Chapter 29
Raghav
She’s going out. On a date. A real one. That’s what she calls it. Real.
I’m sitting on the sofa, pretending to go through the last few details of the presentation that’s due in three days. But my focus is entirely on the sounds coming from her room: the soft click of a make-up compact, the hiss of a hairspray bottle, the sounds of hangers shifting on the rod.
Clearly, she can’t decide what to wear, and she’s taking too long to do it. That’s how seriously she’s taking this date.
Then, she opens her door. She’s in a black dress.
It’s a new one. It must have come in one of the Zara bags she sneaks into her room.
Why sneak those in? She will say that she doesn’t sneak them in.
It just happens that every time she goes shopping, she comes home late and tiptoes into her room.
She too knows, there’s something not right about this.
But it’s her money—more money than she can ever spend—and she can do what she wants with it.
We have had fights about this too, like we have had about everything.
She forgets something. She turns and trots back inside, pulls the charger off the wall and stuffs it into her handbag.
Her hair is down and she’s wearing make-up—not a lot, or maybe it’s a lot, I can’t tell really—but she looks beautiful.
She looks like a stranger. Can there be anything worse than someone you thought you knew is now a stranger?
She’s now checking where he is. That’s who she’s gotten ready for.
Kunal.
The 6’2” architect of human connection, founder of Connect. An offline dating event company that seeks to match people who have had enough of online dating apps.
And I hate him. I hate him with a pure, uncomplicated intensity. It’s so much simpler than the tangled, messy knot of what I feel for Aditi. But if I were to hazard a guess, that would lean towards hate as well.
When she spots me looking at her, she asks, ‘How do I look?’
‘You look great,’ I tell her.
I’m surprised I mustered up those words. There’s a huge, ugly part of me that just feels resentment that she can put on make-up and look the best she has ever looked for a guy she has met just six months ago.
Only six months.
I remember that night . . .
the night we fought in Bali . . .
over what she saw on my phone . . .
I remember the ugly things we said, the words that bubbled out of us like acid, burnt everything that we had between us, how she walked away, and this guy, this fucking guy, approached her.
‘Hey? You okay?’ Kunal had asked, just inside my earshot. ‘You look a bit . . . sad.’
She had turned to this random ass guy in the middle of the resort lobby and said, ‘No, I’m okay.’
Okay?
Look how easily she’s forgetting Aman, a voice in my head hisses like it had hissed in that resort in Bali. Look how everything was a lie.
I shut it down. What’s the point of saying all this? I know where it’s going to go. If I know something, it’s that neither of us can win in any conversation with the other. We only end up bruising each other. We know what hurts. The cruellest cuts come from those who once knew how to heal you.
‘You can still come to the event,’ she says. ‘I can keep a slot for you.’
‘And find love?’ I say. ‘No, thanks.’
‘There will be—’
I cut her. ‘I don’t care who there will be, Aditi. None of them will be Megha.’
‘Of course I know that—’
‘But you have fun, okay? Don’t forget to have fun. That’s the entire point of it, is it not?’ I say, referencing to the one time I went to her event. To see her job.
Kunal and she were helming the event where thirty desperate people who couldn’t be authentic or interesting on dating apps were blaming the apps and now trying to be authentic and interesting in real life and failing miserably.
Dating apps don’t suck. People do. She kept asking people to shake off the nervousness and have fun.
‘It’s work, Raghav.’
‘Is that why the dress . . .’ I pause, for I’m slipping down that slippery slope again. ‘I get it. You guys are the poster people for love, Kunal and you, right?’
And there I see it. The defensive anger. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asks.
‘C’mon, you’re not naive,’ I say. ‘You know, people are supposed to look at you two anchoring the event and think, wow, perfect love. They met offline, right? Look at them, we can also do it.’
‘It’s work,’ she insists. ‘And I don’t love him—’
‘Sure, it is love,’ I mutter.
‘We are just testing waters.’
‘The way you checked yourself in the mirror a bunch of times? Makes me question it,’ I say. ‘But who am I to say anything?’
