Just the Way You Are (11 page)

Next morning, I woke up to shimmering sunlight. The fever didn't seem to affect me as much anymore. And my mind was quite clear. After drawing in the dust on the glass of my window, I checked my mail. Nothing. And as usual, I checked for any messages left on Facebook, even before I dragged myself to the pharmacy! There was indeed a message for me, ‘Good morning. How are you feeling now? Let me know if you have taken the tablets. Be well. Shall be waiting to hear from you.' It was from her. And my smile was back. I had been wondering how to pass the cruel night and here it was, this dawn, awaiting me with a new light, lifting me through the rain. I had a hope for a hand to hold.

During the days that passed, we chatted continuously over Facebok. Her name was Tanvi. From the virtual world we graduated to talking over the phone, sharing everything that we could share—our aspirations, choices, desires, and many other things that made us fond of each other. I started feeling as if I had found a soulmate in her and was content to have someone beside me, though she was far.

She would often call me, ‘Sameer, I hope I'm not bothering you …'That would always be her first sentence. I would smile and tell her that she could neither bother nor disturb me, that I always waited for her call.

She gave me the belief that I was someone special to her. There wasn't an iota of doubt that she had opened up her heart to me and let me be its sole carrier.

‘You know, it has become more and more difficult for me,' she'd mock the situation.

‘Why? What's difficult now?'

‘Well, you know I come back from the ward and attend to the clinic, read my books and then, in the middle of it all, I realize that the day has been a sheer waste. I have missed something important!'

‘And what exactly might that be?' I would know the answer somewhere in my heart, yet I would not let on that I did.

‘You know it, right? I know you're smiling. You dodo, it's talking to you over the phone.'

And we would laugh delightedly, continuing to talk for hours.

We would share the best and the worst of her life. She would share her petty problems at college and how she had to work long hours at the clinic. She would go on about how she longed to see me. She would tell me about her friends and how they all loved her. At times I felt she had too many people in her life and wondered if I was just the right one to be special among all of them. But we never ended up being serious on that matter.

After about two months, when my internship days were ending, she had her semester exams coming up. I refrained from calling her during those days as I wanted her to study well. I had it my mind that I would visit her once I was done with my MBA, of which I had barely some months left now. After her exams were over, called her. But, as time passed, I found her response colder and her spirit dwindling. Like all other tricks of fate, she too became distant and flimsy. All she talked about was her classmate whom she had started liking and the possibility of their becoming good friends in the future. I did not know how she could convert every single intimate detail into an area of common discussion. I still listened to her and consoled myself with the thought that she must be in a different mood altogether. Days crawled by with fewer and fewer words from her.

It was a month since I had finished my MBA. On the last month after my exams I decided to visit her. I planned on taking the first train to her college and thought that I would surprise her. Maybe on seeing me, the dying embers of her heart would flare up. Maybe once she saw me, everything would come back to her and she would once again realize that I was the person she loved. Maybe on seeing me, every unsure feeling in her would turn into a certainty and we would end up together. But fate had other plans.

She called me up just the day before I had to take my train.

‘Sameer, I need to tell you something.'

‘What is it, Tanvi?' I had assumed that even before I reached there that she would tell me what I had longed for so many days.

‘I think I have found my soulmate.'

‘Me too …' I blurted out.

‘Whoa! Really? It's Rishabh, actually. The classmate I had been telling you about. Remember?'

Her words struck me like an electric current and shattered every little piece of my world. I felt my knees crashing to the ground and the phone just slipped from my hands. For some time I couldn't quite gulp down my shock. But then I held my legs and squatted on the floor. I felt weak and unable to move. I had never thought of her as a frivolous person while talking to her about my life and how I was in need of love. Then she had said nothing and had acquiesced to being with me forever. But I didn't realize the change in her in a couple of months and that our bonding had become so mechanical. I felt broken, and more than that, I felt used. She, of course, knew of my feelings. Someone cannot be that ignorant as to not be able to detect the emotions in the voice of a person with whom she talked for hours, almost every day. If this was what she had in store for me, she either should have told me or should have never let me come so close to her so that I would lose myself. I wondered at the irony of this for days. Wondered at the incredulousness of people and how they could use others. Wherever I went, whatever I did, I found no peace. After having spent myself completely, I couldn't take it any longer. Instead, I decided to write a letter to her.

