The Girl of My Dreams

by Durjoy Datta

  Daman raised his hand the highest. He was looked over a few times but the emcee finally noticed and the microphone was passed on to him. Jayanti shot Daman a look which he ignored.

  ‘Hello, I’m Daman,’ he said. ‘Congratulations for the books you have written in the past and the one you’re writing. I’m also a writer, though infinitely less successful. But don’t you think that the success of your mediocre books is the reason why other authors don’t get a chance to prove their worth? Like Jayanti Raghunath here, who’s my editor as well, told me a couple of days back that they will have to shift my book’s release to next year because they want to concentrate on yours.

  Do you think that’s fair? That’s my question.’

  He passed the microphone back to the emcee. The crowd muttered profanities. ‘Asshole!’ ‘So rude!’ ‘Jealous!’ The girls in the crowd looked at Daman like they wanted to pull him apart limb by limb. He stared at Karthik who brought the microphone up to his beautiful face and chuckled.

  ‘I’m a writer, Daman,’ said Karthik. ‘I write books. That’s all I do. My job ends there. What happens after the book leaves my computer is not my business. If tomorrow my book is being read

  by just one reader, I would still write. So if you’re asking me to stop writing and stop publishing my books, I think that’s unfair. Also, I don’t have any say . . .’

  Daman had stopped listening at this point. Amidst the many people staring at him, he found

  Shreyasi’s smiling face. Then she turned and left. Daman tried weaving his way out of the crowd but he was stuck.

  He heard Karthik end. ‘I hope I have answered your question.’

  ‘THANKS!’ Daman shouted back and started pushing his way out the crowd. In his anxiety to catch Shreyasi, he stepped over a few girls’ toes. They cried out, ‘Jerk!’

  Finally, out of the crowd, he could breathe again. He looked to his left and then to his right. He found Shreyasi entering the little cafe adjoining the bookstore.

  ‘Sit,’ she said when she saw Daman. She was looking remarkably calm. ‘Will you have something? You look like shit. When was the last time you took a shower?’

  Daman pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ said Shreyasi. Daman put it out. She continued, ‘It is nice to see you again. I was glad to know we share our hatred for Karthik Iyer. He’s just a . . . never mind. I’m sorry your book is getting pushed because of his—’

  ‘It’s getting pushed because of you!’ snapped Daman.

  ‘You’re getting into semantics now. Their tea is good. You should try it.’

  ‘How did you register this number under my name?’

  ‘Always the curious writer, you,’ said Shreyasi and laughed. ‘But let’s talk about what we are here for. I—’

  Daman interrupted her. ‘Before you say anything, I want to make it clear for once and all that I might have used your name, maybe conjured up the character of Shreyasi thinking of you, but there’s nothing between you and me now. Whatever happened in Goa ended there. I got past it,

  Shreyasi, and you should too.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say that.’

  ‘Shreyasi . . .’

  ‘You’re not the one who remembers everything so stop telling me what to do.’ She sighed. She took out her phone and tapped on it. ‘Check your mail,’ she said. ‘Don’t look at me. Check your phone.’

  Daman fished out his phone and opened his mail. ‘What is this?’ he asked, seeing the attachments.

  ‘These are my flight tickets and the hotel reservations of that trip to Goa,’ she said. ‘If you call

  Sumit, he will tell you that these are the same days you were in Goa as well. This was the same hotel you stayed in.’

  Daman kept his phone aside. ‘What’s your point, Shreyasi?’ he said.

  Her eyes went soft. ‘It wasn’t just a car ride, baby.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Your friends and mine put up at the same hotel in Goa. You and I didn’t spend an hour but three days together falling in love. We hid from our friends and sneaked out. We went on never-ending drives, drank under the stars and made love, held hands till they were clammy and hoped time would stand still. I was already engaged so I thought of it as a last fling before marriage. Little did

  I know I would fall in love with you,’ she said. ‘Tell me, do you really think your friends sent you alone to get drinks for them?’

