Someone Like You (25 page)

‘How was it?’ I ask.

Pia shrugs, without saying anything. It was our last exam of the first semester. All of them took place within a span of twelve days, and we did nothing but study in those days.

Three days before the exams, I noticed that Pia hadn’t slept in two days and had been studying.

‘You should rest. Stop studying,’ I said.

‘Tanmay would have wanted us to study,’ she said with glazed-over eyes. ‘And to do well in the exams.’

I nodded. The resolve to complete everything that Tanmay would have wanted to do has taken over our minds completely. That’s all that matters now. We studied hard for the exams and covered every single topic on the syllabus, because Tanmay would have taken care of that. We completed the neatest, most original and elaborate projects in class for every subject, because that would have been the case had we copied from Tanmay’s work. No one could put together better project reports. We did every big and small thing he would have done, had he been alive.

We leave the department building and make our way to the hostel building. I spot mandar at a distance and he
shoots a sympathetic look at me. I am sure he misses Tanmay too. Who doesn’t? There were scores of candles in front of Tanmay’s picture kept in the canteen. Tanmay was loved, and always will be. Mandar walks away from us and he is joined by other teammates, all of whom are in their football jerseys. I wish Tanmay was walking with them, talking about how they would win the final match of the tournament. But that can never be now. Tanmay will never see ICE get the title home. He will not be there to strike the winning goal. He will not be carried on the shoulders of his teammates. He is gone. Far away from us and never coming back.

I would hate to see the team losing the final match in his absence, when he had worked so hard for it throughout the series. I know how badly Tanmay wanted that, but there is nothing we can do about it.

‘Is something wrong? Did the exam not go well?’ I ask Pia. She has been looking a little lost.

‘I broke up with Vishal,’ she tells me simply.

‘What? Why?’

‘I don’t love him.’

‘Pia, please—tell me what happened. I want to know. You don’t look so good …’ I say.

‘There is nothing to tell. I just realized that I don’t love him, and I told him that. He was more than happy to let me go.’

‘No way,’ I whisper, more to myself. I cannot believe that someone can let someone like Pia go just like that, without even putting up a fight. The guy has to be nuts.

‘Yes way,’ she says and smiles sadly.

‘What is it, Pia? There is something very wrong, and I know that. Please tell me. I want to help. You don’t have to be alone in this.’

Even though I plead and beg her, she does not say anything. I can see tears in her eyes, and they devastate me. What kind
of a person leaves his girlfriend in a time like this? Does he not know what she is going through? How can someone be so heartless? When I try and fail to get it out of her, I finally give up. She is holding back tears, and my insistence would only make it worse. We have already shed more than enough tears in public.

We walk back to our room in silence. Our mid-semester exams are over and we are scheduled to go home for the semester break after three days, although we both still do not feel like going home. We have decided to stay back for these three days and watch the football final, just like we would have, had Tanmay been playing.

What we are doing might not make sense to anyone else, but we need to do
something
to keep us sane. Just sitting around and thinking, remembering everything, was driving us crazy. So we started to think of things Tanmay would have wanted to do, and started doing them. Though we could not find too many of those, we feel a lot calmer doing the smallest of things. We hope that if he is looking down at us from wherever he has gone to, he is smiling and is at peace. We sit together and watch all the sci-fi movies that he had wanted to see and begged us to watch. We do that on a loop, over and over again. Just to feel him around.

We spend the rest of the day locked inside, not even going out to have a meal. If we carry on like this, we will soon starve ourselves to death.
Which is something Tanmay would not have wanted
, the thought hits me. I cannot let the pain of losing him overtake us. Pia needs me; she is even worse off than I am and now she does not have either Tanmay or Vishal to take care of her. She is my responsibility right now, and I feel guilty about allowing her to destroy herself.

I turn to look at her, to ask her to come with me to have dinner, only to see that she is weeping. She is sitting in the furthest corner of her bed, and has her head dug into her
knees. I get up from my bed and slip in next to her, holding her tightly. I can feel how thin she has become. Since the past month, she has neither been going to the gym nor eating, and it shows. It saddens me.

‘Hush. Relax, Pia. It’s going to be okay,’ I whisper.

‘No, it’s not,’ she sobs. ‘He is never coming back. He has left me forever …’

I know her well enough to know that she is talking about Tanmay, not Vishal. My heart aches for her. ‘I am sorry. We cannot do anything about it …’

‘But I miss him!’ she cries out. ‘I miss him so much! He did not have to go away. Not like this. Not so soon. Not ever. This is not fair. This is
so
not fair.’

‘I know. But we cannot be like this. We have to stop thinking about … all that.’

‘How can I? I have tried, but I just … can’t. I can’t get it out of my head. He … do you know how …’

‘What, Pia?’ I ask. She is trying to say something, but her sobs are making her break down.