Dear Tanvi,

I am writing this to you with a heart that is weak with indifference. Within the last many months, seeing how close we had become, I had come to assume, and now too think, I know incorrectly, that you are the perfect person for me. You are perhaps the soulmate I was seeking since I was aware of something called love. But now I think this is causing me more harm than good. You have left me alone and vulnerable. You knew my feelings quite clearly as we had discussed them almost every day, that how desperate I was for love and my quest for love never seemed to end. Probably you are right in your own way, that you could not treat my feelings with greater perception than regular friends do. But in that process I was damaged somewhere inside. I became dark and unrecognizable, which I can no longer bear. It is definitely true that I need love and I pine for it, but that I cannot get it at the cost of chasing someone eternally and running after her without any hope. In the last few days I have observed your ignorance as well as your drifting away from me. I want both of us to be honest with each other and not make things ugly. You are surely lucky that you have loving friends to take care of you, the ones you have spoken to me about over the phone. I am happy that you have a life, unlike mine, where people are fond of you and want you in their life more than anything. But I cannot be a part of such a world. I want you as someone special, my special person, my beloved, and sharing you with others is naturally difficult. I have worked really hard to win people's hearts and that, with more of failure than success. Sometimes I feel terribly lonely and miserable for being what I am. What if I remain alone till I grow old and perish? What if I die alone without anyone beside me to talk to me during my last hours? But then, I would not have compromised on winning love on the grounds of losing my self-respect and self-esteem. More so, force doesn't work in a relationship. If it has to happen it will happen by itself. One cannot make it happen. For you, it must be easy to say that I was one of your good friends. But in my mind you had already completed and complemented me. I was already under the impression that we had given ourselves to each other. What, after all, is love if not giving? Perhaps that was a lie that I had been telling myself over all these months to keep myself from the reality but who can avoid reality? I was stupid. I have nothing much to say now. I feel broken. The thing that I wish for is to love and to be loved. I did my part honestly but you didn't reciprocate in kind.

The only strength I have at this moment is to understand my own aching self and let the world be ignorant about it. And now what else can I wish for you? You already have ample love in your life. And that too from your ‘friend'. I did hope once that you would be the only person who would come forward and hold my hand. However, as they say, one must not lose hope. Maybe I will someday find someone who will love me for who I am, beyond friendship.

Best,

Sameer

Shagun kept the diary down on the table in front of her and looked up. The light of the day had slowly faded. In the afterglow of a heavy day she couldn't keep track of the wheel of time. Several hours had passed and it would soon be night. Sameer must have landed by now, she thought. He could call anytime. Thinking of him, she was filled with compassion. She thought it to be the wrong sort of feeling. For you feel compassionate for someone whose pain you think is of unbearable endurance. She was expected to long for him, not feel pity for him. But she couldn't feel that for the moment. She thought if she could have Sameer in front of her, she would cradle him like a child in her arms, kiss his forehead, and let him have what he had been seeking for so long—unconditional love. She needed to love him. She wanted to feel it desperately now. But for that she needed to finish reading the diary.

I WAS FEELING THE LOAD
of years passing on my shoulders. Many of my friends already had full lives with wives and children. I had nothing of the sort to look forward to. People had drifted apart and were busy in their lives. Their time was for their family and not wasted, brooding, lonely, and desperate, like mine. I had no idea how they were and whether they were really happy to have a ‘complete' life in the most conventional sense of the word. But their Facebook photographs did exemplify moments of euphoric happiness that is fabled to be found only with the existence of one's family. One of those days, Gaurav called up to ask me if I was well and how long I planned to brood.