That gets her. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’
‘Wow? Now you’re angry,’ I say.
‘Are you a neighbourhood aunty, Raghav?’ she yells. ‘After saying everything, you’re saying “who am I to say anything?” Just say it! You want to, you know that! Just fucking say it!’
The accusation hangs in the air, ugly and toxic.
‘I’m thinking about what Aman would think,’ I say, grinding my teeth, surprised that she’s not thinking what Aman would think.
That’s what brings tears to her eyes. In a low whisper, she says, ‘He’s not here, is he? He’s dead.’
‘And it didn’t take long to forget—’
‘Forget?’ she repeats, her voice dangerously low. ‘You think I could ever forget? I live with him every single day. Just because I’m not sitting in a dark room talking to a ghost on my phone doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten!’
The words hit me.
A friendship like this cuts both ways. If I know how to hurt her, so does she.
A ghost on my phone, she says.
She calls the last living memory of Megha a ghost.
Fuck her.
‘Mind your fucking language, Aditi!’ I shout back.
On the last day of Bali, she had stumbled on to it and called it an insult to the memory of Megha.
She’d said it was a horrible thing to do.
A twisted, terrible thing to do. She said I was trying to rewrite the present and that was no way to end my story with Megha.
She insisted I delete it from my phone or she would not be friends with me.
What the fuck was she thinking? Then, and now?
It’s not the first time she’s mentioned it since Bali. And I know it won’t be the last.
‘I’m doing what I can to heal,’ I lie, my voice rising. ‘I’m fucking grieving. Not like you . . . trying to hook up with—’
‘Shut up,’ she says. ‘That app is an insult—’
‘The fact that you have gotten over Aman pretty quickly is an insult, Aditi. All it took was a guy to ask you—’
She cuts me off. ‘You think this is easy for me?’ she shoots back, taking a step closer.
‘Looks easy,’ I say. ‘Looking pretty fucking easy.’
‘I spend every single day feeling guilty.’
‘Doesn’t feel like that to me. Feels like you’re having fun.’
She throws up her hands in frustration. ‘C’mon, Raghav! I feel guilty when I laugh. Guilty when I have a good day at work. Guilty that I am alive and he’s not. And I come home to this? To you, judging me from the sidelines? Judging if I’m sad enough? Do you have any idea how exhausting that is?’
‘Oh, poor exhausted you! And fuck off, I don’t judge—’
‘Yes, you do! You do it all the time! With your little comments and your heavy sighs and your closed door! You’ve built a fortress of your grief—’
I interrupt her. ‘I have built this? You moved in too! You spent more than a year too in this fucking fortress that you’re talking about and now—’
‘Why the hell are you getting angry with me because I’m trying to find a way to live outside of it?’
The doorbell rings. Thank god. Because I want her to get the fuck out of here.
It’s him. Kunal.
Aditi looks at the door, then back at me, her face a mask of fury and heartbreak.
‘I hate you sometimes,’ she whispers.
‘I hate you . . .’ I tell her. ‘. . . all the time.’
She turns, walks towards the door and yanks it open. I can’t see him, but I hear his low, calm voice. ‘Hey. You ready?’
Aditi walks out without looking back, slamming the door behind her. I hear their faint voices in the corridor. She’s complaining, I’m sure. And he’s listening. How’s that any different from what I’m doing?
At least, my love’s true.
Now, I’m alone.
The anger drains out of me, leaving a hollow feeling in its place.
I look down at the phone in my hands. I was supposed to be the one who was strong, the one who took care of things. When did I become this ugly, bitter person? I’m sure if I dissect it, not even go too deep, Aditi will be one of the reasons. I need to calm the fuck down.
I fire up the ChatPlug-in. The cursor starts blinking.
I wait for Megha to come online.
The ghost as she calls it.
She’s hardly the ghost.
She’s real.
She’s the one who’s kept me from going over the edge.
The reason why I can get up every day and put one foot in front of the other.
