‘Can I help her?’ she offered. I was glad to accept her offer.
As the lady went inside the restroom in anger, she slammed the door. All I kept staring at was the signboard with a girl’s image on the door, below which was stencilled, in French, ‘Elle’ (She).
I could still hear Simar’s voice. She was shouting, ‘Ravz, you are such a liar … I wanted you to take care of me … and you left me in the hands of this bitch!’
I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that time would run superfast. I wanted it all to end soon.
‘You didn’t even listen to what I wanted to say …’ Simar continued to shriek from the other side of the door. I heard everything.
In no time the door opened again and the lady ran out asking me to rush in and take care of Simar.
Surprised by her body language I ran inside.
Simar had thrown up. Her head was bent low over the sink. She was still puking when I entered. Her hair, which covered her face, was soiled at the ends with the puke in the sink. There was no one apart from Simar in the restroom.
‘Simar!’ I shouted and ran to hold her. She was still murmuring and abusing me of cheating her. Then she suddenly felt me holding her. For a while I saw her face in the mirror. The foul smell of her puke filled the washroom. It was difficult for me to see her in that miserable condition.
In that very moment my entire fear of embarrassment ran out of me. I didn’t care where I was and what people outside were thinking of me. I didn’t even think of thinking anything. All I cared about was my Simar.
I rubbed her back and held her hair behind her ear. With my other hand I held one of her hands. She wasn’t able to open her eyes and look at herself in the mirror. All I kept saying to her was that I was there and she was safe.
It took some time for her to catch her breath. Even when she seemed to have stopped puking I made her stand there for a while in case there was more to come.
Meanwhile, the lady very helpfully got some water. I made Simar gargle with that water and take just a sip of it. The two of us stood there for some time. She was done throwing up.
After a short while, when she felt better, she simply asked, ‘Ravz, why did you leave me alone?’
I felt ashamed—even more than what I had felt while I was standing out and trying to face the people in the restaurant. Her candidness had left me with tears in my eyes. I touched her cheek and patted her. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have anything to say.
The difficult time had just passed and Simar was feeling better. I had washed her hair with water and removed the minute stains from her dress with paper napkins. I felt relaxed seeing her regain her consciousness. As the two of us walked out of the restroom, nothing bothered me. I didn’t hide my face from the people sitting outside. Rather, I looked them straight in the eye. I was sorry that we had spoiled their evening, but I wasn’t embarrassed any more. I had already accepted that sometimes such things happen. After all, Simar hadn’t done anything knowingly. She was under the influence of alcohol and my poor girlfriend was harmless to anyone. Plenty of such thoughts made me strong from inside.
We collected our takeaway and drove back. While she sat next to me, Simar apologized for her irresponsible behaviour. I rubbed her head. When she asked why she had vomited I explained that this was precisely the reason why I told her not to mix her drinks. She felt sorry from her heart. I wanted to apologize to her for cheating her at the restroom door but I didn’t. I wanted to do that when she was completely back in her senses. I then made her rest her head on my shoulder as we drove back to my place.
At home, I prepared some lemonade for her. She drank that. Her eyes looked as though she badly wanted to catch up on some sleep. I asked her to change and gave her a fresh night suit from my cupboard.
I held her in my arms. As she slept comfortably, I recalled every detail of that evening—the time Simar expressed her desire to drink, the table that we chose in the restaurant, Simar’s first sip of beer, the alarming phone call from her mom, the tequila shots, a drunken Simar and a panicking, embarrassed me, the mess in the restroom—every scene of that evening flashed before my eyes.
In the end I looked at my sleeping baby and felt the urge to shower all my love on her. I kissed her cheek lightly. That was the first night I felt more responsible for her. I slept cuddling her.
Our love story progressed with the Belgian summer. We would see each other almost every day, mostly in the evenings. If it was a weekend and Simar didn’t have an exam coming up, she would come to my place in the afternoon and be there till late in the evening. Most of the time she would get her study material and spend two to three hours studying, while I completed the miscellaneous household tasks for the day.