‘What do you need? You have the best life possible. Why do you have to make love, of all things, your ultimate obsession?' he snapped.

‘Gaurav, you know it doesn't leave me, man,' I said, nodding like a school kid listening to his furious teacher. ‘It slowly eats me up from inside and I have a feeling that this phase will never end, however successful I may become.'

‘Precisely,' he interrupted me. ‘Years have passed. You have managed to get through the best college and best job possible and people look up to you, you know, and you still haven't matured, Sameer. Do you think you are still a teenager or a college-going lover? Don't you think it's disappointing for me to know that you never believed in my predictions?'

‘Gaurav,' I said, ‘your predictions are the single silver lining in my dark sky.'

‘Ah, come on,' he interrupted me again. ‘Don't give me this melodramatic crap. Listen, I told you that the moment six bloody years of loneliness would get over you'll have your soulmate. That's the problem with you guys, you see: when I told you about cracking the best college and becoming successful, you did not consider that. Now, when you have the best job in hand, you don't appreciate my words of truth. Hmph!'

‘Gaurav, that's not the case, you know,' I defended myself. ‘Even after all these years, when I have lost contact with many of my friends due to their becoming settled with their wives and children, it's only you with whom I have maintained my friendship and I know you have always helped me to climb out of the rut of life.'

‘Then you must also believe,' he said, his voice calmer, ‘in the story I had told you once of Rama and Shiva. You are already with your soulmate. You just need her to find you and make you fall in love with her.'

And he hung up. His abrupt phone calls always lightened my burden. Though I couldn't really understand how the universe worked according to him, there was something about him that I couldn't help but believe in, each time that he said something and claimed it would turn true. Things would happen when they were meant to happen, as he had said. My convocation was coming up and I needed to prepare myself. I waited for the week to end.

Mom and Dad came for my convocation. That morning, I got up and took out my suit from the wardrobe. I did feel a bit vain but all my hard work was for Mom and Dad. The dean called me up on stage to deliver a speech on how I had managed to prepare nine papers and get them published in a span of two years, and I felt a surge of pride. The whole world shrank to the faces of my mother and father. I could see Mom's face brimming with joy as I was being praised in a crowd of over five hundred people. She didn't understand what I was being praised for, but she had the clear idea that her son had done something commendable and the laurels that followed made her feel that she herself had done something great. For me, it was certainly a cold war I had fought for years and not just to achieve what I did, but to slay the demons that had slept inside me. For the first time I felt I had won the world.

That evening Mom sat beside me and stroked my head which was on her lap. I pleaded with Dad to let her stay. After much insistence, he agreed. I was alone here and would feel better if she would stay with me for a while. Days passed and work became more and more hectic. I had been assigned with another responsibility at office. I was happy with this new responsibility because it was the best way for me to pass the time, without returning to my recent past that always led me into deep contemplation which got me to dig out things that disturbed me, and then resulted in sleepless nights. Mom was aware of these things, and that was the reason why she occasionally invaded my room at midnight, to check if I was asleep or not. Most times, she found me either sitting idly on the balcony, or working on the laptop. She would gently chide me, ‘Beta, go to bed. It's already midnight. What are you doing so late in front of the laptop? I never understand.' And I would reply, ‘Some office work, Mom.' She understood everything but never advised me. Because I never wanted to listen to anything. She knew it and did not want to stretch the matter lest it became ugly once again. Though sometimes she urged me to open up. I felt relieved that I had my mother to talk to, though I couldn't disclose everything about my heart's volatile condition to her. Dad spent his time between his office in Bihar and Delhi. He would come and stay with us most weekends.