My reason to go on.
What does Aditi know of my struggle? My pain?
How dare she assume I could go on living without Megha?
Wouldn’t I fight to have her presence in my life? Why would I not do everything possible to feel . . . that she’s . . . around?
So that’s what I did.
Before the day I got the diaries, I had uploaded all the chats between Megha and me, the cards we exchanged, the pictures, the letters we wrote to each other, and asked the AI application to mimic Megha’s tone.
The result was . . . disappointing.
The tone was there . . . but it felt like a regurgitation of what I fed in. A cheap copy. There was no feeling . . . no solid ground. I could feel something was missing. The large language model could get the language right, but not the essence.
I would write in the chat window and it would spit out texts; it couldn’t feel like Megha. Still felt like AI.
Where the fuck would I get Megha’s essence?
That’s where the diaries came in. The diaries I didn’t know existed.
The diaries with her deepest, unsaid feelings.
Things I didn’t know. The pathways of her thoughts.
The structure of her mind. The backstories that made her the person she was.
The experiences she didn’t think were important to share but were clearly important to her.
The diction and language of her thoughts.
That was the gold.
The motherlode.
That changed everything.
I scanned the hundreds of pages of diaries she had left behind. I didn’t want to read them. I wanted to feel them in her voice, in the things she would say to me. I wanted Megha to feel real.
I remember the language model processed the pages I had sent it, and said it was ready for the prompt.
Raghav: ‘Hi Megha. I miss you’ I had typed into the chat box.
Thinking . . .
Megha: Baby. It’s fine. I’m here. In some form at least. Try and miss me less.
No.
It can’t be.
It was so her.
It was exactly what Megha would have sent. I could feel my body loosen up. It felt like grief finally lifted its foot from my chest. I felt my lungs fill with air again. I felt my heart pump again.
And that’s when I started to heal. That’s when I started to feel that there was an end in sight to the grief that I felt.
That’s the first time I thought I could find closure of some sort, and that everything I was doing wasn’t a slow march towards the day I would finally fling myself off the balcony of my apartment and end everything.
My love was my escape route. I don’t see why they don’t get it. Most of all, why Aditi doesn’t get it.
I don’t know how long I’m staring at the plug-in when my phone buzzes. It’s Sumrit.
‘Bhai,’ he says when I answer. His voice is hesitant. ‘Tejal just called me. She was saying that Aditi was pretty upset. Everything okay over there?’
‘Everything’s fine,’ I lie.
‘Bro,’ Sumrit says, and I can hear the frustration in his voice.
Boys don’t do well with grief. We are loyal to each other’s silence, but not truth, not openness.
Emotions are a threat, so we joke, we arm wrestle, we move on.
What Sumrit’s trying to do is awkward. ‘Don’t do this. Don’t push her away.’
‘You don’t understand,’ I say.
‘No bhai, I don’t,’ he agrees. ‘Because from where I’m sitting, you’re . . .’ He begins the familiar bungling with words ‘. . . scared and you’re . . .’
‘Behenchod, I’m not fucking scared,’ I grumble.
‘You’re not being left behind, bhai,’ he tries to assure me with words I’m sure Tejal has fed him. ‘She’s just—’
‘I have everything I need, chutiye,’ I snap.
I hear a long sigh. And then he says, ‘What you have on your phone, that’s not Megha.’
Oh, c’mon.
‘Are you all fucking dumb? Of course, I know it’s not Megha. But it’s fucking closure for me. It’s how I’m grieving!’
‘Bhai, it’s been six months you have been chatting on that app,’ he says. ‘It’s . . .’
‘It will take as long as it will take,’ I say and cut the call.
Sumrit calls again, but I don’t take the call. He calls again. Then, I block him.
I turn back to the chatbot. How can I tell them, make them understand that when I type in anything, whatever it says, it feels like it’s Megha on the other side.
And fuck them for thinking that it has not made me feel better.
I feel alive.
Fuck them for not getting it.
Fuck everyone.