‘He was such a sweetheart … he loved me—I always knew, you always knew, everyone knew. But he never said it to me. He did not want to cause trouble between me and Vishal … so he never told me how much he … I didn’t want to hurt him. But there was nothing I could do. I was with Vishal and I didn’t want to …’

‘I understand. It’s not your fault.’

‘It is! I have been so stupid! I do not love Vishal. Vishal does not love me either. I should have realized it way before. We have been out of love for years now. I don’t even know why we were together till today. But because of the stupid feeling of obligation I had with Vishal, I hurt Tanmay so much. If only I had told him … just once …’ she says, crying brokenly. She is having difficulty in breathing.

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ I whisper, crying too. ‘You could not have seen this coming.’

‘I could not have stopped the accident, but I could have at least … he would have been so happy … Can you imagine the expression on his face, had I told him that I love him? I have known that I love him, for a long time now. If only I had just …’

‘You should have,’ I murmur.

‘Yes, I should have! But I can’t, now. He is gone. For always. I denied him something he probably wanted the most … and for what? That thing I had with Vishal that I forced myself to believe was love? You know—Vishal probably never loved me. I thought he would learn to love me over time. But it never happened. All he ever loved was my body. I don’t know why I even bothered to make it work for so long. I should have just …’

I don’t know what to say. I can understand her pain, and I know it goes way deeper than mine. I cannot even imagine what she must be going through. I picture Tanmay’s reaction, had Pia told him about her feelings. I don’t think even a zillion football victories could have matched that happiness. I feel sad for him, that he never got to know. If only …

‘This is all my fault. Had I told him … he would not have been trying to stay away from me and not disrupt things between me and Vishal. He would have wanted to spend time with me. He would have come to me after that football match, not the stupid party. He would never have gotten drunk, never have driven that bike, never have had that accident, never have …
died
.’

‘No! You can
not
blame yourself. It is not your fault. You could not have known. You could not have stopped it from happening …’ I say and hug her tightly. The last thing I want right now is for Pia to think that it was her fault in any way. She is already hurting way too much.

I keep holding her, for hours. She keeps crying, and making me cry. The things she says tells me how broken she is from the inside. I wish I could do something to make it better. But when someone dies, there is nothing anyone can do to make it better for the ones close to him. All you can do is be there and make them realize that they are not alone, that someone is with them always, no matter what. I have learnt this first hand. And I would never wish something like this for anyone. No one deserves this kind of pain.

It is almost 2 a.m., and Pia has finally fallen asleep in my arms. I slowly shift and move away, making her lie down on the bed and rest her head on the pillow. As I pull the duvet over her body and tuck her in, she murmurs something incomprehensible.

‘What?’ I whisper.

‘Don’t make the same mistake as me. If you love someone …’ she says and dozes off.

For some very weird reason, a picture of Karthik flashes before my eyes. Before I can decipher my feelings for him, the memory of my last encounter with him comes running back to me.
He killed Tanmay.
I will never find it in my heart to forgive him.

I get under the covers of my bed and roll over. I know that sleep is a long way away. But I will still try. I cannot let this attitude continue any more. Staying in for days, not eating, just thinking about Tanmay and crying is slowly killing us from the inside. It needs to stop. I need to go out, meet people, talk and live. I also have to make Pia do the same. We need to get our lives back on track, and it has to begin now.

I pick up my cell phone and type a text message.

‘Let’s meet up tomorrow?’

A few kilometres away …

A shiny red Audi A6 zips through the streets of Nagpur. The wheels grind hard against the asphalt of the road, and it is obvious that the guy who is driving it is very angry. He holds the steering wheel way too tightly—the veins on his hands are popping out and his knuckles are white. There are beads of sweat on his forehead, even in the air-conditioned car.

‘Can you drive a little slow, man?’ Chetan, the college president shouts, as he almost falls over onto the dashboard. He grudgingly buckles up his seat belt and sits back. The expression on Akshat’s face scares him.

‘Will you just shut up?’ Akshat shouts.

‘No, I won’t. If you drive like this, you are going to get us killed. What is the problem with you?’

‘What’s the problem with me? You’re asking that, you asshole? You killed him! If I had not asked my dad to call the commissioner and tell him that Tanmay is a friend and it’s a drunk driving case, you would be in fucking jail, man!’

‘You don’t have to repeat it a zillion times to make your point. I get it; I screwed up. And I said I am sorry, man. It was dark and it was Karthik’s bike. I didn’t know Tanmay was driving it,’ Chetan argues. He has lost count of the times that he has explained this to Akshat ever since the ‘accident’ happened.

‘What? Are you BLIND? You fucking killed him! I still don’t get it. How can you not see it was not Karthik who was driving?’

‘It was a mistake, Akshat. Let it go,’ Chetan says. He doesn’t want to fight this fight again. It’s been going on for days, now. He was asked by Akshat to knock over a guy who had beaten Akshat black and blue a few days earlier—Karthik. That night, they had tailed Karthik’s bike as soon as it left the party. But that is all they had done—tailed. They did not cause the accident; they did not even touch the bike. They were just following them from a distance of ten feet, honking occasionally to scare them.