One such evening, when I got home, I saw many plates on the table and leftover namkeen, sweets, biscuits, and half-finished cups of tea. It must be a group of ladies, I thought. Mom had made good friends in the colony and there were aunty-jis moving in and out of our house since she came. It felt good. At least the house wasn't empty like before.

I sat on the sofa and picked up a sweet from a plate. I never understood how people could leave something like sweets untouched. I would never do that. First I would finish the entire plate and only then would I continue talking. Regardless of who was addressing me.

I loosened my tie and shouted, ‘Mom! Where are you? I am back.'

She was in the kitchen and hurriedly came to the room. Her face was beaming. I wondered if Dad had gifted her a necklace or some new sarees. But I asked her directly, ‘You're looking very happy. What's up? By the way, so many plates …' Before I could finish, she interrupted me as if she just been waiting for an opening, ‘Seema Aunty had come.'

I raised my eyebrows and said, ‘Who is this Seema Aunty?'

‘What? Don't you remember her? You met her at Aanchal Aunty's anniversary party? Last to last week.'

‘Mom, how could I remember anyone? In the last two weeks, we have been to at least five parties. And I never understand why you insist on taking me along to such parties,' I said jocularly.

‘Yes beta, I understand. But you remember one aunty who remarked after meeting you that you looked very handsome in your blue sherwani,' she tried hard to remind me.

‘Yes, yes. I think now I'm able to recollect faintly. It didn't appear that it was her fortieth anniversary. I must say, she has maintained herself quite well.'

I waited for Mom to say something but she remained silent. When I looked at her, she protested, ‘Why? Does your mom look like an old hag? So many ladies in the party mentioned, that too several times, that it doesn't at all appear that I am the mother of three and that I'm over fifty-five. Huh.'

‘Mom, Mom!' I cajoled her. ‘You are the most beautiful lady on earth. Happy now?' I said, with a big smile on my face.

‘Yes. That's better. So at that time, Seema Aunty was also there, she had asked you about your job and all.'

‘If you say so. Even if I beat my head against the wall I'm not going to remember anything, Mom. And who cares about aunties in parties!' I chuckled. ‘I attend parties only to eat. If you ask me, I can easily remember the names of the various delicacies we had that evening.' I laughed.

She laughed too. I felt good to see her laughing.

‘So what about Seema Aunty?'

‘Yes. She was saying that Rekha, your son has grown up. He's a naujawan now! Aren't you thinking of his shaadi?'

‘So …' I didn't like where the conversation seemed to be going.

‘So, she was saying that she has a girl in mind. Very beautiful …' I stopped her.

‘Mom, why are these aunties always so worried about my marriage, tell me?'

‘Oh. Listen to me na, beta. Kabhi toh sun!' she snapped. ‘I too want you to get married. You will be thirty-one soon. And I also want a bahu who will take care of me.'

‘Then it's fine. I will arrange a nurse for you who will take care of you all the time. Moreover, you both won't even fight. In fact, you can make her do whatever you want without her uttering a single word. Wouldn't that be nice?'

‘No, I want a bahu. And that's my final decision.'

‘Okay, okay. But you always go on about a beautiful girl. The last dozen girls were also beautiful. And you know what happened with them. So, sorry. I am not going to meet this new girl.'

‘First listen to me. At least get to know her. See her photo. Read her biodata. And then decide.'

‘No, Mom!'

‘Listen. Either you bring home a girl of your own choice or let me decide on a suitable lass for you. Here, Seema Aunty has given me a picture of her. First you see her, and then decide. I won't say anything.' And she went into the other room.

When lines like ‘I won't say anything' come up, there is seriously no option but to listen to Mom. She's a typical Bollywood mom, I swear.

She came back with an envelope in her hand. Looking at her beaming face, I was sure that she was hell bent on settling this girl and me together. She put the envelope into my hands and said, ‘Open it up and see.'

‘Don't I have any option other than opening it?' I sighed, making a face.

‘Don't say anything and open it,' she ordered.

