The Girl I Last Loved (7 page)

I smiled without turning back. I often wondered what had I ever done to make him think we were such good friends. Whatever it was, I owed that deed a lot.

“For a change, start talking about your feelings,” I felt Ved’s palm over my shoulder.

I felt my muscles tightening.

I don’t know what got into me as I turned back and hugged Ved.

“You should call it a day,” Ved whispered. I nodded.

“I would like to carry along…”

Ved deliberately tagged himself along with me.

“I am going by local, so…,” I paused before answering in ‘no’ as it came to me that this guy had done much for me to receive a ‘no’ in any situation.

“I am so excited ‘the Akash’ has allowed me to accompany His Majesty to a local station,” Ved said, overanimated over his excitement.

In our fifteen minutes’ wait, he asked me more than fifty times ‘when will the train arrive’, though I wasn’t keeping a count of it.

“Don’t put questions like a five-year old who hasn’t travelled by a local.” I finally gave up.

“Dude, since the day I got into this city, I have owned a car. Everyone doesn’t share your luxuries.”

I wanted to ask then why today, but kept mum as I already knew the answer.

The train arrived and Ved tried to jump into the first compartment which halted in front.

Blocking him, I pointed, “We are moving to that one.”

Ved gave me a quizzical look but sensing he had no other option, simply followed.

He was lucky enough to land up a seat. In his excitement, he even managed to grab one for me.

I shook my hands in refusal and turned my back towards him.

Just in a few minutes, my world again came to a standstill.

She was there. From the moment I saw those glittering bangles, I knew there was no other who could contrast multi-coloured bangles with white shirt and blue jeans. As soon as she was in, she swiftly swing the red printed stole on to her shoulder. The ladies’ compartment was empty, so she grabbed the window side seat. Then she hung her bag by the edge of her seat, stuffed earphones in her ears as rested on the seat. She then surveyed the area. I tried to hide, in spite of knowing that she wasn’t looking for me.

A few minutes passed… she looked a little drowsy. She pulled out her
dupatta
, folded it as to form a pillow, placed it over the seat’s metal frame, folded her legs and closed her eyes.

She was sporting golden eye-shadow which made her face look even more radiant. She glittered among the others, like always. She looked beautiful – her face was at such ease that it even made my thoughts peaceful.

It was hardly fifteen minutes that a fat woman in her mid-forties appeared out of nowhere and was tapping on her shoulders. I wanted to yell out, ‘Don’t wake her up. It’s hard for her to regain sleep once somebody disturbs her.’

However, there has always been a difference between what I want and what I do.

She woke up with a jerk and adjusted to accommodate that fatsy.

“Now I know why we didn’t go in that other compartment.”

As I shifted my gaze, Ved was smiling while looking straight at Kasam. I smiled to myself and focused on Kasam again.

Chapter 7

Date: 17th July 1999

Dear Diary,

So, it’s been a really long time, huh! Actually, today morning Daddy went to fetch Mommy’s medicine and I went to take my bath while Ananya was at school. That was the time when Mommy fled away, what she usually does these days. Daddy was really angry this time. She returned at 1 p.m. when Daddy wasn’t at home. When he came back home, he sent her out of the house and said that if that’s what she wants, then she should leave once and for all. But, everything settled down and she entered back. However, later that evening at 6:30, when Ananya came upstairs, she told me that Daddy had driven her out of the home again and she had no money. We went downstairs but none of us dared to speak about that. We were feeling really bad and we thought that
Daddy overreacted. All of a sudden she seemed like a nice, poor person and we all were wishing for her to come back. When
she didn’t return by 8 p.m., we got tense again and told Daddy to look for her but he said that we shouldn’t be bothered about her.

Mommy came back at around 8:30. She had taken Ananya’s saved pocket money and also spent it. Then she just went back to her old habit, which was a lot of abuse. When she starts saying all that cheap and abusive stuff, I feel like hitting right on her face with a baseball bat, really hard. She only abuses Daddy, which makes me feel really bad ‘coz he has to bear it all just for the sake of avoiding us getting spoiled. Right now, we all wish for her to just go somewhere, just not around here and we won’t care. We will be just fine.

In everyone’s life there are some chapters which are never read. They are kept hidden from others so as to hide it from oneself. Probably I landed over one such chapter in Kasam’s life.

Still perplexed to comprehend, when I saw her tear-filled eyes.

“Kasam,” my voice broke.

“How dare you read my diary?” she uttered a sudden loud cry.

“I… didn’t… you asked me to grab your notebook.”

“Don’t you understand the difference between a diary and a notebook?”

By the time I stepped towards her, she escaped, with her eyes brimming with tears.

I wandered restlessly through the corridors, looking for her.

Asked for her in the canteen… gave the library a thought… nah… it wasn’t a place for her.

I even asked Priya to check the ladies’ room.

Then as a bolt of lightning struck me… maybe I knew where she was.

A few minutes later, ‘may’ was wiped out. She was there, sitting alone in the barren backyard of our school, playing with a small, perhaps wild flower. Her face had shades of pink. Normally if a fair girl such as her cries, they develop this texture. Her eyes were moist, but she wasn’t crying any more. There was a used coffee cup lying by her side with edges chewed. She had this peculiar habit of biting the paper coffee cup while drinking.