As my stay grew longer, I even managed to buy a secondhand car. I’d been feeling the need for it since Simar had came into my life. It was a small black Renault. I was lucky that someone in our Indian community circle was going back to India and was keen on disposing of various belongings before he left, so I managed to buy this car from him at a lowered rate. Simar always referred to the Renault by its number plate—4900.
‘
Ravz, 4900 ko ghumaane le chalte hain hum
,’ she would say.
Occasionally, we would go to a nearby lake. We would sit on the bank and watch the ducks paddling on the water. We would see the sun set in the western horizon. She would strike various poses beside the rich green palm trees and ask me to click numerous pictures of her. When it came to pictures, she was obsessed. Her cellphone had an uncountable number of pictures, ranging from dead insects found on the road to pictures of herself trying on various dresses in the trial room of an apparel store. Some of the pictures in Simar’s camera were moments captured while travelling in the car. While I would drive she would often demand my attention, asking me to pose for her camera. It was perfectly okay for her to find any location during the ride and suddenly scream at the top of her voice to make me halt the car so that she could get out to click some pictures.
One of the usual things for us to do was to drive in the late evening on the road next to my office. For some unexplained reason we loved to make out with each other inside the car. Maybe it had something to do with the romance of being together and also warmly enclosed in the interior of the car.
‘I smell of you whenever I spend time with you in your car. It kinda turns me on,’ Simar had once revealed.
Soon our families became aware of our romance—though strictly only the part that we made them aware of. At times, late in the evening when Simar would be with me and her mom would call up, she would lie to her and say that she was in the hostel.
‘Shhhhhh, Ravz! Its Mom’s phone call. Don’t utter a single word!’ she would shout before jumping to answer the phone.
Gradually, our friends in Belgium and a few dear ones back in India got to know the truth about us. In one of the conference calls that Amardeep, Manpreet, Happy and I used to hold once a quarter, I broadcasted this breaking news to them.
There were occasions when Simar and I also fought. Most of them were sorted out in a day’s time. There were some which lasted longer than that. But we would exchange some sentimental messages which would make us call off the fight and soon the quarrel would be history.
Once in a blue moon, on a weekend night, we would go out to a disco and party. But that was only when we had plenty of friends, including Sanchit with his wife and Simar’s college friends, to accompany us. Late in the night, when I would go to drop Simar back to her hostel, I would park my car outside and we would go for a long walk. We simply loved doing that. The sky above us would be dark and occasionally calm. As the night proceeded, the midnight airplanes would interrupt the silence of the sky. Seeing the twinkling wings and tail lights, we both would remember India. She would turn nostalgic and ask, ‘Ravzu, yaar. Why aren’t they taking us along with them?’ And I would rub her head lovingly.
Occasionally we would go to see an Indian movie. One of the Belgian theatres was owned by an NRI—in this case, a Gujju. Whenever a new Bollywood movie did well at the box office in India, he would put up the same as a weekend movie in his theatre. I remember when Simar and I had watched the Aamir Khan starrer
Ghajini
, she’d got completely scared while watching the scene in which the villain kills the heroine. She’d gripped my wrist and squeezed her eyes shut. I realized she was crying. I consoled her in that hall which had only Indians in the audience. It took me twenty minutes to make her believe that it was all fiction and that in reality the heroine was doing well back in India. Later at night when I’d dropped her at her hostel, she’d made me check her room thoroughly before I left. She wanted me to check if, by any chance, there was a stranger hiding in her room, just the way it had happened in the movie. Even though this seemed a bit stupid to me, I actually searched the room because she was so scared. She was relieved when I found none.
We both showed up together for all the festivals and events that the Indian community in Belgium celebrated. We spent a great deal of time together. We enjoyed each and every moment of being in love. Together we drove, we ate, we exercised, we laughed, we fought, we cried, we patched up, we confronted and we celebrated. In our best moments we made love.