  ‘Why—’

  ‘You volunteered because you wanted to spend time with me. Okay, tell me this. Have you seen the pictures of your trip to Goa? In how many of those are you with Sumit? Did you never ask yourself why you were missing from those pictures? Because you were with me all the time.’

  ‘There are no pictures. Sumit’s data card got corrupted.’

  ‘How convenient.’

  ‘Oh please, Shreyasi. I am aware he might have deleted them to keep my PTSD at bay,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway it doesn’t matter whether we spent a few hours or three days, you’re married now and I don’t feel the same any more. We should move on with our lives now and find our happiness elsewhere.’

  ‘I don’t wish to move on.’

  ‘What will you have me do then?’

  ‘Baby,’ she said and reached out to hold his hand. Her eyes glistened with tears. ‘While you lay sleeping in the hospital, there was a strange man in my bed, spreading my legs and thrusting himself inside me day after day. You know what kept me going? Your name, your memories, your face.’ Tears streamed down her face. She wiped them and continued, ‘And then you woke up and remembered me, my name. I came to see you but—’

  ‘You never came to see me! They told me you had left the country,’ grumbled Daman.

  ‘Because they hated me. They believed it was because of me that you had almost died so they didn’t let me meet you. They figured you would get to know the truth if I met you.’

  ‘What truth?’

  ‘What do you see in your dreams, Daman? Who drove that car? You or me?’

  ‘It changes but mostly it is you,’ said Daman.

  ‘It was you. You drove the car. You drank and you looked at me and didn’t notice the taxi on the wrong side,’ said Shreyasi, matter-of-factly. ‘Two people died that night.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Every time you had a dream about you driving the car, your therapy was set back by five steps.

  You had a hard time dealing with the deaths. That’s why they trained you into believing it was me who was driving that night. They lied to keep you sane,’ she said. ‘Don’t they keep telling you that it was I who drove?’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘I don’t blame them for wanting to keep me away from you,’ she said. ‘They wanted you to get better and so did I. They thought if you saw me you would remember that I wasn’t driving, you were. If my absence helped you recover, so be it, I thought. I disappeared. I didn’t want to worsen your illness.’

  ‘Even if what you say is true, what do you want from me now?’

  ‘Your words, baby. That’s all I had,’ she said. ‘Despite my absence, you used my name and wrote about me. I knew I couldn’t be with you but when I read those little stories, I could imagine being with you again. You were my happiness, you were everything to me but then . . .’

  ‘The book came out with Jayanti’s version of Shreyasi,’ said Daman. ‘Look, Shreyasi. I apologize if the book offended you but you have to realize I didn’t know.’

  Shreyasi frowned. ‘You think I was offended? I wasn’t offended. I felt bereft, I felt like something had died inside of me,’ she said and threw him an icy look. ‘And yet you were about to sign a book deal with her. One that doesn’t even have me.’

  ‘This is my career, damn it!’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice at me. You should know better than that,’ Shreyasi warned.

  Daman lowered his voice, ‘I understand where you’re coming from but what’s in the past is
best left in the past. We can be friends and put this to rest. There’s no point dwelling on it any more.’

  She laughed mirthlessly. ‘We will never be friends. We are lovers and we will always be that.

  Here’s what I want you to do. It’s the same thing you want as well. Write Shreyasi well in the next book and it will make me very happy.’

  Fuck her, he thought, she’s crazy. To her he said, ‘Firstly, there’s no book contract yet, and secondly, I don’t have creative control of the book.’

  ‘You should concentrate first on writing the book. Jayanti comes later. The book contract will happen. I give you my word. Have some faith in me.’

  ‘It’s actually Karthik who—’

  ‘He will be taken care of, love. Just write the book.’

  ‘What if I don’t?’ asked Daman.

  She got up. ‘You will,’ she said. She ran her fingers through Daman’s hair. ‘Because I love you very . . . very much,’ she whispered in his ear and walked away.

