Walking towards the cycle shed, Rashi hadn’t the faintest idea about how to start the conversation. Rajat walked in just then, unlocking his cycle. Without saying a word, they pushed their cycles together in step, only this time on the same side of the road.
‘So . . .’ they both began together.
‘G-go ahead,’ Rashi stammered, blushing.
‘I heard you are moving to Pune,’ Rajat said, looking at her forehead.
‘Er, yeah. Dad got transferred. We are moving in a week,’ she replied.
‘Oh, okay,’ he said, uncharacteristically quiet.
‘Rajat?’ She looked at him. ‘Can you give me your phone number? I’ll call once I reach Pune.’ It was a rushed sentence.
He stopped in the middle of the road. She came to a halt beside him.
‘Give me your notebook,’ he said.
Rashi handed him her school diary and watched with quiet excitement as he scribbled his landline number on the last page. He handed it back to her and she carefully kept it back in her bag.
They reached the eventual fork in the road and stood there for a long time, smiling at each other. Rajat seemed to want to say something, but changed his mind, happy to just stand there and watch her walk away.
The next few weeks were a blur of moving vans and settling in an unfamiliar city. When they finally installed the telephone line, she ran to her room, tearing open the boxes that had her school things. She searched through two boxes full of her belongings but couldn’t find the diary.
‘Ma! Did you see my diary from the last school?’ she yelled out from her room.
‘It should be among your boxes. Look again,’ her mother yelled back.
Rashi turned her room upside down, searching every unopened or half-opened box. Her parents watched bemused as she dashed from one room to another, trying to find the elusive diary. She couldn’t find it even after several hours of intense destruction of her room. Dejected and tired, she plopped to the floor.
‘Ma, did you see it while unpacking? I had all my friends’ numbers in that diary,’ she asked weakly.
‘I’ll help you look for it,’ her mother said, gently stroking her hair.
Over the next few days, her mother helped her search every nook and cranny, but the diary never made an appearance. It seemed well and truly lost in the move.
Rashi felt a sharp pain of disappointment in her chest. She sat in her room, moodily looking at her newly wrapped notebooks, quiet tears trailing down her face.
Five years later . . .
Rashi was scrolling through her Orkut scraps, the concave monitor giving her a headache. In college, she was finally able to persuade her parents to buy her a computer for her room so she didn’t have to go to the cybercafé down the road every time she had an assignment due.
Just as she was about to call it a day, she noticed a notification indicating a new chat message. No sooner had she clicked on the message than her heart started hammering loudly in her chest at the familiar name and display photo.
‘Hello, Ms Talkative. This is Rajat Desai. The boy who wrote your name on the blackboard and got you into trouble all through ninth standard.’
‘Hi, Class Leader. Still taking rocks to college?’ she replied, fingers flying on the keyboard in her hurry to reply to him.
‘It has been a while! What college are you in?’ he enquired.
‘I’m in Fergusson, studying literature. What about you?’ she typed back.
‘I’m studying Mech at IIT Delhi.’ he responded.
‘Some things have remained consistent, I see,’ she typed back, smiling.
He was still adorably studious.
They chatted for a while, exchanging pleasantries about college majors and the simplicity of school life. They reminisced about their teachers and how much they missed homework compared to the atrocities of college assignments. Rashi relaxed in her chair. Conversation with him was surprisingly easy.
After a while, she looked at the time and groaned.
‘Okay, I have to log off now. My parents will blow a fuse if they see me on the computer for too long,’ she said, reluctant to log off but not wanting to give her parents an excuse to catch her late at night. She waited for him to wish her goodnight and log off. He was still typing.
A few moments later, the screen filled up with his words.
‘Why didn’t you call, Rashi? I waited for months for the phone to ring.’
Rashi took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
‘I wanted to, believe me. I lost the school diary that had everyone’s numbers in it. I turned the house upside down looking for it. I never found it.’
‘Oh, okay,’ he typed back.
‘I really wanted to, Rajat. Without any numbers or addresses handy, I couldn’t stay in touch with anyone. I was miserable that entire year,’ she replied, hesitant.
‘Yeah, I was bummed too.’
‘Why were you waiting for my call?’ she asked boldly.
It was ten minutes before he replied. She thought he had left the chat.
‘Will it be too awkward to tell you now that I had a huge crush on you in school? I don’t know if you knew, but I pushed my cycle in the opposite direction to my house every single day just so I could walk with you.’
Rashi stared at the message on the screen for a long time.
The screen flashed a new message.
‘Are you there?’
Her fingers shaking, she typed her reply and hit enter.
‘ . . . I had a crush on you too. I pushed the cycle so I could walk with you.’
She felt a familiar smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, a new feeling blooming in her chest that she couldn’t quite name.
20
Something in the Rain
Kaustubhi Singh
I wanted to wake up thinking, believing, that my life was finally on track. I wasn’t the last person wishing for this, but I wanted sanity—and I wanted closure.
I am twenty-five and was diagnosed with chronic alcoholism about three months ago—and it wasn’t a problem until my ex-fiancé’s wife reported me for threatening them. I hadn’t been clean for this long—fifty-five days in a row, with minimal withdrawal symptoms—but my anxiety was still pretty bad, so the rehab doctors decided to give me counselling, and I was in no position to deny. My withdrawal symptoms from alcohol weren’t as painful as the ones from heartbreak. They were more to deal with, and that is why I started drinking in the first place—to avoid the ache in my chest that felt like a rotting tooth.
I take a little walk in my cubicle for one last time because I’ll be given a clearance today. I sit on the brown wooden chair I used to kick when I was so miserable that the doctors had to tie my hands up. Alcohol was my escape. The idea of alcohol was not pleasure but an escape, because when that warm liquor burns your throat, it starts dissolving the hurt stuck down there and slowly numbs you so you don’t feel the hurt. Heartbreak isn’t beautiful; it isn’t some literature; it’s not listening to sad songs or something like that. It’s feeling okay for a minute and then starting to feel their ghost around you, their touch on your skin. You miss them, you miss them so much that you choke on your memories with them.
Dr Mayank Sharma, my shrink, almost my age, tells me that it will always hurt, and it will make one cry and scream till one’s nose is blocked and eyes puffy; that hurt is inevitable but it will hurt less, and I will see and understand why someone did what they did. And I think I understand. When I look back to the day Robbie left me for another woman, he said he had grown out of love and I stood there thinking: Where did I go wrong? But thinking about it now makes me realize I did everything to truly belong to Robbie. I changed myself for him, I changed my ways and choices for him when I should have let him love me for who I was, because that’s what love is, that’s what love is supposed to be—loving someone for who they are.