeping well, so I had to take care of that too. Everything else took a back seat. There have been times that I have looked for him on social networking sites, but have
never found him.’

  While we are talking, the receptionist enters for the third time. The first two times she had said that there was something important from Piyush’s boss. This time it looks urgent and something that can’t wait.

  ‘I really have to go. How long are you two in Bhopal?’

  ‘We are leaving tonight,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ he says.

  ‘We will let you know if we stay for longer. We would love to hear more about him,’ I say.

  ‘So, whom are you meeting next?’ he asks.

  ‘We wanted you to tell us that,’ Avantika says. ‘Do you know he had a sister?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I don’t remember the name … Umm … Oh wait—Nivedita, right?’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ve never met her,’ he says.

  ‘Did you know she is crippled?’

  ‘What?’ Piyush takes a little time to comprehend what Avantika had just said.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Avantika asks.

  ‘He had once asked me for money because he wanted to see her in Gandhinagar. I thought he was lying and I refused. We had a huge fight that day. I didn’t know—’

  He looks like he regrets it. Until just a moment ago, he still thought that Ritam had been lying about the crippled sister. He feels sorry and it shows on his face.

  He looks at us and asks, ‘Can you make me copies of the diary? Of the parts I am in?’

  ‘Sure. We will leave it at the reception.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he says feebly.

  Before he leaves, Avantika asks him if he knows where Sumi is or what her full name is.

  ‘Sumi Das,’ he says. ‘I have no idea where she is … Sumi and Ritam were my only good friends in my schooldays. If you meet Sumi, please tell her that I really cared about her.’

  Just as he is about to leave, Avantika asks him—just out of curiosity—what Ritam looked like. It is awkward for him to describe another guy at first, but then he tells us that Ritam stood at about five-ten, was strongly built—hardened from football practice, I presume—and had a sharp jawline on which he was often complimented. He hugs us both and leaves the room. Avantika and I look at each other, feel sorry for Piyush, and ask the receptionist to make copies of the first few pages of the diary.