I stop the motorcycle at the side of the road. She clambers off, her footing unsteady. There’s dust and asbestos hanging in the air from the under-construction buildings around us. We are both slurring our words.
‘I have started to look for people to marry,’ she says in a flat tone. The words are jagged enough to shred my heart. ‘... because I want kids.’
‘You hate kids.’
She chuckles sadly. ‘Desperate times, desperate measures. It will be an entirely selfish operation. I will have kids because I want to feel purpose. How messed up is that?’
‘Right up your alley.’
‘Sometimes I imagine these fictional kids growing, being twenty, thirty, forty, and still asking me for pocket money because... why not? Why should they work and pay for a life that they didn’t ask for?’
‘Don’t have a kid,’ I advise her while envy pricks my heart.
After all these years, she decides to create a mini version of herself but without me. Fucking bullshit.
‘Embrace the boredom, like I have. It’s going to come, sooner or later. That’s what my podcast listeners tell me. Old and boring. So just be that.’
‘We are driving around drunk, and you’re saying we are boring?’
‘That’s just us being stupid and dealing with our loss in unhealthy ways.’
‘The loss of my brother.’
‘The loss of my mother.’
‘The loss of our love.’
‘The loss of our future.’
She looks at me from head to toe, as if appraising me in a store, and then shakes her head. ‘You know, even if I could be with you, which I won’t... Maa would never live with it.’
‘You found me on a dating app. Why are you under the impression that I want to be with you?’
It’s a lie so blatant that I can barely force the words out of my mouth. The anger in my lie is obvious. I avert my gaze from her, trying to hide the undeniable fact that I’m still pathetically and passionately in love with her. I feel steadier now, though I know I’m being delusional. The alcohol is obscuring my judgement. The lights of Delhi shimmer in the distance as the naked truth rears its head again.
I need her.
I get back on the motorcycle. She climbs on without question. The motorcycle roars to life.
‘Because that’s who you are, Daksh,’ she tells me. ‘You’re born to love me.’ She grips me tightly and rests her head on my back. ‘You’re in love with me, Daksh, you always have been.’
‘That’s presumptuous.’
‘Where are we driving to?’
‘. . . someplace not boring.’
I can feel her breath in my ears.
‘You remember that time we stayed up all night, talking and laughing on that rooftop?’
‘That cliché date of ours?’ she says.
‘It felt like we had all the time in the world.’
‘A few floors above from where my brother hung himself.’ This time, her barb is less pointed. She adds after a pause, ‘I should stop doing that. Stop bringing it up.’
‘You and me both.’