I took out the picture and looked at it. I looked at the picture then at Mom. I thought Seema Aunty had perhaps given her the wrong picture. And then I looked at Mom again.

She asked, ‘What happened?'

‘Are you sure this is the picture of the girl?' I asked, bewildered.

‘Yes. That's what she has given me. Why?'

‘Because there are so many girls dancing. How on earth could it be the picture of a girl sent to a prospective groom to look at?' I mocked. ‘Where is that picture of the girl by the flowerpot wearing a constipated smile?' I laughed loudly.

‘Actually, Seema Aunty has only this picture of her. She asked me to keep it for now. By tomorrow she will ask Kajal's parents personally. She is going to their place.'

‘Oh! Kajal is her name, whoever she is in the picture,' I said and then protested, ‘Wait, what do you mean that she will go and meet her parents? Don't tell me that she is distributing pictures of a girl without her parents' knowledge. Isn't that absurd?'

‘You are another one. Why do you have to analyse everything? This is women's stuff. You just tell me whether you liked the girl or not. Rest we will see. Isn't she beautiful?' she beamed.

‘Beautiful? First tell me, where is she in this picture?'

‘Oh. That's her in the left corner. She was clicked while dancing.' She looked at my frowning face. ‘And yes, that answers your question—she is a dancer.'

‘Don't worry. Bring in a dancer bahu and she will make you dance all day,' I quipped.

‘Be serious sometimes. You always have to make fun of things.'

‘Okay, okay. I am serious. Let me check out this girl.'

I tried hard to find the girl. But there were four girls dancing in the corner.

‘Mom, sorry, but I don't know who is your bahu Kajal. Here four girls are dancing in the left corner.'

‘Okay.' And she pointed straight without taking a second. I looked at the picture closely. She was in a typical red suit, the kind of red people wear only for their wedding. I have a great aversion for these red-suit kinds. In fact, all the other girls were wearing the same flashy red. I could not see the girl properly. She had her head hung forward and her hair was loose around her face. It appeared for a moment that she was doing the salsa.

‘Is she doing the salsa?' I asked Mom, trying hard to see what exactly this girl was doing.

‘What … sa …? She is doing bhagnra.'

‘Never mind.'

‘Okay. How is she?'

‘Mom, did she drink bhang and dance the bhangra?' I asked.

‘Why are you saying so?'

‘Because I am not even able to see her face. Look at the picture. All her hair is on her face. It seems like she is doing an ad shoot for some hair product.'

‘Oh. Don't worry about that. Seema Aunty will bring another picture of hers. Tomorrow. But I feel you should meet her.'

‘I have said it earlier as well. I don't want to meet anyone.'

‘Only once. You didn't meet anyone,' Mom pleaded.

‘Yes, because I don't want to meet any such bimbos. All stupid girls.'

‘How can you say that without even meeting the girl? Meet her. Talk to her. Try to get to know her. I am not forcing you at all.'

‘Okay, okay. I will see. By the way, what does the girl do except dance?'

‘She cooks very well. Any kind of dish.'

‘No, I am not asking this. Is she educated?' I corrected Mom.

‘Yes.' Mom said as though she was the CEO of some company.

‘She is some soft … umm … engineer. See, she is an engineer.'

‘Okay. Software engineer. Where?'

‘Yes. The same. Seema Aunty was saying that she works at some company named Info-fy-fush.' Mom tried to recall the name but found it hard to pronounce and so let it go.

‘Okay. I got it. It's Infosys.'

‘See? You also like her education background.' She beamed again.

‘What? When did I say that?' I said, nonplussed at her interpretation.

‘Okay. Done. I will fix a meeting with Seema Aunty.'

‘Do whatever you like. I am very hungry. Call me whenever the dinner is ready. By the way, what is Dad up to?'

‘He must be loitering around the sector, looking for some paan. After coming back home, nowadays he has developed a very bad habit of eating paan along with his new-found friends in the colony.'