Chapter 7 Aditi
Aditi
The coffee shop is the last to shut down.
I don’t know why I expected everything to be open all night. The store workers need to get back to their families too. The fear has led to sadness and now I wonder what mine’s doing. I have not answered their calls. So, are they calling all my friends? Will they wait till the morning?
It only strikes me now that a lot of my ‘friends’ will know that I have run away from home.
It’s always been tough for them to pick a side.
Should they validate my relationship with a thirty-year-old?
Or should they side with my family? They thought it was a phase, that I would get over him.
They saw me crying and bawling and they empathized, but once college ended with most of them scrambling for jobs that didn’t exist, my troubles were forgotten by everyone.
Everyone except Tejal. They would have called her first. And she would have told them that we haven’t spoken in three months.
She hated my family with a vengeance, always thought they were cruel and controlling even when I didn’t, but she also thought I shouldn’t be in love with Aman, this wasn’t the time, and he wasn’t the person.
No matter what I said to her, nothing made a difference.
When I finally told her what I was going to do, she came down on me heavily.
‘He’s going to drag you down,’ she told me.
So, I was forced to remind her that her boyfriend was unemployed and lazy and lived off his parents’ money. That he didn’t need time to ‘figure’ things out, he was just a loser. And that he wasn’t an ‘attentive’ boyfriend, he just had nothing else to do.
‘You’re going too far,’ she had warned me before she told me that my relationship would crash and burn and I would regret marrying a man who was clearly shady on account of dating someone so young.
Our friendship never recovered from that.
Strange how friendships get weighed down by the complications of relationships.
Strange when friendships are the only relationships where everything is supposed to be expected.
Remember the movies? Friends help hide the body.
But the lover goes to the police and recreates the murder for them.
All in the name of sacrifice. The real sacrifice is implicating yourself in the murder, too, by hiding it.
I want to call her. Aman keeps telling me I should and argues that Tejal doesn’t know him the way I do, and so I should forgive Tejal, but I can’t bring myself to make the call.
I look around and mops are being dipped into dirty buckets, sleepy cashiers are counting money before depositing it into cash boxes. The airport has entered its post-midnight personality—half ghost town, half refugee camp.
I can feel my eyelids getting heavy. Sleep defeats the best of men.
I have learnt this from the movies. Criminals are kept awake for hours, and being awake is torture enough for them to confess to crimes they did or didn’t commit.
What would I not do to get into my bed right now!
But that would be such a tragic end to my love story.
‘Can we go out? Eat something warm?’ I ask, to stave off the feeling. The feeling of wanting to get back to my own house, my own bed.
Raghav checks his phone.
‘There’s a place five minutes away, walking. Open till 1.’
Raghav and I walk out into the wet night.
The rain’s an occasional drizzle. The roadside eatery looks better than it did in the picture Raghav showed me.
We order parathas and chai. We eat standing under the thin metal sheet and tarpaulin awning, occasional drops hitting our arms. We’re silent for a while, just chewing and listening to the world.
‘So, how long have you been dating?’ I ask him.
He takes a bit of time to answer the question. ‘On and off? Forever. Started in school, but her brother found out. He was in the same school.’
‘Then?’
‘Beat me up,’ he says. ‘They changed her school.’
I stop mid-bite. ‘Brothers,’ I say.
‘Yours?’ he asks.
I nod, but I don’t go into the details. The three days he had me locked up in my room when he first found out about it.
For three days, I heard my parents, Bhaiya, Didi and sometimes Jiju talk about it in the living room.
Occasionally, one of them would come and ask me if I would stop talking to Aman.
After stupidly defying them for a day, I said I would.
But they didn’t believe me. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had just told them Aman was a fling and nothing else.
That I would erase him from my memory and then continued everything in secret.
I would have been more discreet, hid him better.
They would have slapped me, thought of me as a slut, but Bhaiya would have eventually forgiven me.
Or not. I don’t know any more. I used to tell Aman that the first person I tell about him would be Bhaiya, that he might understand. How wrong I was!
‘You kept in touch with Megha?’ I ask.
He shakes his head. ‘We didn’t talk for a while. School ended, and she moved to Lucknow. Got into college, dated someone else.’
Even while saying this, his face falls.
‘Did the brother find out about the other boy too?’
Raghav shakes his head. ‘They broke up. I was keeping tabs, of course. So I reached out to her. It took time but . . . we got back.’
‘Did you date anyone after she changed schools?’
He stares at the steam rising from his chai. ‘No, never felt like it.’
‘So you kept waiting for her?’
He nods. ‘With her, it was . . . love at first sight. And the feeling never went away. I just wanted her.’
‘Then, you must have been crushed when she was dating that other person?’
He nods. ‘But it didn’t make a difference. I knew it would end. It was a matter of time.’
‘Why?’
‘I saw their pictures,’ he answers. ‘They didn’t seem in love.’
‘You could tell that from the pictures?’
‘Of course, I could,’ he says. ‘She never stopped being in love with me. At least that’s what I told myself. I had to. It was unbearable otherwise.’
‘You are a romantic,’ I remark.
‘So are you, are you not? You’re running away.’
‘I mean . . . maybe,’ I say.
Such a strange word: romantic. To violently cut off your family for the sake of love is said to be romantic. To die for each other, that’s romantic. The word belies what it’s used for.
‘You kept texting him when he was on a flight,’ he says. ‘But you didn’t tell Aman your family showed up?’
‘It’ll just stress him out.’
He looks up. ‘But it happened. It’s a big thing. When Aman lands, your brother will still be looking for you.’
‘Exactly, it’s a big thing,’ I say. ‘So why dump it on him? He was already worried. He doesn’t need to know every single minutiae of this mess.’
‘It’s not about dumping. It’s just . . . shouldn’t he know?’
‘Why? So he panics while he’s in another city? How will that help?’
Raghav shakes his head. ‘Because he’s your guy? Isn’t that what this whole thing is? Being like . . . there for each other in moments like these?’
His voice is steady. Not angry. Just . . . disappointed. And I’m bothered that he’s disappointed. Why does he care? Why do I care that he cares? When will I stop caring what others think of Aman? Of me? Of us?
I feel my own voice rising. ‘But . . . if I can make life easier for him . . . why wouldn’t I? Things I can handle, I handle. I don’t want to burden him. He has enough going on.’
‘Like what?’
‘There are things you don’t know,’ I say.
‘I mean, I’m sure there is—’
‘Please, you don’t know the complete story, Raghav,’ I grumble, and the words come out sharper than I intend them to be.
But it has the desired effect. He’s about to say something, maybe apologize, but the rain starts to pelt down faster.
‘Sure,’ he says finally, but the silence that follows is stiff.
Like neither of us fully agrees with the other, but we don’t want to fight any more. And I don’t want to tell Raghav the entire story. I don’t want to tell anyone. I used to, and it evokes pity and I don’t want to start my life with pity.
‘We should go,’ I mutter.
The walk back is quiet. The guard lets us in with a nod. Inside, people are sleeping on benches, using bags as pillows. Raghav sits on one end of a bench. I sit on the other.
We don’t speak.