Truly Madly Deeply (36 page)

“Whoa… where are you headed to dear?”

“Please hurry up. Give me his number… please …”

She was almost on the verge of breaking down but she held herself together, realising that all was not lost yet. She cursed herself for not memorising his number, which had been lost on some page of her last year's workbook which might be lying in some old paper mart.

“Seema? What happened? Is everything all right?” Sapna asked out of concern.

“Just hurry up, Sapna. It's urgent,” Seema pushed.

“Ok, ok, I will search for it in the student council records. Hold on!” Sapna, who had taken Rahul's position as the head of the student council, said.

Seema kept muttering incoherent prayers under her breath. They involved nothing religious but something pure and hopeful. Flashes from the past kept pouring in her mind.

“Ok, this is it,” Sapna resumed the call and announced a ten digit cell phone number which Seema wrote down on her palm, whilst holding the receiver between her tilted head and shivering shoulder. She disconnected the call almost immediately on writing down the last digit and frantically pushed in the digits on the phone.

‘The number you have dialled is currently unavailable, aap ke dwara dial kiya gaya number filal uplabdh nahin hai' the operator's voice buzzed into her ear. She felt like slapping the overly sweetened female who had lent her voice for this purpose.

She kept redialling the number until her fingers ached and each time her frustration on the same voice grew manifold.

She stopped dialling after the tenth attempt. She called Sapna again.

“Do you have his landline number?” Seema asked.

“Why are you in such a hurry? I was giving you the landline number, you disconnected the call even before I could speak a word further,” Sapna blamed.

“Oh, I'm really sorry! Please do that now,” Seema requested, cursing her stupidity.

“Hold on!” Sapna said.

She gave her the eight-digit number of Rahul's residence and Seema proceeded to punch them in.

Someone answered the ring after a long time. Seema was beginning to lose hope.

“Hello,” it was a heavy, male voice. Seema guessed it was
Rahul's father.

“Hello, can I speak to Rahul?” Seema tried to sound calm.

“Who is on the line?” his father questioned.

“This is his friend, Seema,” she replied after a thought, not bothering to look back over her shoulder to check who was spying on her.

“Seema Tandon?” she was surprised on hearing her full name from his father's mouth.

She nodded on the phone, holding the wrist that held the instrument with her other hand to keep it from shivering. In that moment, she realised how far Rahul had thought for both of them.

“You are not his friend,” his father said tersely.

“I'm sorry but I need to talk to him, Uncle. Please give him the phone,” she requested, in newfound courage.

“He tried to talk to you, didn't he? It made me wonder sometimes what my foolish son saw in you. He did not even want us for company to see him off, he wanted to leave alone, he wanted to stay aloof. You have made my boy a recluse, a stranger to the world around him,” his father accused.

“I'm sorry Uncle, I'm really sorry… please,” the tears started their descent. She made no effort to sniff them back where she had held them for so long.

“You should be sorry… You are too late, his flight took off half an hour back,” his father informed her in a cold voice, and then the ground beneath her feet started slipping along with the receiver in her hand.

***

Seema's family attributed her condition to the surmounting pressure of her studies. Once or twice, her parents tried to
talk it out with her but neither would they understand her predicament nor she would tell them. They even planned a weeklong vacation, hoping that she would become her former self once again but she declined the invitation and asked them to carry on.

As days passed by, she found herself morphine into a stranger.
In the bathroom, where she got more privacy than anywhere else, tears competed with the water that flowed from the shower. They mixed together on her body to create ripples of pain that leached into her chest.

She would sometimes leave early for her tuitions and would
reach the same bus stop where she hoped that he would come for her. The hours would drag on until finally someone from her tuitions would notice her and remind her that she was getting late for classes. While leaving, her eyes would involuntarily keep looking at the very spot that Rahul was a denizen of, as if expecting him to appear out of the air and surprise her. She would wait at the spot beneath her house, hoping he would appear and profess his love for her, once more.

She would switch on the television and remain staring at it for hours endlessly, hardly registering the presence of the SRK she liked or the Sujal-Kashish pairing she fancied once. Why? She did not know! She seemed lost and it seemed to her she had lost something. What? She did not know! She could do nothing; she could not sleep, eat nor drink peacefully. Hunger, thirst, pain; all had vanished with time. How? She did not know!

A week after the shock of losing something, she yet did not realise the magnitude of, Seema remembered the parchment she had picked up after it had fallen from Rahul's pocket. It was right there, lying at the bottom of her bag. Hurriedly, she made her way to her room, carefully taking out the sheet of paper, lest it was damaged by her eager hands.

She buried her face in the paper and searched for his scent, the smell that she would always keep in her heart. She put it there along with his secret smiles, the sound of his laugh, the feel of his touch and the warmth of his voice. The things she would never forget. She would let go of him but these, she would not, she would hold on to them until Rahul lived in her heart, hold on to these memories, as they were as precious to her as all the wealth in the world, as she was to him.

She unfolded it, expecting to find some ray of comfort, expecting to be greeted by some ray of hope, expecting to see that all this
was a joke and he was just away for a short vacation. Her
searching gaze met Rahul's intricately crafted italics, which quoted an ancient couplet,

“For your love my patience fails and albeit you forget

I may not; nor to other love my heart can make reply:

Bear my body, bear my soul wheresoever you may fare

And where you pitch the camp let my body buried lie:

Cry my name above my grave, when thou need me, and an answer shall return

The moaning of my bones, responsive to your cry.”

