Because Shit Happened

by Harsh Snehanshu

  It was time to let her know the truth. It was time to make her realize that I was not worthy of her. As I looked into her brown eyes, which were inches away from me, I gathered courage to speak, but she kissed me once again. This time, I kissed her back. Unknowingly.

  I carried her in my arms and took her to bed. A minute later, we were in another world. I had never felt so close to her before. I even said I love you thrice during that time. Twenty minutes later, she asked me to go and put on some protection. She wanted to go all the way this time. I thought of the pack of Durex lying in my drawer. She asked me where I had kept them and went to retrieve one. While she was gone, I lay on the bed contemplating on how things were getting complicated with every fleeting moment.

  After not hearing from Priya for around five minutes, I got a little worried. I went to the other room, thinking she might not have found the pack. I entered the room and found her sitting morbidly next to the open packet of orange-flavoured condoms. At first I couldn’t realize what had gone amiss but when I saw the orange-sachets strewn on the ground, I realized that I had been caught.

  I could have chosen to lie like my friends, but could not think of a better time to bring up the truth in front of her. Sadly, she didn’t give me a chance to speak in my defense.

  An extremely loud slap rang out in the room and I went flying to the floor. Neither of us said anything for the next few minutes. She came and sat helplessly on the ground next to me.

  I moved near her and disrupted the eerie silence with a meek but sincere sorry. She didn’t respond.

  Half an hour later, she stood up and went towards the bed. When she came back, she was fully dressed and headed towards the door. I grabbed her hand before she could leave.

  ‘Don’t. Please don’t go,’ I said in a hoarse voice. There was a mirror near the door which showed that my left cheek had turned red with the slap.

  ‘Amol, let go of my hand,’ Priya said.

  ‘Don’t go,’ I persisted.

  She started hitting at me with all her might and even tried to strangle me. I fell against the wall, while she tried to choke me with all her force. At first I felt that she was joking, but when I actually started getting asphyxiated, I grabbed her hands and freed myself immediately.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ I screamed, panting heavily.

  ‘Who was the whore you fucked? Tell me, who was the whore you fucked?’ she screamed at the top of her voice.

  ‘Stop shouting,’ I yelled at the same volume and whispered, ‘It was Shikha and we didn’t.’

  ‘I will kill you if you lie to me.’

  ‘I am not lying. We didn’t,’ I said. I was still out of breath.

  ‘So who used it then?’ she said pointing to the orange sachet.

  ‘I used it. There are other things one can do with it,’ I replied annoyingly.

  ‘Despite sleeping around with that slut, you could still dare to touch me with those fingers of yours that would have…you scoundrel!’ she yelled and threw whatever she could find around at me—shoes, polish, key chains, hangers, and a plastic chair before dropping down on the ground.

  ‘Are you committed to her?’

  ‘I am. But I don’t love her at all.’

  ‘Why did you have to do it?’

  ‘I felt that you would never talk to me.’

  ‘Why could not you tell me before going ahead with her? Wait, when you came to break up with me, it was her, wasn’t it?’

  I nodded in shame.

  ‘Answer me,’ she yelled. ‘Can’t you break up with her for me?’

  I kept mum. My mind was racing through various things. Clearly, Priya was the girl I had ever loved with all my heart. I didn’t know whether I still loved her or not. I just knew that I could not see her cry.

  ‘Please answer me. I will never question your answer. Just answer me. I am going home tomorrow anyway for a week’s time before joining my job,’ Priya said dejectedly and got up.

  ‘Can you tell your parents about us? Now that we have arrived at this juncture of life, I want to make sure of a future before moving forward. If we are to restart our relationship, it’s important that both of are secure about never being heartbroken again,’ I said.

  ‘If that’s what makes you happy, I will,’ she said with immense sincerity and left my place.

