The Promise

by Nikita Singh

  He considered the chance of Shambhavi being different, but he could not take the risk. Money was too important to her. And he had too much of it in his bank accounts.

  He knew that he needed to end it. He could not give her false hopes; that would not be fair to her. But he also knew that if he pulled back once again, he might lose her forever. She would not stand by him and wait for him to come around forever. She was attracted to him because of the mystery around him. Sooner or later, the charm would be lost and she would no longer feel the magic she seemed to feel between them.

  Or maybe she was in it for his wealth, in which case, the charm would never fade. Not until the money did, anyway.

  He hated himself for thinking like that about Shambhavi. But the lessons life had taught him had made him cynical. He could not just accept things without thinking about them first and finding flaws in them. Some things were too perfect to be true.

  He tried and failed to sleep that night. Finally, a few hours of result-less efforts later, he got out of bed and made his way to the kitchen. He put on some coffee to brew in the coffeemaker and sat at the kitchen table, waiting. Once it was done, he filled a mugful of the hot liquid and took it with him to his bedroom.

  He turned on the television. After surfing for a while, he found that a rerun of some crime show was on. He stared at the TV screen to ward off uninvited thoughts. When the show was over, he flipped through the channels again but failed to find anything remotely interesting. He wished he had someone he could call, if only to be able to fight the fierce feeling of loneliness. But he had no one. He had cut all ties with human beings a long time ago. His life was his work. The person closest to him was probably his assistant, and he could hardly call Faisal to have a chat at 5 am, without coming across as a madcap.

  And then, his thoughts came back to her. Shambhavi. Ever since he had first met her, the direction of his life seemed to have changed. That scared him to a large extent-to think that a girl could have so much power over him, in so little a time span. And he tried with all his might, but was unable to block her out. Her sweet face and huge smile broke through all the defences he had built up.

  He thought long and hard about it, and decided that she needed to be put down. He would have to cancel his next date with her and let her know that whatever they were to have from then onwards needed to be strictly professional. That was how it was going to be.

  With the decision finally made, his restlessness was put to a state of comparative ease. He fell into a dreamless, uncomfortable sleep.

  All it takes is one turn of events, to change lives forever. Some consequences remain irreversible for a lifetime.

  rjun was seventeen, living on the outskirts of Indore, in a place called Dewas, when his parents decided to take him to the city so that he could get proper higher education. He had just taken his XII Boards and harboured dreams of becoming an architect. His father owned a furniture store, which brought in decent amount of income home. His mother used to teach in a government school, and did her part in providing for the family. He also had a sister, ten years younger to him.

  Even though they never had a shortage of money, they never had an excess of it either. They had been happy. His parents worked hard and as he grew up, he wanted to do his part to help the family. He had always been good at studies. Studying in a simple convent school all his life, he was excellent at English, driven by courtesy, and curious to learn. He also made sure his sister knew everything in her textbooks by heart. Everything went smoothly till he passed out of school.

  Then one day, the time came for him to go to college. He was working hard enough to get a scholarship, but they still needed a student loan, like all middle-class families do. Arjun was hell-bent on paying back the money to the bank himself, once he passed out of college and started working. With that thought in mind, he joined college, excited about studying architecture, the subject he was going to graduate in.

  The first semester went by, and everything was smooth. Arjun found his subjects engaging and interesting and big plans for the future started to take form in his head. One weekend, his father was coming to Indore for some work and his mother and sister had decided to tag along to meet Arjun. He showed them around the city and they ate out in the heart of the city-Rajwada. He promised his sister to take her to Chappan Dukaan-Indore's food destination, a set of lots and lots of small outlets serving anything from hot dogs to Bengali sweets to pani puri-when she came to the city next.

  That never happened. On their way back to Dewas, the minibus they were travelling in got hit by a loaded truck, coming from the opposite direction. It being a highway, both the vehicles were moving at high speeds and the collision was powerful. Too powerful for people inside the vehicles to survive.

  As soon as Arjun got to know about the accident, which was a good twelve hours after it happened, he rushed to the filthy government hospital his family was taken into. Once there, he found his father missing a limb and bleeding profusely, but still breathing. His mother and sister were not as lucky.

  Arjun had no means of getting his father transferred to a better hospital, a private one. He cursed the day he let his parents put their entire life's savings into his college tuition, in order to get that student loan. He felt helpless. The amount left with them was too meagre a sum to be of much help.

  He managed to get his father transferred to a private hospital and get better treatment, but the hospital was not much better than the government one. Arjun was seventeen, too young and too panicked to deal with it all by himself. And he did not get a chance to ask anybody for help.

  He saw his father bleed to death, right in front of his eyes.

  Arjun was twenty-three when Prehal came into his life. It had been six years since his family passed away, and by that time, he had picked up the pieces of his scattered life, and was in the process of putting them together. When his family had died, he had nothing left. He swore against emotional attachments to people; it hurt too much to lose them.

