PART 1 #6
I finally muster some control and turn away from her.
I walk away from her: from all the hurt and rage I brought upon myself by falling in love with her.
I hear her jog behind me. I want to stop her.
Ask her to go back to her life. A life I have made painstaking efforts to stay away from.
I don’t want to hear her, I don’t want to look at her, I don’t want to breathe in the same air as her.
I don’t want to let her pick at the scab left by the wound she caused.
‘Daksh?’
I don’t answer.
‘Daksh?’
My strides get longer, my jaw clenches, and I try to put as much distance between us as possible.
‘It’s not a race,’ she tells me.
That’s when I snap. Something breaks in me. I freeze, then as I turn, a roar bursts from deep within me, almost primal. ‘FUCK YOU!’
A satisfying relief runs through my body. Nice. I’m going to do it again.
‘FUCK YOU,’ I seethe again.
I regret not having done this earlier. I can see the point of revenge. The lure of giving into your intrusive thoughts.
‘YOU ARE THE WORST FUCKING GIRLFRIEND IN THE WORLD!’ I shout.
It’s like therapy. Watching her eyebrows curl into a frown comforts my heart. It reminds me of all the times she gave me excuses, explanations, and I tried to find some understanding in her eyes and found garbage.
‘GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY LIFE!’
She meets my eye. I try to find some version of regret in them. I find only coldness. Typical Aanchal.
‘Daksh, don’t leave,’ she mumbles.
My eyes turn into furious pools of wetness.
‘Aanchal, you can’t do this to me.’ I step closer to her. ‘I can’t waste one more fucking moment on you.’
She catches my gaze with an intensity that anchors me to the spot.
‘And yet here you are.’ Her voice is cold and calculative. Like she’s enjoying this exchange. As if she likes seeing me torn up, hurt.
My mind’s raging, pure lava. ‘I can’t believe you. And it’s fucking presumptuous of you to think I’m here for you. I’m here for Gaurav.’
‘And why are you still with Gaurav?’ she asks.
‘It’s my work. I would never abandon it.’
She stares into my eyes.
‘You know that’s a lie. Gaurav’s your tenuous link to me, Daksh. If you don’t work with him, our link will break,’ she says with a seductive note in her voice, something she has learnt over time to add to her arsenal to make people do what she wants them to.
Her audacity doesn’t surprise me any more.
‘It’s nothing more than work,’ I growl.
I have met a fair share of selfish people in the world, but she beats all of them by a mile and a half. I remind her that she and I are different. She would sacrifice anything to be successful.
‘You will never abandon your work. You will sacrifice whatever it takes for your work,’ I tell her.
Her lips turn into a smile. A fucking smile.
‘You say it like it’s an insult, Daksh. And yes, you’re right. I will never abandon it.’
‘Great then, fuck you, fuck your work, best of luck for your life.’ I flash her two middle fingers as if I’m a high-schooler and she’s my school crush. ‘Fuck you, Aanchal.’
‘HEY!’
A loud voice booms from the side. We both turn. I don’t see them at first with all the crowd that’s gathered around us to watch the drama. Three policemen are marching towards us, their hands on the holsters of their guns, their eyes stern.
Before I can react, they surround me and spout angrily, ‘You can’t do that in here, habibi!’ says a tall, bulky policeman as he grabs hold of my arm. ‘You can’t swear in public. You have to come with us.’
‘She deserves it,’ I hear myself mumble.
7.
Daksh Dey
Aanchal and I sit on opposite sides of a small glass table in a room in the hotel’s business centre.
I have the choicest of slurs sloshing about in my brain.
The uniformed police officers are telling me that swearing in public in the UAE is a jailable offence.
Unless of course, the hurt party grants pardon.
I want to tell the policemen that Aanchal is indeed deserving of all the expletives I can think of and she’s not the hurt party.
If they knew our story, they would agree with me as well.
They are men too. I stay quiet. My brush with UAE law has taught me that, king or pauper, the rules don’t bend.
Actually, they do bend. But only for the literal king of the UAE.
Aanchal asks the policemen to wait outside.
Reluctantly, with their hands on their guns, they move outside.
‘Just tell them I apologized and we can get out of each other’s way,’ I demand from Aanchal.
She looks at me unmoved. ‘I’m not going to lie,’ she answers with a straight face. ‘You need to apologize, Daksh. That’s the only way it ends. That’s what the law is.’
