‘Oh, so you want to date again?’ I said, trying not to change my expression.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘Fine then. I will move out tomorrow.’
‘Great,’ he said and turned up the volume of the television. He always did that whenever he wanted to avoid a conversation with me. But this was the first time he had done such a thing during my stay there. How on earth had he become so cold?
I went to my room and locked it from the inside. I cursed myself till I was hoarse, and cried myself to sleep. The next day, we hardly talked and I shifted to a friend’s place. With every box that I packed, sealed and carried out of that house, I lost a part of my life. It was like picking up the last pieces of my life. I cried a lot that day. And he didn’t even notice.
‘You are such a bastard, Joy,’ I said. ‘Manika was so much in love with you and this is how you treated her?’
‘I always say the same thing,’ Manika said.
‘I didn’t know what she felt about me! And the only reason I kicked her out was because I couldn’t bear the fact that she had a guy! I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but I couldn’t! It was killing me. Every time her phone beeped and she went inside to talk to Ravi, it killed me. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t take the fact that some other guy had control over her life. That she shared something with that guy that she couldn’t share with me. It was very hard for me to bear all this.’
‘And it killed me when I moved out,’ Manika said.
‘Awww,’ Joy said, and hugged her tight.
‘Sweet couple you are, the both of you,’ I said. ‘Anyway, so what happened after she moved out?’
‘The same thing all over again! I went into depression. Only this time, there was no Manika to take care of me. She had started ignoring me,’ Joy said.
‘I had no choice,’ Manika said.
‘So basically, both of you knew that you loved each other and still remained away from each other? Must have been terrible, right?’ I said.
‘Mind-numbingly terrible,’ Joy said.
‘More for me,’ Manika said.
‘Fuck you.’
‘Fuck you,’ Manika said.
‘Okay, you can do that later, now why don’t you both tell me, one by one, how it was for you to stay away?’ I said. ‘Manika, first you …’
Manika started narrating her side of the story.
Manika’s Sob Story
I didn’t think it would be this hard. Or at least I had wished it would not be. I spent my days trying not to cry. You are allowed to be selfish in love, right? I was. And I wanted him. What is so wrong in that? What was so wrong in me expecting that he would at least see that I was in love with him? At least acknowledge the fact that I loved him.
No sign whatsoever.
What’s more—after the first few days of separation, he hadn’t even bothered to call or ask how I was. Just a few messages wishing me good morning, good night at times, that was all. How could he be so heartless? I left everything for him. And this is how he repaid me. I was a fool to be in love with him.
I stayed indoors weekend after weekend, on the couch, watching romantic flicks with happy endings that made me sicker. But there was nothing else that I could do. The ashtrays kept piling up with cigarette butts and the flat was filled with the stench of cigarettes.
Ravi called up a few times and I abused him every time that happened. I was so miserable that it felt good someone else was miserable like me, too. And surprisingly, I had stopped feeling bad about him. Why should I? Nobody felt bad about me!
But Ravi realized that something was wrong with me. His project brought him to Delhi, and the first thing he did after landing here was to see me. That guy really loved me. I cursed myself to have fallen for the wrong guy.
‘You look terrible,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You look good, though.’
‘Look Manika. I don’t know what it is with you and Joy, but I am sorry for all the past months. I was just very angry. And you have to forgive me for it. It was a shock to me. I was in love with you!’
‘Hmm.’
‘After all that we shared, one fine day, you just walked away from me and went back to him. It was really too much for me to take,’ he said. It looked like he would start crying.
‘I am sorry, Ravi,’ I said. ‘You’re one of the nicest guys I have ever met. I am so sorry for whatever happened between us.’
‘Manika … I am sorry for all the name-calling and abuses. You know I didn’t mean them. I was just very angry and frustrated with you. But do you have to do this? Joy? Are you sure of what you’re doing?’
‘Yes. Being with anyone else would be unfair. I hope you understand,’ I said and held his hand. I hoped he would feel better.
‘I do. I mean, that’s what I tell myself every day,’ he said and half chuckled.
‘Anyway, enough of this depressing talk. What’s up with you? Any new girl in your life?’ I asked, trying to lighten up the mood.
‘Ummm …’
‘A pause? Which means there is?’ I said.
‘Not really. But when you left me, all crushed and crying and angry, there was a girl in my office who took care of me. And I am beginning to like her. It’s too early to say anything, but let’s see,’ he said.
And believe me, I was so relieved! It was like a huge boulder off my shoulder. I wished and prayed they would fall in love.
‘So? What’s her name? How does she look? How is she?’ I asked.
‘I promise I will tell you when something concrete happens.’
‘Fine. Fine,’ I said.
‘So, what’s with you? And Joy?’
‘Maybe he really doesn’t love me anymore and I was fooling myself.’
‘I really don’t get you, Manika. You left our perfectly good life for this uncaring bastard! On a whim? On a hope?’ he asked, exasperated. I didn’t blame him.
‘Ravi, this is all I want, and this is what can keep me happy,’ I said.