  25

  It was a Monday morning and Avni found herself crouched in one corner of a bathroom stall, crying. It felt like she had been knifed in the back and it was slowly turning and twisting with every second that passed. This wasn’t her. She was to be the model, non-intrusive, fun, one-of-the-guys kind of girlfriend who the other boys wanted for themselves. And what did she not do for Daman?

  She suffered his inane ambition to be an idealistic writer, put up with her nagging dad asking her to find a guy who worked a stable job at KPMG or Ernst & Young, and even refrained from texting

  Daman or calling him for days on end lest she disturb one of his creative outbursts, even when the pain of missing him was almost physical. That’s what relationships are about. That’s what loyalty is about. That’s what life is about. You hammer away at it, you work at it, and you get results. After all the nights I have spent worrying about him since his deal fell through, this is how he repays me?

  The previous evening she had met Daman after ten days. He looked like a shadow of himself, scrawny and shabby, his cheekbones protruding and his eyes sunken. He had aged years in a few days. Along with the deal, he had also crumbled. She could make out that he had been smoking way too much, and sleeping very little. It had taken a lot of coaxing for Avni to drag him out of his apartment that evening. He had mostly kept quiet, nodding and smiling weakly at whatever Avni said. He looked hungry but he ate little.

  ‘It will be okay,’ Avni found herself telling him over and over again.

  When Daman excused himself to visit the washroom, Avni had checked Daman’s phone. She hadn’t meant to do it. But his phone beeped incessantly and she only wanted to silence it. She would have just done that if she hadn’t read the beginning of a text that flashed on the screen.

  Curiosity and fear got the better of her. She swiped open the phone and read the string of texts from an unsaved number.

  Don’t write about her.

  I love you.

  It would kill me to see someone else’s name in print other than me.

  I love you, Daman.

  She doesn’t love you the way I love you. If you write about me, I will make this thing with Karthik go away.

  And the last one. I love you. Always yours, Shreyasi.

  She didn’t question Daman when he came back from the washroom. She told him some work had come up and left.

  Twelve hours later, she was still trying to fight the truth she had learnt. She toyed with her phone, trying to think of what she would say to him. She couldn’t even bring herself to be angry at him. I’m so stupid! How could I believe that Shreyasi wasn’t real? She was there all the time.

  How could I have been so blind! She mustered up the courage to dial Sumit’s number instead.

  They decided to meet in an hour. Avni left the washroom stall, washed her face, and reapplied her make-up before she left the office. Sumit was waiting for her when she reached the cafe. It was the same cafe Daman and Sumit would wait for her to come to after she wrapped up work when they had first started dating. She would change out of her office clothes and into little black or silver or yellow dresses in the washroom to go clubbing with them. The latch of the washroom had always been suspect. Once Daman had opened the door and clicked a hazy, unrecognizable picture of her peeing. For the next week, he had been insufferable, threatening to send it to all her colleagues.

  The joke went stale soon enough, but after that it would always be Sumit who stood guard at the door as she changed.

  ‘Hi,’ he said and got up to hug her.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘What happened? Is everything okay?’

  ‘Did you tell Daman we are meeting?’ asked Avni.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The waiter placed two menus in front of them and looked on expectantly. Avni ordered two cappuccinos for them. It took her all her might not to burst out in little sobs. Everyone lied to me, even Sumit. I took him for a friend, she thought before she spoke.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something. And I want you to be true to me. I know the half-truth so there’s no point in lying any more.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Who’s Shreyasi?’

  Avni saw Sumit’s face darken. ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘She’s not just a character in the book, is she?’

  The waiter got their coffees and placed them in front of them. They would remain untouched for the rest of evening.

  Sumit sighed and spoke, ‘I had asked Daman to tell you about the nightmares.’

  ‘What nightmares?’

