5.
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 thehurtparty. 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 holsters, they move outside.
‘Just tell them I apologized and we can get out of each other’s way,’ I demand 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.’
It’s mind-boggling how big a piece of shit she is. ‘Don’t waste my time, Aanchal. I have had enough of these fucking games.’
‘Careful, you’re swearing again,’ she warns me. ‘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? 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.
‘And you’re the noblest boy in the world, Daksh Dey, aren’t you? 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’re right!’ I try to rein in my fury. ‘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 deeply. ‘Why can’t you see that I had to do what I had to do? Can you please see that for once?’
My heart races like a runaway train. The policeman outside sees the anger in my eyes and steps closer to the glass.
‘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.’
‘Don’t say that.’
I know what I’m going to say is a lie but I want to hurt her, see her cry.
‘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. She says with a shrug, ‘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 trails. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. I was choking on my own breath. ‘You were all I wanted. 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, rotting and eating everything about me. You left me a shell of who I was, Aanchal.’
‘It was just a month, Daksh,’ she insists, her voice now slowly rising. ‘It was just a month! How are you feeling my problem!’
I force back my sadness as I promised myself I would if I’d see her any day. ‘First, it was forty-three days. And if I can 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 multiple times over the last three years. I didn’t know until this moment that I wouldn’t stop loving her. The sight of her is still painful, like all beautiful things are.
‘We wanted different things,’ she says, bringing all the hurt back instantly.