‘I am sorry. I am sure someday I will get what you are trying to say,’ he said. ‘But if you love him so much, why don’t you tell him so?’
‘I don’t have an answer to that.’
‘You’re strange, Manika.’
‘I know,’ I said and smiled at him.
We shared a quiet coffee together and he left later that evening. I thanked him for coming and we promised each other that we would still be friends.
The days rolled by and nothing changed in the situation between the bastard and me. All the effort that I had been putting in the office in the first month was going to waste now. I wasn’t working. I spent hours at the coffee house puffing cigarettes with other non-performing assets of the company, thinking about him. Surprisingly, it seemed like all the time between our break-up and our coming back together never existed. No time without him was worth remembering.
There were times I used to sit at home and wonder what had happened to me. I was a strong, independent girl who used to have a field day mocking all the girls who fell in love, broke their hearts and ended up spending their days crying … and now I was one of them. I was in self-destruct mode.
During those days, I resisted the temptation to call up Joy and tell him what he meant to me, and what an asshole he was, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself. Maybe he has already started dating someone, I said to myself.
The depression from being away from him was like a disease. It kept getting worse. Even my kid sister got worried this time. After so many years, we had changed places. She was taking care of me now. She asked me why I couldn’t tell him that I loved him.
‘TELL HIM? That’s the last thing I will ever do! Can’t he fucking see? After all that he did to me, I left my guy and stayed with him just so that he could get over that girl he was so obsessed with … and he can’t see that!’ I had said, agitatedly. She offered to stay there for the night, but I made her go. It was anyway embarrassing to cry for a guy in front of my baby sister.
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‘Sad,’ I said. ‘Joy? Do you think you can beat that?’
‘Me? No,’ he said and his eyes welled up. ‘Come here,’ he said to Manika and kissed her on the lips.
‘You really killed me then,’ Manika said, sobbing softly.
‘I am so sorry for that,’ Joy said. ‘If only I knew …’
‘How could you not know?’ Manika said. ‘You always knew what I had in mind before I could say it … What happened then?’
‘I am sorry. And why didn’t you just tell me?’
‘Why couldn’t you see?’
‘I was blind,’ he said and hugged her close.
‘GUYS!’ I said. ‘Now don’t make me cry … and Joy, continue …’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I will keep the crying part to the minimum. It’s very depressing.’
‘Fine. Whatever. Just go ahead!’
‘Umm …’
Joy continued …
Joy and His Sob Story
When Manika left, it felt like the world crashed around me. It was different this time. Not like the time Natasha left me. In her case, I just missed the person. In Manika’s case, I missed what I was with her, what we were together and what people thought of us together.
That night with Arnab and Sarah, I could see envy in their eyes. The day with Nisha, I felt the blood rush to my head when she said that we were an inspiring couple, and they wanted their story to be like ours, perfect and beautiful.
She was with Ravi now. And it didn’t seem she would ever come back to me again. She had harped in the past about how nice and dependable Ravi was and I couldn’t take that happiness away from her. It pained me every day to imagine the love of my life with someone else, but that was what it had to be. I had my chance and I dropped it. I had the love of the prettiest and the most charming girl I had ever seen in my life in my palms and I dropped it.
It sucked. There were so many times that I had wanted to tell her that I loved her. I wondered about a million times how the conversation would go. I would say I love her. She would say that I was just saying it because I was fresh out of a break-up. I would start begging. And she would ask me to fuck off. I was better off not telling her.
I called her for a few days and she picked up only a few of my calls. Some days later, I stopped calling her since it was getting tougher to talk to her and not tell her how much I loved her. I even wrote bullet points on a sheet of paper and kept it near the phone.
– Love you.
– Sorry.
– Be a part of my life.
– I am a fool to have let you go.
– You’re a princess to me; I will always treat you like one.
– Your smile means everything to me.
– I don’t want any guy around you. Ever.
– Break up with Ravi.
But I never had the courage to pick up the phone and tell her these things. The time was gone and I had lost the moment. It had all come back to haunt me. I used to spend hours those days looking at our old pictures and videos, reminiscing about how good and happy we were together. How we spent our days locked up in a small room whispering sweet nothings to each other, how days passed without us knowing what was happening outside the little, warm and cosy room we slept in, how we were so dangerously content in each other’s company, and how we really pissed off people around us because we were so much in love!
‘I think you should have just told me.’ Manika said.
‘I know I should have,’ Joy said and continued.
I used to lie on my bed like a pig every day and spend hours on Facebook checking her profile. Manika was never too much of a Facebook person and never updated anything. Though it was the first profile I checked every day.
But then, as luck would have it, one fine day, or the finest day of my wretched life, I spotted a news update on my Facebook profile. Usually I never look too much into them, but that day, by a stroke of luck, I spotted something.
Surbi is friends with Ravi Kadyan. Manika had liked the post.
Surbi was the girl I had dated for a couple of months just after I had joined MDI, Gurgaon after my job at the engineering firm. She had dumped me for some other guy and that was from where I had picked up the story of the third book! She had been my muse. How could I have forgotten her?
And Ravi was, well—Manika’s Ravi!