Autumn was ending. The trees in the courtyard of my office had shed the last of their leaves. It was one of those unusual Belgian afternoons when the sun and late-year rain were playing hide-and-seek. I had just got back to office after having my lunch with Simar at our regular diner. I logged into my laptop to work but I felt restless—I didn’t feel like I’d be able to work for the rest of the day. There was an email for Sanchit and me sent by our account manager in India. It read:
EighteenDear Sanchit and Ravin,
The Belgium project will now be fully operated from India. The client has agreed to double the workforce as we wanted and has extended the project for 2 more years. This is great news for us. The management here wants both of you to come back, transfer the knowledge to offshore folks and lead your respective teams from offshore.
Plan your travel back to India before the new year.
Best,
Anand
Account Manager
India Office
It was the evening of 25 December. The world outside my house was decorated in the shades of red, white and green—red Santa Clauses, white snow and green Christmas trees.
Simar and I too had got ourselves a small Christmas tree which we placed in the balcony of my house. She’d enthusiastically decorated it with all her heart with glittering baubles and then had even put up some cheerful coloured lights. But unlike the world outside, happiness didn’t prevail within my house. All my belongings from the entire one-bedroom house had been reduced to two travel bags.
After ten months of being with each other, the time had finally come when we were to part—though only physically. Simar had been sounding low ever since I’d told her the news of my going back to India. There had been times when she wasn’t able to cope with the situation and would burst into tears. I too was sad. Simar had eight more months of studies left before she could come back to India.
But I tried to cheer her up.
‘Baby … you are anyway coming to India in your next term break, na?’
‘But that’s four months away, Ravz!’ she wailed.
I kissed her forehead and gently rubbed her back. I looked at her closely. She seemed to be on the verge of crying, so I cracked a few jokes. The initial ones didn’t work but the later ones did rescue her from her depression.
When she was able to speak a little later, she said, ‘I have got something for you.’
‘
Aaaiiiin?
’ I pretended to be ignorant in a mischievous way.
‘Hahaha …
Ravz, itna funny mat bano
.’
She then pulled her bag towards herself and took out a large red Santa cap. Absent-mindedly biting her lower lip—as was her typical expression—she handed over the inverted cap to me. ‘This is for you,’ she said.
I looked inside the cap and was amazed to see it full of big and small thermocol balls along with some cotton ribbons. I dipped my hand into the pool of fluffy thermocol to hunt for whatever was in there. I grabbed and pulled out little bells, a few trinkets, a heart, a designer pen …
Every time I found one little gift, Simar would clap delightedly at my success. She looked so cute doing that. It was getting difficult for me to control my emotions. On one occasion when I was about to get emotional, she shouted, ‘Ravz! Cheatercock! Now you have started crying.’
And then I found a scroll inside the cap. I pulled it out and asked her what that was. To answer my question, she simply smiled and came over to sit in my lap. Slowly, she unrolled the scroll. I found five beautiful feathers within, each with their respective messages attached. The entire pamphlet looked striking. It was all Simar’s creativity. The moment I looked at it, I planted a kiss on her cheek in gratitude for putting in so much of effort for me. She ignored my loving gesture and instead went ahead to explain the scroll to me in detail.
Her entire concept was amazing. Those five feathers apparently signified five great moments which I’d brought to her life in the past few months. When I wanted her to tell me about those moments she ignored me again and continued talking about the set of feathers. In her scroll she mentioned that she was so grateful for all the fantastic moments I brought to her life that she could do almost anything in return for them. And so those five feathers, she explained, marked her five promises to do anything for me in the future.
‘Ravzu, you can use this first feather whenever we fight next, though I pray to god that we don’t fight at all. But still, if we ever fight and then—no matter who is right and who is wrong—if you give this feather back to me, I will give up the fight and accept whatever you say.’
I was blown away by the sweetness and innocence of her thoughts. One by one, she then explained to me the purpose of all the remaining feathers. The second one was to be used when I wanted her to give up any one habit of hers. She said it was going to be tough, though, and I should try not to use that feather. I laughed in response and inhaled the scent of her hair.