  I had never felt so remorseful before. I cursed myself for letting things get so complicated, for having invited Shikha home that night, for not paying attention to Priya while she was on the phone with me, for my first fight with Priya, and so on. Now when she was ready to face her strongest fear, I was captured by another fear. The fear of another encounter. Shikha.

  When Priya left, I switched on my cellphone. There were twenty missed calls from Shikha and three unread messages.

  ‘Call me as soon as Priya goes,’ Shikha’s message read. I felt a sudden disenchantment with Shikha, like I wanted to get rid of her from my life that very minute.

  ‘We are going to Noida to see a client. Will come back at night,’ the second message said. It was Mishra’s and the last message was from Rishabh saying, ‘We met Shikha. She cancelled the meet after just two hours. She said she was not well. We had discussed new designs today. She says she will deliver them by Tuesday. Can you convince her to do it by tonight itself?’

  ‘Bloody hypocrite,’ I yelled in disgust. She had behaved unprofessionally, having allowed her personal issues with me to affect her professional work. My irritation was at its peak. In that moment of extreme anger, I laid out an elaborate plan of getting rid of her for good. But before everything else, I had to get the work done.

  I called her and uttered a fake apology for not having called her. She resisted at first.

  ‘There’s good news for you,’ I told her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything has been solved. Now, nobody can ever step into our lives again,’ I said. I was astonished to see my own falseness, but my conscience supported me because I was doing it for my venture.

  ‘Really? You mean it?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you want to know what happened?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to hear about Priya. I’m just glad things are finally over between you two.’

  ‘Mishra and Rishabh won’t be here till late and you can stay over on the pretext of work.’

  ‘Wow, I’m coming right away,’ she said excitedly and disconnected the call.

  Rishabh and Mishra came back at 10 at night. They were surprised to find Shikha at home.

  ‘Look what we have accomplished in the last few hours,’ I said, letting the work to speak for itself. Mishra and Rishabh peered on the screen incisively only to break into a satisfied smile.

  ‘It looks good,’ they both echoed like robots. Mishra went into the loo, where he used to smoke and poop at the same time.

  I grabbed the plates from Shikha and took them to the washbasin to rinse.

  As I returned from the kitchen, I saw that Shikha and Rishabh were missing from the drawing room. I went to the outer room and what I saw stopped me dead in my tracks. Shikha was giving Rishabh a shoulder massage and he, in turn, was moaning in pleasure. When I entered the room, Shikha looked at me helplessly, as if she had been forced to do what she was doing. Rishabh, on seeing me, signalled for me to remain outside and let him enjoy his time with her.

  I came out and tried to gather my thoughts. Shikha immediately came running out of the room. I waited for Rishabh to come out as well but he didn’t. I asked Shikha what she was doing back in the room. She said to my disbelief that Rishabh forced himself upon her and asked her to give him a massage against her wishes. She hastily explained how she ran out of the room when he tried to assault her, to which I remained unperturbed. In that small moment, I came face to face with the reality that Shikha didn’t matter to me at all. I tried to console her, half-heartedly.

  ‘Do you want to go?’ I whispered.

  ‘Not when you are here, I trust you,’ she said and sent me thinking.
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br />   ‘Where am I going to sleep?’ she asked, a way for her to tell me that she was not deterred by the immediate assault by my able partner, who had by now come out of the room.

  ‘Umm, let me ask Rishabh,’ I said.

  ‘The three of us can sleep in the AC room, so we can let Shikha sleep in the drawing room,’ Rishabh suggested.

  Shikha looked at Rishabh with piercing eyes and said, ‘I want to sleep in the AC room, please. I don’t have problem in sleeping alongside Mishra or Amol.’ ‘We can use pillows as separators, can’t we?’

  Rishabh face had turned red. He had been humiliated on his own turf.

  ‘What about Rishabh?’ I said, playing the role of her partner to a T.

  ‘Oh, Rishabh told me that he usually chats with Anjali at night on Skype, so he can sleep in the drawing room today,’ Shikha taunted and went to the AC room with a victorious smile. I followed her but was stopped before I could leave the room.