I went to her with unhurried steps and knelt down on the ground beside her. I looked into her eyes; she immediately closed them.

“You know, whenever in life I see a cup in this condition again, I will know it’s you. There can be no other.”

I managed to bring a smile on her face.

“Get up, it’s not your fault…,” she extended her hand to me. Though it was most of my effort but she pulled on to me.

“I am sorry.”

“You are forgiven,” I smiled.

“In fact, you did me a favour.”

My face made my bewilderness evident.

“You know all the girls, they want to be like me. My looks… my kind of style… my pocket money… the way guys fall for me… they want it all. To put it simply, they want my life. They think it’s perfect. I want to preserve that ‘thinking’. I don’t want people to talk about me behind my back. I don’t want them to know that there is even a single thing wrong in my life.
I am a star – they shine, never cry,”
she said with a smirk.

She spoke with such conviction that my eyes were forced to remain perplexed – fixed on her eyes.

“Four years back, when Mommy left us and went to her parent’s house, I was left crying, being alone in my house. Out of the blue, one of my friends turned up. I was so miserable and lonely that I blurted out everything. She said my life was her fantasy as she thought I had nothing to be worried about at all.”

“That very moment I realised ‘why share your pain when you know they are incapable of reducing it’. It will only put a red mark on the image they form of me.”

There was a strange softness in her eyes when she said, “But your accidentally reading my diary and gave me a reason to share my secret with someone.”

All of a sudden, I felt wanted.

“My parent’s marriage was a mistake. My Mom never wanted to get married in the first place. She wanted to study but her parents forced her into marrying when very young. Daddy was establishing his business at that time, so he didn’t bring Mom home after marrying and she stayed with her parents for three years after marriage. I was born meanwhile. They never got the time to know each other and connect. While Mom was there at her home, constant questions like ‘Why you are still living here’ by her parents, neighbours and relatives, and Daddy’s indifference to her pain made her impervious to any commitment towards the marriage. Finally, Daddy brought her home when my uncle asked him directly to do so. Even after that, he was very much engaged in his work. He didn’t take Mommy for an outing and whenever he asked, Mommy refused. Daddy never liked fancy clothes, jewellery or makeup. He scolded Mom if she ever got overdressed.

“Slowly Mommy started blaming us – her own family for her state of life… loss of her career… rather she never accepted us as her family.

“Slowly she left doing all household chores and transferred all decision making to Daddy. But what remained nontransferable was our requirement of a mother’s love, care and advice. She kept on abandoning us and running to her past. In due course of time, Daddy understood that it’s no longer about his marriage, it’s more about his kids and lived with that very well. Alas! My mother wasn’t able to do the same.”

In my weirdest imagination even I never expected Kasam’ s life to be like this. She was always so cheerful, happy, fun-filled. Perhaps she was so fun due to a miserable childhood. Maybe that’s why she lived every moment doing what she liked, being what she was and loving her life.

“Akash… when a marriage fails, people keep coming bubbling out with various reasons for its failure. But if they already knew these things before the marriage, why didn’t they stop it beforehand? My relatives said Mommy was
manglik
and Daddy wasn’t, probably that qualified as the major accomplice in the crime; or because Daddy married within one year of a death in the family. However, everyone knew these before, but they kept mum ‘coz they also knew despite these things, the marriage can still work. It just needed a try at the right time from both the sides.”

‘Wow…’ I thought to myself, ‘she was quite grownup for her age’.

“Still all those years – seeing Daddy and Mommy fighting; Ananya and me staying awake at night, planning what we can do to unite them; seeing in people’s eyes that our family isn’t normal, avoiding bringing friends at home, unknowing what could be the scenario.

“Neighbours always asking if everything was alright at home – ‘is your Mom still living with you?’; relatives hesitating to come and visit us – on the whole, parents mess their marriage and their children who are incapable of cleaning it, live with that. The last thing I would let happen is to let my marriage go wrong, if not for me, then for my children as they don’t deserve a childhood like mine.”

She finished talking, lowering her head while still playing with that small flower.

“I am sorry I brought that up.”

“Don’t be. Though if you want to make it up, then there’s one thing you can do…”

I got scared of the mischievous smile she gave with that line.

I ended up taking a whole round of the school with that flower plucked beside my ear.

So, that was Kasam, changing within a flash of lightning

While leaving the school, I handed her diary back to her. A few ten rupee notes fell from it. I reached out and on flipping the pages of the diary, a few more notes came out.

“What’s it…”

“I hide money in books and finding makes me ecstatic.”

“Are you insane or something?”

“No, I am not,” her simple answers were always direct and mesmerising.

“You will lose all the money.”

“It doesn’t matter; having them won’t make me happy anyways. What if I find happiness by losing them? What matters more – the money or my happiness? Even you should try it, only then you would know the feeling.”

“No thanks. I am not as rich as you.”

“It’s not about being rich. I keep only ten or twenty-rupee notes. Nobody gets poor even by losing them.”