Seeing that, the bike had picked up speed and they had also driven their jeep faster, to catch up. But before they got the chance to knock the bike over, it had crashed itself, right in front of their eyes. The bike had crashed straight into the divider, while moving at the speed of over 100 km/hr. Tanmay and Ratul were thrown off, landing around fifteen feet away from where the bike, whatever was left of it, lay. It was not Chetan’s fault. He and his cronies had just witnessed the crash and had gotten scared. In the chaos, they accidentally banged the bike with their jeep. And that’s how the police came into the picture.

Seeing Ratul and Tanmay bleed, they had panicked and immediately picked them up and driven them to the hospital in their jeep. Later, the police found evidence that the jeep had crashed into the bike. It was Akshat’s father who had intervened, to convince the police otherwise. It was difficult to substantiate the fact that the bike crash happened before the jeep crashed the already battered bike, even though it was the truth. By the time the jeep had hit the bike, Tanmay and Ratul had already been thrown off the bike. It wasn’t really Chetan’s or his gang’s fault.

Akshat’s father had pulled some strong strings and no one other than a few people in the police department even know of the jeep being involved in any way. And it is never going to come out, they have taken care of that. The policemen’s pockets were taken care of very generously.

‘I am sorry, man,’ Chetan mutters again.

‘What has happened has happened. Lucky for you—Tanmay is dead and Ratul doesn’t recognize you,’ Akshat says. ‘But the thing is that … we still have unfinished business to take care of. Karthik still does not have any broken bones in his body.’

Akshat hasn’t been able to get the image of Karthik beating the shit out of him out of his head. It was humiliating and something like that had never happened to him before. Four years back in Jaipur, a guy had grazed his car against Akshat’s newly bought Chevrolet. The poor guy had spent the next three weeks in hospital. Akshat has been after Chetan’s life to do something about Karthik and when he failed, he made his life hell with constant taunts. Chetan clearly remembers the night when he tried to talk Akshat out of what he was asking him to do. But he owed a lot to Akshat—the unlimited crazy inflow of cash, the hot women, the rowdy parties, the fast bikes. He just couldn’t say no when Akshat told him to knock over Karthik. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done it before, but Karthik was a tough guy, and he didn’t want to get into trouble with him, just in case something went wrong.

It did. And someone died. The only good part was that everyone knew that Tanmay was drunk and it was assumed to be his fault. What bothers Chetan most is that even after everything that happened, Akshat still doesn’t want to back out. He still wants his precious revenge on Karthik.

‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ he says to Akshat. ‘And I am not going to be any part of … whatever it is that you have planned.’

‘I don’t need you to be. You are anyway not efficient enough,’ Akshat says with a smirk.

‘What are you going to do?’ Chetan asks slowly, not sure if he wants to know, but curiosity getting the better of him.

‘Take one thing he holds close. What better way to hurt him than attack where he is already hurting?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Niharika,’ Akshat says with an evil grin stretched across his face.

‘Oh. What’s with her? Why do you want her so bad? There are like a thousand other girls, you know? I think the first year girls this time are way hotter.’

‘I don’t know what it is about her. It’s just that she rejects me … that turns me on. I had made out with her sister and that one was a firecracker. I am hoping this one’s better. Can you imagine the odds? I slept with two sisters! I am going to make sure it happens soon,’ he says and laughs out loud. There is something very sinister in his laughter which makes even Chetan squirm.

‘So, you want to sleep with her just because you made out with her sister?’

‘Well, kind of. Plus, she is hot! And the added—and major—advantage now being that it will kill Karthik to see her with me. She wants to meet me. A couple more dates and she is all mine. The death of her loser best friend has already left her vulnerable. Landing her will be very easy right now.’

‘Just be careful. Karthik doesn’t look like someone who would take this lying down. You might not want to piss him off,’ Chetan warns.

‘There is nothing he can do. She hates him. This is my best chance. And even if he does something, I am more than eager to take him on. By the way, where is the jeep right now?’

‘It’s hidden somewhere in the college. No one will be able to find out.’

‘That better be the case,’ Akshat sighs and thinks about Niharika and her perfectly shaped breasts.

He tries to remember the last time he had taken someone as fine as Niharika to bed and his mind draws a blank. Nagpur has become a fruitful playground for Akshat. Every year, just as the new batch enters he comes to the campus to visit his old friend—the
decadent, foolish college president—and entraps one of the many beautiful and nervous juniors. Last year, it was Twinkle Shah—the petite Ms Fresher—and their relationship lasted all of fifteen days, ending once Askhat had his way with her in the parking lot of a movie hall. This year, it’s taking a little longer.

He checks her text message again. He is about to get lucky.