After All This Time (14 page)

‘Shourya, this is Mrs Suryavanshi . . . Lavanya’s mom.’

‘Oh. Oh, hello Aunty. What is it? Is everything all right? Is Lavanya okay?’ Shourya sat up on the bed. The only times he had received calls from Mrs Suryavanshi were when Lavanya was in some kind of trouble.

‘Is Lavi with you?’ Mrs Suryavanshi asked.

‘No, she left here in the morning. Around five or six, I think.’

‘Oh! We don’t know where she could be,’ her mother cried.

‘What? Since when?’ Shourya’s heart beat loudly in his chest as he thought about the last conversation he had had with Lavanya. The hurtful things he had said.

‘She left in the morning, around ten. She did not tell us where she was going, but she looked very upset . . . She hasn’t taken any of my calls all day.’

Shourya checked the time on his phone. 6.23 p.m. Somehow despite all the craziness in his life, he had managed to exhaust himself and sleep all day. ‘Don’t worry, Aunty. I’m sure she’s okay. It’s not that late . . .’ he said, getting out of bed.

‘I’m worried about her, beta. She kept herself locked up in her room all morning. And then she left without a word.’ Mrs Suryavanshi sounded distraught.

‘She’ll be back soon,’ Shourya reassured her as he pulled on a shirt over his T-shirt. ‘I’ll—’

‘I have never seen her this . . . troubled.’

‘I’m going to look for her. And I’ll talk to her.’

‘She had a fight with her father this morning.’ Mrs Suryavanshi’s tone was timid and fearful.

Shourya froze.

‘It was early in the morning. Soon after she came home from Shreela’s bidaayi, I think. Neither of them told me what happened, but I heard them in the corridor. When I came out, she had already locked herself up in her room.’

Shourya gulped. If something happened to Lavanya . . . He could not think that way. He had to find her. If he let such thoughts come into his mind, they would paralyse him. ‘I’m going to find her,’ he said, more to him than to Mrs Suryavanshi.

‘Toughy was whining at her door all morning, but she did not let him in.’

‘I will find her. Please take care, Aunty, and don’t worry about anything. I’ll find her. I’m sure she’s okay.’

As soon as he hung up, Shourya called Lavanya. There was no answer. He tried again, and was about to hang up when he saw lights blinking at the foot of his bed. Lavanya’s phone lay on the floor. She must have forgotten it in his room in the morning.
‘Darn it!’
he muttered under his breath. He quickly pulled on his jacket and grabbed his car keys. Where could she be? Delhi was so big; there were innumerable places where a person who wanted to get lost in the city could go.

Shourya could not think of a place to start from. As he got into the elevator, he tried to look for some clue to where she could be. Her phone was locked. The only place he could think of was their school, but he knew Lavanya had no love for it, so it would not make sense for her to go there. He could circle her street and the surrounding area, to see if she was taking a walk. But who took eight-hour-long walks? His palms were clammy and his forehead was beaded with sweat.

He ran to his car, and unlocked it. It made a sound, and he saw a startled Lavanya stand up on the driver’s side of the car.

Lavanya’s heart was pounding in her chest. She could not only feel it, she could also hear it. And it wasn’t just because the sound from the car had alarmed her. It was because of the person standing in front of her.

She had not expected to see Shourya there. Although, now that she thought about it, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to find him in his parking spot at some point. The thought that he might come down and see her before she’d successfully gathered the courage to go up and face him had not crossed her mind once.

‘What the—’ Shourya muttered. He paused in his tracks for a second, before rushing to her. ‘God! What are you doing out here in the dark? Do you know how worried everyone is about you?’

The words caught in Lavanya’s throat. Shourya did not look angry any more. He looked concerned, ruffled, even frightened.
For her.

He held her by her shoulders and studied her under the dim light coming from the street lamp outside the parking area. ‘Are you okay?’ he muttered.

She nodded rapidly, repeatedly.

‘Oh God, Lavanya! Look at me. Lavanya, talk to me. Let me . . . I’m so sorry for saying all those things to you. I was . . . I was angry and frustrated . . . and it had nothing to do with you. I’m in a very bad place right now, and I needed an outlet, and you were there and I vented it out on you. I didn’t mean any of it. I’m so sorry, I’m such an asshole—’

‘Shourya . . . Shourya . . .
Shourya
!’ Lavanya tried to make him stop, but he went on speaking, apologizing.

‘No, no, listen to me! It was wrong of me to dump all that on you. As if you didn’t have enough problems of your own. I feel like shit. Don’t believe a word I said earlier, I was just being a jerk and blaming you for my problems . . .’