‘Don’t waste my time, Aanchal. I have had enough of these fucking games.’
‘Careful, you’re swearing again,’ she warns me.
I lean back into my chair.
She continues, ‘And your client is in Dubai. Where do you have to go that’s so important?’
‘You call your brother my client rather than Gaurav?’
She doesn’t react.
I continue, ‘It’s not syntax, it’s a window to your shitty soul. Everything is a transaction.’
For the first time, I see signs of anger on her face. I enjoy it. I commit it to memory for future pleasure.
‘And you’re the noblest boy in the world, Daksh Dey, aren’t you?’ she says, her voice now venom. ‘Step off your high horse and for once see things from other people’s perspective.’
People like her don’t change. Who does she think she is?
‘You still have pig-headed confidence that you were right,’ I try to rein in my fury.
She shrugs like she did no wrong.
‘Listen, Aanchal. We can trade insults all night long, but I don’t have the time and you have a wedding to attend.’
Leaning into her chair, she gives out a weary sigh.
‘Why can’t you see that I had to do what I had to do? Can you please see that for once?’
‘Aanchal, I don’t want to talk to you, see you, be around you. You’re a fucking stranger to me. I wish you always were a stranger.’
My heart races like a runaway train. The policeman outside probably sees the anger in my eyes. He steps closer to the glass.
‘Don’t say that,’ she says.
I know what I’m going to say is a lie but I want to hurt her, see her cry. The alternative to healing is, maybe, to hurt the other equally. When love leaves, what do you fill that hole with? What emotion is strong enough? Revenge.
‘I regret the moment I met you. I would do anything to forget you and everything about you. If I could, I would burn every reminder of your existence from my life.’
She stiffens. And with a casual dismissive flick of her wrist, she says, ‘Fine, then just go to jail. Then you will certainly remember me.’
‘What part of I hate everything about you don’t you get, Aanchal?’
‘The part where what happened wasn’t my fault.’
‘How can you be so fucking dense? You broke my heart . . .’
My voice cracks and trails. I can feel my heart pounding in my ears. I am choking on my own breath.
‘. . . you were all I wanted, Aanchal. Everything I needed in my life you just took away. You just fucking had to ruin everything, didn’t you?’
She exhales long and wearily. As if it’s me who ripped her soul apart and shattered her spirit.
‘It’s been three years, Daksh.’
‘And yet it feels like my wound is as fresh as yesterday,’ I grumble, teeth gritting, ‘rotting and eating everything inside of me. You left me a shell of who I was, Aanchal.’
‘It was just a month, Daksh,’ she insists, her voice now slowly rising.
I want to check out of this conversation as soon as possible.
She speaks again, ‘It was just a month! And how you’re feeling about it now is not my problem.’
I force back my sadness as I had promised myself I would if I saw her again.
‘Firstly, it was forty-three days. And if I could string together the fragments of happiness I felt in those forty-three days, they look like an eternity to me. So don’t tell me that our love was governed by fucking time.’
I have imagined this conversation numerous times over the last three years, tinkering with the little details, the timing of it, the venue, and the words I would use to tell her that I hated her.
I didn’t know until this moment that I wouldn’t stop loving her.
But this, what I feel right now, is not love.
How can love be this corrosive? This is what it feels like when your idea of love is shattered.
This is the absence of hope. This is what was once love.
The sight of her is still painful, like all beautiful things are.
‘We wanted different things,’ she says, bringing all the hurt back instantly.
I shake my head. We didn’t want different things. Her decision was based on what she wanted. There was no discussion, no chance of a compromise. She was a boulder rolling down a hill and she crushed me. I was supposed to just say yes, that’s it.
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Daksh,’ she says, her voice serious. ‘I had just broken up with Vicky. I was just coming out of a four-year-old relationship which was just . . . toxic. You can’t even imagine what I went through.’
‘With a guy you shouldn’t have been with in the first place,’ I argue, though it’s not much of an argument. She had gotten into that relationship when she was seventeen or so, so there was little chance that she had made the right decision.
‘I needed time,’ she insists. ‘I couldn’t get into something so quickly. Didn’t I have the right to freak out?’
I feel all my wounds slowly reopen.
‘And I clearly told you that I would be there every step of the way,’ I remind her. ‘Did I or did I not tell you? I begged and fell at your feet to give us a chance and you just . . . I had been in love with you for years . . .’