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 remindherthat her boyfriend was unemployed and lazy and lived off his parents’ money. That hedidn’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?’