  ‘Amol, don’t you want to work for a while?’ Rishabh asked in all seriousness.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I had been doing till now. We can finish the remaining designs in the AC room. Come, sit with us till we retire to bed.’

  ‘No, I’m fine here. Good night,’ Rishabh said.

  When Mishra came back, he was delighted to find that he was going to be sharing the bed with a girl. We decided that Shikha could sleep along the edge of the bed, Mishra in the middle, and I on the other edge. It was not agreeable to either Shikha or me, but we could not have said a word.

  ‘Mishra, why don’t you lie on the edge for a while? We have to work on the design,’ Shikha asked Mishra who had by then already dropped his body in the middle of the bed. He pretended not to listen. I rolled him over to one side with great difficulty. He woke up after a while, feigning astonishment at his changed position but when he saw us diligently working, went back to sleep.

  We indeed worked for a little while, designing eight out of the total twelve pages which, as Shikha said, would have increased the ‘stickiness’ of our website ten times the initial figure of zero. A website is completely dependent on how it makes the user feel the first time he logs in. The better it looks, the better will be the user experience, and the more ‘sticky’ the relationship between the two becomes.

  I was extremely happy that my shrewdness had borne good results. Just four more webpages had to be designed after which I could get rid of her forever. Though her involvement as a designer was based on a verbal promise of 20,000 rupees which were to be given to her in four installments, in reality she was pursuing the task only because it allowed her to spend time with me. Had I broken up with her, she would have broken up with YourQuote—no matter what financial incentives we gave her.

  At 1 o’ clock, tired at last, we went to sleep in the chilly AC breeze, ducked under one blanket that allowed our hands to foray into each other’s territory without waking up Mishra.

  The next day—a Sunday—didn’t turn out as I had imagined it to.

  Early in the morning, Shikha received a call from her parents telling her that they were reaching her hostel in two hours. She left before Mishra or Rishabh could wake up. She asked me not to call her during the day as her parents had become suspicious about guys owing to their experience with Kartik and she hadn’t told them about me. She assured me that she would return as and when she would get free.

  By the time Mishra got up, I had just finished taking a bath and was drying myself with a towel.

  ‘Where is Shikha?’ Mishra and Rishabh jointly asked me, ironically for two totally opposite reasons.

  ‘She’s gone. Her parents were going to come to her hostel,’ I said. While one was disappointed by her departure, the other seemed glad.

  My cellphone rang. It was Priya. Curious, I moved out to the balcony.

  ‘When I told my mother about us, she slapped me in front of everyone here in my PG. My father didn’t say a word and both of them just left, asking me to never call them. Are you happy now?’ she said in anger.

  I was speechless. For all our fights, I had always blamed her. We had spent some of the best times with each other and at that moment, I felt like I had let her down. I repeatedly sought her forgiveness, to which she had just one response: ‘Are you happy now?’

  The burden of remorse in having sinned twice—first by cheating on her and then by being the reason behind her shattered relationship with her parents—trampled my heart. At that moment, I was willing to do whatever it would take to make things right with her.

  ‘I’m really frightened, Amol. I don’t want to be alone,’ she said.

  ‘Come over,’ I said without thinking and disconnected the call.

  But no sooner did I put my phone down, I came face to face with the reality of it all. My work held priority and I figured that it wasn’t possible for me to break up with Shikha before completing the user interface design. The future of our venture depended on those four webpages that were remaining.

  I thought of calling Priya and asking her not to come. But I chose to do something completely else. I called her friend Kamna, who also happened to be a good friend of mine, for help.

  ‘Hi Kamna, this is Amol,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Hi Amol, how are you?’ she said with no excitement at all.

  ‘Nothing. Things between Priya and me haven’t been well lately,’ I said trying to seek sympathy.

  ‘I know, you have been seeing Shikha, Rishabh’s ex, isn’t it?’ Kamna plainly said.