  Sumit told Avni all that he knew, the accident, the therapies, the PTSD and the psychogenic amnesia. Avni listened to him with rapt attention. All she knew was Daman had been in a debilitating accident; everything else was news to her.

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Avni.

  ‘Yes, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you sure there’s nothing more to this?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Sumit’s lies made Avni bristle. ‘So you’re telling me the girl walked away and never once contacted Daman?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  Avni slammed the table. ‘When will you guys stop lying!’ The coffee cups clanked. Coffee was spilt. Her palm stung.

  The accusation made Sumit squirm. ‘Look, Avni, she didn’t, okay! Daman tried to get in touch with her but that’s where it ended. The email ID I gave him was the one created by me. It was I

  who posed as Shreyasi and asked him to leave her alone. I will show you the mails. Wait.’ Sumit pulled out his phone from his back pocket and tried signing into a mail ID, shreyasibose07@gmail.com. The mail ID spat out every password combination Sumit tried.

  Incorrect password. ‘I must have forgotten the password. You’ve got to believe me. I’m not lying. I hated that whore and wanted Daman to just stop fucking obsessing over her. It wasn’t worth it. The girl nearly drove Daman to his death!’

  Avni watched Sumit carefully. He’s not lying, she thought. Sumit’s face had turned scarlet in anger and the vein on the side of his forehead throbbed visibly. The mail ID had been auto-filled as he started to type ‘shr’ . . . that meant Sumit had at one point in time signed in using the name.

  Sumit continued, ‘Why are you asking me all this? Did he tell you something?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘It’s because Shreyasi is back.’

  ‘How is that possible?’

  ‘She’s in love with Daman. She wants him back.’

  ‘What nonsense is this? She can’t do that! There must be some mistake,’ Sumit spat angrily.

  Avni shook her head. ‘I read texts from her on Daman’s phone.’

  26

  ‘Do you love me?’ she asks. The words come out in a gurgle of blood and tissue. Her jaw is broken and twisted in places. The car is suspended mid-air. It’s the second flip. I’m still in the driving seat. My hands are off the steering wheel. I’m braci
ng myself for the impact. My leg is broken and twisted at an awkward angle. A searing pain grips me. The car lands on the roof and spins. The jerk nearly snaps my back. She reaches out for me. A bone has splintered in her forearm and broken the skin. It juts out grotesquely. I want to touch her. ‘I do,’ I say. But before my words can reach her she’s thrown out of the car with a violent jerk, like a fired cannonball.

  The wind is kicked out of her. The car turns again. I lose sight of her. And then, everything catches fire.

  A startled Daman woke up to the thundering horn of a passing truck. He was drenched in sweat and his hands shook like a tuning fork. His car was parked on the side of a busy road. But . . . He was driving to the British Council. He had no clue how he ended up there. It was sundown and the traffic was on the rise. He started the ignition and throttled the air conditioner. With a rag he found in the glove compartment, he wiped his seat and then himself. He had just put the car into drive when he noticed the missed calls on his phone. Avni. He would call her later. There’s no need to bother her with this. She’s worried enough. The last time they met Avni had been scared shitless seeing him unshaven and weak. ‘It will be okay, something better will come along,’ she had said a thousand times that evening. Little did she know that it wasn’t the deal but the nightmares that had been wringing Daman like a washerwoman’s coarse hands. For the first time, there was something consistent in all the dreams and the nightmares. He was driving. Ever since Shreyasi had told him this little detail it was like his body was physically trying to not accept the possibility. So what if I was driving? What changes? He ran a fever on most nights but it would subside in the mornings.

  He had dared not tell his parents about it or they would descend to his apartment like the army and get him admitted to a hospital.

  By the time he reached home, there were fifteen more missed calls from Avni. He parked the car and climbed upstairs to his apartment. Even as he jumped the last couple of stairs, he could sense something amiss. As he took a few steps closer, he noticed that the door was ajar. Clenching his fists he tiptoed to the door. His heartbeat quickened, beads of sweat trickled down his forehead.