‘SHOURYA!’ Lavanya snapped, silencing him. ‘Will you stop? You said nothing wrong. It doesn’t matter why you said it or the way you said it. The fact is—you were right. I did all of those things to you.
I
was the asshole. And I deserved every word you said, it was a long time coming.’

‘It’s not like that . . .’

‘No, you
are
right. I had my reasons, but should they have been enough for me to leave everything? I
was
selfish. I really was. You are right about me.’

‘No, you’re not. You were just a child. You were only looking for a way to be okay.’ Shourya looked at her with such intensity in his eyes that she could not speak for a minute. Everything they had been through, everything she had shared with him, every moment they spent together—she could see it all in his eyes.

She remembered the time when, years ago, she had skipped her physical education class and left school early. She had found her father’s car parked outside an unknown house. It wasn’t until she saw the little board that said
Mrs & Mr Benoy Dey
on the gate that she realized it was her science teacher’s house. She double checked the number on the car; it was definitely her father’s. Lavanya wondered if Mrs Dey had asked her parents to meet her outside the campus. Science was not her strongest subject, but she had it under control. She did not understand the need of a parents–teacher meet.

Lavanya decided to wait for her parents to come out. As unusual as it was for a teacher to ask parents to meet off campus, it was very unlike her parents to do something school-related without telling her. For a minute, she had wondered if her father and Mrs Dey’s husband worked together. That could explain Lavanya’s dad being there. Or he could be in one of the other houses on the street and had not been able to find a better parking spot.

Lavanya kept thinking of scenarios. It was her nervousness about her performance in Mrs Dey’s class that made her slide down the bonnet and walk towards the house. She was a bundle of nerves; her gut told her not to open the gate, to keep on walking all the way home. Whatever Mrs Dey had to say to her parents couldn’t be that bad. She could go home and ask her dad where he had been, and what Mrs Dey had said.

She had taken seven steps—was it odd that she remembered even this tiny detail?—inside the gate, when she had noticed a movement on the first-floor window out of the corner of her eye.

When she remembered the moment now, she saw herself standing there, watching as realization struck her sixteen-year-old self. She saw herself look up to the source of the movement. And she saw her father looking down at her. She would never forget the expression on his face. He looked baffled for a moment, rooted to the spot, his hand on the drape. Then she saw him release a troubled breath and gasp for air. She saw his lips move and mutter her name. Lavanya didn’t need to look away from his face to see that he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

They had stood there, frozen, their eyes locked with each other. They must have been like that for only a few seconds, but Lavanya remembered it feeling like hours passed before her eyes, but she saw nothing, only her father’s eyes. His horror-struck eyes filled with guilt, remorse, shock? She didn’t know. And she never found out . . . She never looked into her father’s eyes again. Until that morning.

Lavanya had run. As soon as they had broken eye contact, Lavanya had taken a step back, then another and another till her back hit the gate. Turning, she had fumbled with the latch on it and looked up one last time before she got out. ‘Lavi,
wait
!’ She knew her father was going to come after her. She saw him rush away from the window, and she had run.

‘You were there,’ she said to Shourya, angrily wiping away the stray tear that escaped down her cheek. ‘When it happened. I came to you.’

‘Don’t think about it. Please,’ Shourya whispered.

‘You were on the cricket ground; I remember clearly. The PE class was going on. I ran back to you and interrupted your game. You were so mad at me.’

‘Hey! I didn’t know what was going on. And like you said, you interrupted my game.’

Lavanya looked up at Shourya. All the buttons of his jacket were undone. As were the top four buttons of his shirt; the rest were done wrong, leaving one hole empty at the bottom. He was wearing a deep grey T-shirt under it, which he had had for years. It was completely worn, torn at the edges and also had tiny holes on it at places. Lavanya wondered if he’d let her keep it.

That day, he had reluctantly left the cricket ground with her and she had dumped everything on him. Ever since then, everything that she had gone through, he had too. He had shared her confusion and her anger, and when news of the affair leaked, he had borne the bullying with her.

‘I cannot believe what I did to you, after everything . . .’ she said.

‘Ah, it’s all right. I’m a man. I got over it.’ Shourya shrugged.

Lavanya knew he was pretending it was no big deal just so she would stop feeling so bad. ‘No, Shourya, it was wrong. And I’m sorry I didn’t see that before today.’

‘Okay, enough. We’re done discussing this now. It’s all in the past, let’s leave it there?’

Lavanya nodded.

Shourya finally let go of her shoulder, and she leaned into his chest. Her head was buzzing with snippets from their fight in the morning, and every moment since then and before that. It was exhausting. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly.