I sighed and wondered how small the world was, how much it had shrunk, and yet Manika and I were apart. I clicked through Surbi’s profile out of boredom and noticed that she was interning at the same firm where Ravi had been working for many years. Later that night, I was checking her updates and noticed that within the six hours that she and Ravi had been friends, she had liked almost all his profile pictures and commented on dozens of them. I wondered why she would gush over Ravi so much, but then she had always been a bit of a, with all due respect, slut.
For the first time in months, I logged into Facebook chat and I saw that Surbi was online. I thanked God that Surbi had dumped me and not the other way around. I could still ping her and not get cursed. I was the victim in the relationship!
Me: Hi Surbi!
Surbi: Hi Joy.
Me: Long time. Where are you working?
Surbi: Colgate. I heard you are interning in Delhi, right? So what else?
Me: Nothing. You tell me. How is office? Any new hot guys? Or still with the older one?
Surbi: Naah, I broke up with him.
Me: So anyone in office?
Surbi: Naah.
Me: C’mon! Don’t lie! There must be someone. Are the guys in your office blind that they don’t hit on you?
Surbi: Hmmm … actually there is this one guy. I find him cute! B
Me: Oh, you do? Who is he? TELL ME!
Surbi: No one. A senior of mine. We just went on one date. Don’t know if he even likes me!
Me: I am sure he does. Who is he? Paste me the link!
Surbi: Wait.
She typed and my heart pounded in anticipation. I was already imagining scenarios where Surbi seduces Ravi, and Ravi ends up cheating on Manika, and I am the good guy who makes everything all right.
Surbi: Here. http://www.facebook.com/pages/phputr/116852198388214?ref=ts
I opened the link; it was Ravi.
Me: Nice guy. Is he single?
I typed, and hoped and hoped she would ensnare him and make him cheat on Manika.
Surbi: Since the last two months, I guess. His girl left him for her ex-guy. He doesn’t talk much about it. Poor guy. She must be a slut. But Ravi is really nice. ?
WHAT!
Me: Are you certain? Do you know who his girl was?
Surbi: Nope. He has asked me not to talk about it. So I don’t ask him.
Me: Does he know that you dated me Surbi?
Surbi: Nope. For other people, I never dated you. You know, I regret you. ?
Me: lol. ?
Surbi: What about you?
Me: Nothing much. Anyway. BRB. GTG. Catch you later. Bye.
I went offline.
And read the conversation again. I saw the profile again. And I saw the comments again. And then, I peeped into Ravi’s friends list and wondered why I hadn’t done that before, which like most guys’ profiles was unlocked.
I came across a series of posts that were borderline suicidal, and there were songs about betrayal and cheating and lost love. I flipped down the laptop, picked up the car keys and drove like a madman to Manika’s house, my head bursting with countless possibilities and situations. Fuck, was this really happening. This was fucking happening.
I ran up the flight of the stairs. I jumped steps, knocked over people and stood outside her door, my head bursting and my heart ready to pop out of my chest. I knocked on her door.
‘Who’s it?’ she said.
‘It’s me,’ I said.
‘COOL!’ I shrieked out.
‘Very cool,’ Joy said.
‘Go on …’
‘I will let Manika continue,’ he said.
&
nbsp; ‘Okay,’ Manika said. ‘This can get a little nasty.’
‘I love nasty,’ I said.
‘So …,’ she continued her narration.
Manika and Joy
As a habit, I used to check Ravi’s profile almost every day, after I checked Joy’s. I saw Ravi’s new pictures. A girl had liked and commented on every picture of his. She wasn’t all that bad. The comments were obviously very mushy, but it didn’t matter a bit. Far from being jealous, I was a little relieved. They would look good together. I said a little prayer for them in my mind.
I switched onto somebody else’s profile. It was the third weekend straight that I was staying at home and watching television. Early morning cigarette. Then answer the calls that nature made. Skipping the bath. A tub full of pasta. And an entire day of television. The usual schedule.
Just as I was on the third consecutive episode of Friends or Homeland or Supernatural that morning, there was a knock on the door. I wasn’t really expecting anyone. I hadn’t for long. I hadn’t called anyone, so I just assumed it would be the cleaning lady.
‘Who’s it?’ I shouted out from the sofa itself.
‘It’s me,’ the voice from the other side said.
Joy? Fuck! What is he doing here!
I jumped from the couch and looked around; the house was a mess. I looked in the mirror. I was still in my three-day-old sweatpants, my hair was dishevelled, eyes were puffed—I looked like an ugly witch from Harry Potter! I prioritized the things I had to and allotted time to it.
– Stuff the clothes and everything in one room. Lock the room. 15 seconds.
– Wash face. 15 seconds.
– Lip balm. 15 seconds.
– Run to the door and shout that I was coming. 15 seconds.
– Blusher. 15 seconds.
– Throw the utensils in the sink and close the door. 15 seconds.
– Run to the door and shout that I was coming. 15 seconds.
– Brush hair. 15 seconds.
Ohh Yes, I'm Single: And so is my Girlfriend Page 18