  He had just one aim in life-to make big bucks. He blamed his family's death on money, or the lack of it. Had they been rich, they would have gotten immediate medical attention and would not have died so untimely. They would not even have been in that minibus in the first place. It was just unfair.

  Arjun had dropped out of college. He had gone back home and tried to take his father's business forward from there, unsuccessfully. Too many things at home reminded him too much of the family he had lost. So he sold his father's furniture store and took up the only thing he knew how to do-build. He went to Indore again, and worked day and night, endlessly to make something of himself. After a couple of years of constant struggling, he owned the small lodge he had rented and had three employees working under him. Two more years of more struggling, he owned a big factory.

  In those four years' time, he had drowned himself in work, the wound of his family's untimely departure had numbed. And thus, when Prehal walked into his life, he did not hesitate to let himself fall in love. He dealt with his fear of emotional attachment and decided to give himself, and her, a chance. He had lots of money by then, not in liquid form, but still more than he had ever had before. And he knew his business was on a superfast lane.

  By then, his business had started to flourish enough to get noticed by the local newspapers and magazines. After the first four years of depriving himself of everything and just working, he started enjoying the interest the world was showing in him. The attention was humbling and drove him to work even harder. For the next two years, his business grew exponentially and people's interest kept pouring on him.

  But eventually, he realized that it was not he, as a person, that the world was interested in, it was what he was. No one really cared about him, just his work and what he had made of himself. The female attention was only a means of securing a wealthy husband, not a good man. The realization was a sharp blow, and he began to shy away from media and social gatherings and move back into his shell.

&
nbsp; Prehal was a sight to sore eyes and a cure to his wounded heart. She helped him open up once again, and showed him how much fun life was, if only he tried to live it fully. For the first time in a long, long time, Arjun had felt alive. Prehal slowly became more than just a friend and a confidant to him, and he lost his heart to her.

  That was when life took away the ground from under his feet for the second time. When the smile on Arjun's face started to return, it was clear to those around him that he and Prehal were going around. That was when one of his employees made him aware of a secret he knew-Prehal was double-crossing him. Arjun saw no reason to believe him and the poor man got fired.

  It was only later that he found out the truth for himselfPrehal was indeed having an affair with two men at the same time. It was only after he did his digging and got to know the whole story that he decided to confront her, just to see how honest she was with him. She broke down.

  'It was not my idea. Utkarsh asked me to do this,' she cried.

  'Utkarsh?' Arjun questioned.

  'Yes. He's my husband. We love each other. We were together when I met you. Seeing that you liked me, Utkarsh had this crazy idea ...'

  'What idea?'

  'He said I could tell you that I was pregnant with your baby, and you would have to marry me,' Prehal said, clearly embarrassed.

  'But you are already married. How could I have married you?' Arjun thundered.

  'We married in a temple. We're not legally married.'

  'And what would have happened if I had not married you? That's not how it works in real life, you know? Men don't just marry women who tell them they are pregnant with their babies.'

  'We had considered that. But then your other option would have been to pay me off. We were okay with that,' she murmured.

  'So ... it was about ... money, all this while? Right from the beginning?' Arjun could not believe what was happening. How could he have been so blind?

  'Not when I first met you. It was a month later, when Utkarsh got to know that we were good friends, he found out all about you and thought of ways to get money out of you. I was against it, but eventually, I had to agree. I did not want to lose him and we needed money. I love him.'

  Arjun said nothing. He just shook his head in disgust. He was still wrapping his head around the fact that the girl he had allowed to pass through all his defences, had betrayed him. She was married, for God's sake. How could he not see that she had never had real feelings for him? She had been a darn good actress. He was sickened by the way she had played with him, his heart. He turned away from her. She followed him.

  'I am pregnant, Arjun. I have a baby on the way-his baby. I had no other option but to do what he asked me to,' Prehal sobbed.

  'I know that. How can you be so blind? Don't you see that he got you pregnant for a reason? He wanted money, and just that. When you refused to cooperate, he accidentally got you pregnant so that you would have to do whatever he said.' Arjun ran his fingers through his hair, frustrated.

  'How do you know that?'

  'The same way I know that you were trying to find a way to get ... intimate with me, so that you could later tell me that it was my baby.'

  'If it means anything to you-I was not going to do that. I have known you for the last four months, and it was somehow more than enough time to understand you. I could never betray you like that,' Prehal said.

  'Then why did you tell Utkarsh that you were going to do it?' Seeing Prehal look up at him in surprise, Arjun continued, 'Yes, I met him before coming here. I know everything.'

  She nodded, before saying, 'I told him that, to see if he would make me stop. I am bearing his child, but he still wants me to sleep with another man just for some cash. That opened my eyes. I know what kind of a man he is and that's when I decided to leave him. I would prefer raising my child alone, than living with that man.'