“RAHUL! Come back… I LOVE YOU… please… God… please…” Seema wailed, her eyes swollen with the colour of blood, her heart beating in synch with her beloved's name. No response came to the wails, no one answered her cries and no one heard her desperate plea.

Seema became a living corpse, in the span of a year. Her beauty, which Rahul so sacredly worshipped, remained true to her
and did not wither away like the rest of herself. The look on her comely face made no effort to hide the longing and pain written all over it.

No one had seen her outside the confines of her home doing anything else except walking alone along half the length of the highway before turning into Kings Circle and taking a right to reach Maheshwari Udyan and finally bringing her steps to H. Adenwala road where Guru Nanak Khalsa Junior College of Science was situated. While going back, she could be seen at the nearby bus stop waiting for the BEST bus that would drop her back near her home.

The boys who pursued her in college gave up when they could not generate a response from her within two weeks and when she involuntarily thought about it, her heart ached sensing the two years she had been so desperately pursued by someone whom she solely missed today. She would not go out to meet people nor would she meet those who came to see her. She would spend hours locked inside her room, turning page after page of blank books, scribbling unrelated words, drawing sorrowful figures in her science journal and listening to rueful songs, picturing herself away from the world. Her engagement to her cousin was annulled, as this was not the Seema the groom's family had selected as their prospective daughter-in-law.

La Rochefoucauld rightly said,

“Absence lessens half-hearted passions, and increases great ones, as the wind puts out the candle and yet stirs up the fire.”

Sometimes, a hint of the black curly hair or the confident bouncy walk would suddenly seem familiar on the road and she would dash behind it, only to realise that she had been following a stranger. None could be like him, she told herself. Rahul had taken away some part of her with him, the part that could love and feel and maybe even stay happy. He had given himself entirely to her. He remained in her. Her love was hard to define and still hard to confine.

Almost after a year, she got back to her studious self, hoping to find respite in her books, trying to run away from reality, trying to be happy because that was his last wish. She slowly started talking to her friends and wondered why the same interesting conversations of before, suddenly sounded so babyish. Gradually, she improved yet she never became the same, the Seema that had been eaten away by her own conscience, which had been submerged in a loss to great for her nubile self to handle. They do say that time is the best healer and surely as time passed she could do just about everything but she could not forget Rahul. Why? She did not know!

“Other thoughts may come and go, other moments I may know,

That shall waft me, in their going, As a breath blown to and fro,

Fragrant memories: fragrant memories

Come and go.

Only thoughts of you remain, In my heart where they have lain.

Perfumed thoughts of you, remaining, A hid sweetness, in
my brain.

Others leave me: all things leave me:

You remain.”

-Arthur Symons.

***

EPILOGUE

Shadows of lights, in all their colourful might, dance around the congested place and paint each corner with their rainbows. The place resembles an illusionary realm of timelessness where its denizens crawl like ants all over each other yet no one complains. It is almost past midnight but there are no traces of sleep in the eyes of those who grace this occasion. There is some mysterious source of power in their legs, which seems to give them a life of their own as they bend, twist and romp wildly on the floor. The party goers jump all around the place, grinding their sweaty bodies against each other and emitting generous doses of inebriated laughter. Some with shiny shirts and low-waist jeans, some with glittering accessories on their naked torsos, some with plunging necklines on their busty bodies, just let down their hair and shut their eyes, letting the music take over.

Huge silvery balls of light hang from the ceiling, appearing to revolve, making the people feel dazed. Trance music blares from the magnificent speakers ahead, the surround sound effect blasting the eardrums. People almost seem to depend on the sonic waves to avoid crashing into each other as the equally drowned lights keep flashing on their bodies, showing them just enough of a person, to keep away if they want to. There is a thick cloud of smoke fast spreading from the corners, shrouding the moving feet in its wake as the disc jockey changes to a popular techno track. There is a huge roar from the crowd and a wave of energy shoots through all; almost at the same time as their dance steps get a fresh lease of life.

A roaming hand lands on some other part of someone else's anatomy, thinking it to be its own. It scratches the soft flesh absent-mindedly and for a second, wonders where all the hair has gone. But it doesn't matter, the itch is contained. Its owner, a tall boy with a healthy paunch opens his eyes and looks around. He frowns to no one in particular and manages to make his way out of the crowd and towards the bar.

‘Everytime he makes a fool of me. Told me he'll join... aha, there he is!' he cries to himself, noticing a figure occupying a seat towards the end of the bar.

He stops in his tracks. There is someone with his friend, standing by his side with her hand upon his shoulder. He almost fails to identify the figure. When did her bouncy blond hair come down till her narrow waist? When did she grow a couple of inches taller to stand almost shoulder-to-shoulder with his friend? When did those brilliant blue eyes start shining in such darkness? He shakes his head and picks up a half-drunk glass of wine from the person to his right, who is busy peering down the valley between two mountains beside him. It has been a long time, long enough for things to take a turn and seeing the two laughing over a joke, he brushes away the aspects of physical change that their young selves have been through in the year that passed. He sees more people from his previous school nearby, making their way to the dance floor. Passing the 10+2 exams, celebration was always on the cards.

He walks over to them and nudges his friend on the shoulder. He notices his friend's shining face and then realises it is less due to the moving lights in the pub and more due to the fact that he is clean-shaven. He reserves his praising for later.