  I was flabbergasted. Shivers of mortification ran through my body as though I had been caught red-handed. I had taken it for granted that Priya would uphold my privacy, but no.

  ‘Yes, thank you, bye,’ I rudely said and dropped the call before she could ask me anything further.

  I knew what to do next. The wrath induced a tinge of satisfaction in me as for now I could get the designs made from Shikha before anything happened. I called Priya.

  ‘You don’t need to come here,’ I commanded.

  ‘But…what happened?’ asked Priya.

  ‘I think you prefer to gossip about me and my private life with Kamna rather than coming over and talking to me.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I just spoke to Kamna. How does she know about Shikha?’

  ‘Umm…’

  ‘You are one hell of a bitch. You gossip about me behind my back and expect me to believe that you still love me?’

  ‘What else could I have done? You asked me not to speak to you until I confessed everything in front of my parents,’ she started crying on the phone.

  ‘That does not justify you talking about my private life with anyone else. Imagine how you would have felt had I talked about our private lives with Rishabh?’ I screamed.

  ‘I am sorry Amol, I’m really sorry,’ she pleaded and kept crying. It was the most vulnerable I had ever seen her and though it bothered me, I still chose not to comfort her.

  Mulling over the past few days of my life, I came up with a one liner and posted it as the Sermon of the Day quote on our fan page:

  In a troubled relationship, never hope for a break up. Let it come as a pleasant surprise.

  I looked at the watch. It was 2. I hadn’t yet received a call from Shikha. Mishra had translated Shikha’s designs into the CSS codes and was waiting for the remaining four designs, and incidentally, the pages remaining were the most important—Profile, Home, Hall of Fame (that was to contain the best original quotes submitted by users), and Leaderboard that was to be used for gamifying the entire experience.

  Gamification is an important aspect of any networking venture. It involves an incentive and engagement mechanism that drives the user to participate more. Every networking website subtly or blatantly relies on this aspect. For example, you share on Facebook to get likes, you tweet on Twitter to get retweets and followers and so on.

  Getting work done from Shikha was my prerogative, as Rishabh had lost his command on her by his insolent act the previous day and Mishra
had to fiddle with codes—or in his words, ‘clean’ the codes—to make them more scalable, thus easier to manage as the venture grows bigger in terms of size and the number of users.

  The way a website is coded is a very important aspect for any internet venture. Rashly coded websites, especially by freelancers off the web and even some professional web development companies, can drastically affect a business while scaling. The codes should follow a proper framework that makes them decipherable to every technical guy that comes on board later. In a venture, it’s very important to be quick, but it’s more important to be quick with the right process. This was one of the reasons we never hired an agency to build our website and instead waited for the right guy, which we ultimately found in Mishra.

  I messaged Shikha to inquire when she would get free. She told me she was already on the way. When I told Rishabh that Shikha was coming over, he told me he had to suddenly attend some follow-up meetings with a couple of clients he had met last week. Mishra chose to stay. I had to somehow push him out as well. It was the much awaited day when I would get the work completed from Shikha and then excuse her from my life forever.

  ‘How long it had been since you met your girlfriend?’ I asked Mishra, who had his head stuck to his laptop screen. He seemed taken aback by my sudden concern. He looked around to make sure that I was speaking to him and not anybody else.

  ‘Umm…’ he stammered uneasily, ‘over a month maybe?’

  ‘Why do you avoid her so much? Fights?’

  ‘No, not fights. She is just really irritating. Calls me every fucking hour,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! Why don’t you meet her then?’

  ‘Are you crazy? She makes me spend at least a thousand rupees every time,’ he said and botched my plan of sending him to meet his girlfriend.

  ‘By the way, you know what?’ he said with a wicked smile. ‘I’m trying to woo a girl from Click2Closet, the company I’m interning at. She is a real hot Punjabi. I have asked her out on a movie date today evening.’