  'Why do I not believe you?'

  'Because I broke your trust. I know you will never believe me again.'

  That was the last time he met Prehal. He told her what he found out about Utkarsh, just to save her the torture of finding it out herself-as soon as Arjun had confronted him, Utkarsh knew that his plan did not have any chance of working anymore. He had already decided not to have anything to do with Prehal after that; she had nothing to offer him-no money. He was planning on getting rid of the unborn baby anyway, once he got the cash. And if Prehal refused to get an abortion, just like she had refused everything else, he would have taken the cash and left.

  Prehal told Arjun that she had suspected that. She looked sad and even though Arjun still found it extremely difficult to believe anything she said, he pitied the situation she was stuck in.

  'How could you have been so stupid? So blind?' he murmured, frustration seeping out of his tone.

  'I was in love,' she said softly.

  Arjun could not take any more of it. He gave her a cheque with a sum he thought appropriate to help her get through the pregnancy and take care of the child. And then, he asked her to leave. It did not come to him as a surprise when she took the cheque with her and left.

  Six years later, when he was twenty-nine, Shambhavi came into his life. Over the years, he had turned from a newbie to someone who excelled in his field, and along with it, came the polish his personality needed to fit into the posh businessclass society he was now rightfully a part of. No one who met him could guess where he came from and what he had gone through. No one made fun of his accent behind his back, like the women who would flirt with him in those tedious dinners he used to attend when he first started getting recognition ... although he never posed to be someone he wasn't. He could do without the pretences the high-class life brought with it. He wore what he felt like wearing, ate what he felt like eating and built what he felt like building. No one had a say in anything he did.

  It was only when he met Shambhavi that he started to wonder what the world saw him as, after so many years. From the moment he first saw her, he had been trying to stop himself from falling in love for the second time. The lessons life had taught him were not forgotten. The death of his family taught him to not get attached to people and so he had built a wall around his heart and had not let anyone in since. He had also learnt that being rich mattered more than anything else in life, and that was how money had become his life, his obsession. He had begun to learn it, and Prehal had been the last nail in the coffin.

  After he had failed to keep Prehal out of the defences he had built and allowed her to come close, he learnt not to get attached to people ... ever again. And the meaning of money had changed in his life once again. He had always been driven to make it-especially so after his family's death-but after Prehal's painful betrayal, he had started hating money as much as he loved making it.

  He was devastated by what Prehal had done to him. His heart had shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and scattered on the floor. To deal with the ache it caused him, he had used anger. He had refused to let pain be the most prominent feeling, to let it drown him in helplessness and sadness. Fury superseded every other emotion.

  He had a lot of baggage to carry, for one person. The only way he had been able to survive was by blocking everything out and concentrating only on work. That is how his business had grown.

  People said his way of working was unconventional. He had no reply to that. He just worked in the only way he knew how to work. He had seen his father build furniture and he had adapted his style and way of working. He worked endlessly for days on end and if the final product was up to the standard he had set for himself, he sent the piece over for replication and production on a large scale.

  For each of his designs, they would make exactly two hundred replicas, when their factory grew to allow such a scale. In due course of time, it became a pattern. Even after his business grew several times over the years, the pattern had not changed. They still produced a mere two hundred facsimiles for every one of his designs, each of which Arjun approved himself after inspecting. The craze for hi
s work grew to such an extent that pre-orders were made for his next product even before he designed it. All two hundred copies of each new product sold out before he completed building the first of them.

  Over time, the demand for his original work spiked beyond imagination, which resulted in his company becoming extremely exclusive and the products extremely expensive. DE was known to be artistic, not huge. The supply always fell short of the demand. He refused having too many showrooms across the country, but even if he did, he wondered what he would showcase; all his work was instantly sold out, as soon as it was built. They never had anything in stock.

  He had heard that after every new design was launched by their company, the market flooded with cheap imitations of the same. He had become some sort of a trendsetter, someone everyone followed. He hardly cared about such things; without caring about what others were doing, he only cared about doing well in what he was doing.

  Carving wood brought peace to him. He liked to work alone, in silence, not caring about whatever was happening in the world around him. His line of business made it obligatory for him to meet people sometimes, but he shunned it as much as he could. Just like Mrs Ahluwalia. She was not someone he had enjoyed meeting, but he needed to, in order to get through with the furnishing of her mansion, to be turned into a bedand-breakfast. So he had.

  And after getting back to the office, he realized that the meeting had not ended well. Not with respect to Mrs Ahluwalia, but with Ms Sen, the woman who insisted he called her by her first name. Shambhavi.

  He regretted taking her to lunch. It was the first time in years that he had had company, other than professional, of a girl for lunch. He grudgingly admitted that he had liked it. It was something he could easily get used to. But he did not wish to. He had learnt all his lessons the hard way, and he did not cherish the thought of learning them again.