‘Never do that again. Never disappear.’

Lavanya sniffed. She had cried enough for the day, and refused to let another tear slip out. She rubbed her cheek against his chest and felt the soft fabric of his threadbare T-shirt. She tried to nod, but he was holding her too tightly.

She felt his chuckle reverberate through his chest. ‘Use words; nods aren’t the answer to everything,’ he said. She knew if she looked up, she would find him smiling.

‘I won’t disappear,’ she promised. An image of her medical report flashed through her head. ‘Without telling,’ she added quickly.

‘Not even after telling. And in case you’re planning to shut me out again once you return to New York, tell me now,’ Shourya pulled back and watched her expression.

Lavanya held his gaze for a second, as if contemplating, then pushed out her bottom lip and shrugged. ‘Meh.’

Shourya pushed her away at once and made a show of being majorly hurt. Lavanya laughed, chasing him, trying to pull him back to her. He dodged her and got away. But he was laughing too.

‘Before I forget, we need to call your mom and tell her you’re alive. She’s freaking out. Think of a story to tell her; I’m going to let you do the explaining.’

‘Such a gentleman.’ Lavanya watched Shourya as he dialled her mother’s number.

‘You cannot be serious.’

‘Oh, but I am.’

‘Lavanya, this is insane!’

‘I know. That’s the point.’

‘No, no, no! This is
not
a good insane, this is a ridiculous insane!’ Shourya studied the electric blue beast in front of him. ‘Okay, let me get this straight. This is a 1000 CC motorbike. You bought it brand new from the store, paid in full, and . . . What are you going to do with it, exactly?’

They were in front of her house. Lavanya was on the other side of the bike, which stood in the middle of the narrow path that led to the main door, cutting the lawn in half. She ran her fingers over the windshield and looked at the bike gleefully. ‘Always wanted to have one of these. Road trip? It’s on my list. We could go to Rishikesh—I’ve heard they have lots of adventure sports stuff there. Or we could go to see the Taj Mahal? I’ve never been to Agra.’

‘So basically, you want me to ride it and take you on a road trip?’

‘Are you saying you have a problem with that?’

Shourya thought about it. ‘It does sound like fun,’ he relented.

‘Then what are we waiting for? I checked everything. Rishikesh is about 223 kilometres away by road, and Agra is 212 kilometres away. But they are both in the opposite directions. So we can go to only one. In a day, that is. We could go to the other one on the next day.’

‘Whoa. Slow down, there.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I am not saying we
have
to, I am just saying we
could
. It all depends.’

‘On?’

‘What you want to do,’ Lavanya said softly, looking at Shourya with large eyes.

‘Don’t make that face at me! Fine, we can go to Taj Mahal first, and see if going that far on a bike is worth the hassle.’

‘Can we go to Rishikesh first? I’ve never been river rafting befo— Toughy, no!’ Lavanya ran after her puppy, and pulled her slipper out from between his teeth.

‘I have,’ Shourya said absent-mindedly, checking out the bike in front of him. ‘But I’ve not been to the Taj Mahal, which is a shame. It
is
one of the seven wonders.’

‘Okay, fine. Tomorrow morning, first thing. It takes less than three hours to get there by road. We could get there in two!’

Shourya chuckled at Lavanya’s enthusiasm. They had spent every waking moment in last couple of days hanging out with each other. Lavanya had insisted on carrying her to-do list everywhere, and she had checked off another item by shoplifting a lipstick from a mall. He found it strange that she should have such a thing on her list, but she said she had always wondered if the intimidating security systems in big malls actually worked.

She had expected the store security to arrest her and hand her over to the cops. Or at least for the buzzer to go off when they stepped out of the store, but nothing of the sort happened. Lavanya was visibly disappointed.

‘Why not one hour? I could ride the bike at 200 kilometres per hour,’ Shourya prodded.

‘Are you serious? I don’t think it’s safe to drive over a hundred, is it?’

‘We’ll see.’

Shourya knew that even though she’d bought a superbike in a mad moment, and the idea of taking a road trip had her excited, she was going to freak out as soon as the speed touched eighty. He wasn’t sure she even knew what a hundred felt like on a bike.

‘Taj Mahal it is!’ she said excitedly.

He was right. Only, it did not even take them to cross eighty for her to start panicking. Lavanya freaked out just hearing the sound of the engine.

Shourya reached her place at five in the morning as they had decided. As soon as he started the bike, the beast roared into life. The sound was loud enough to wake up the entire street. Shourya could feel the engine grow hot underneath, and he revved up the accelerator, making the engine growl even louder.