After All This Time (17 page)

Lavanya could not sleep that night. After the Salman Khan incident, her excitement had slowly faded away. The evening had turned into a very calm and lazy affair. Spending time with Shourya without having to talk, walking along the beach in silence had been wonderful—the only thought that scared her was the thought of him going away in a few days.

In that moment, she realized just how much she loved him. He was strong, caring and sensitive. Whenever he was around her, he automatically took care of her and watched her back. She felt safe with him. He was someone she could depend on, more than herself. Someone she had blind faith in. Someone who would never break her heart, the way she’d broken his so many years ago. But the fact was that whether he chose to take Deepti back or not, and whether she was in New Delhi or New York, he would be thousands of miles away, in California. Having him back, depending on him once again, had felt so good, and now it was almost at an end.

In her panic of losing him, she had tried to ask him about his plans, and had somehow ended up asking him to go back to Deepti. She wondered all night what that was about, and came to the conclusion that she was letting him go before he went away anyway. She did not know if Shourya would ever again feel what he had once felt for her. Even if by some miracle he did, she did not have a chance at a normal life and it wouldn’t be fair to him to involve him in her problems.

Lying in her bed, she contemplated going to his room and talking to him. They had taken up a suite with two bedrooms separated by a bathroom. For a minute, she even thought of telling him about her disease. That would probably make him stay, at least for a little while longer. He would pity her and give her a few more days of his company. She wasn’t going to deny she wanted that.

She padded to his room and pushed the door open, only to find him fast asleep on the bed. She walked in and sat next to him for some time. She could barely see him in the darkness, but enough to feel a sharp pain in her chest. How would she live without him, again? The first time had almost killed her; she was not sure she could survive being away from him again.

In that dark moment, she resolved to tell him about her medical condition. But once she did that, she could not tell him that she loved him, because that would put him in the impossible position of choosing between staying with a dying person or abandoning her.

Lavanya wanted to touch his face. She wasn’t sure if she would get a chance to do that ever again. But she stopped herself. She had come to realize that there were a lot of things in the world she could not have, and she had no choice but to make peace with that. She got up from the bed and walked away, without looking at him. The longer she stayed, the more hurt she would be. Back in her room, she sank down to the floor at the foot of the bed in a crumpled heap. She could feel herself breaking—her willpower to fight, her desire to live, her heart.

Lavanya heard a knock at her door. She slipped soundlessly from under the sheets and reached for a wet wipe to clean her face. She could not risk going to the bathroom they were sharing. After a night spent crying on the floor, she had barely slept for two hours before waking up again, preparing herself mentally to come clean to Shourya. Her face looked warped—eyes and lips swollen, dark shadows under her eyes—and she suspected her migraine was somehow visible too.

She was creeping back under the comforter when Shourya knocked a second time. She leaned back against the head rest and said, ‘Yes, come.’

‘Good morning!’ Shourya greeted cheerfully as he entered, a grin on his face. He was wearing a white T-shirt with UC Berkeley printed across the front in black, bold letters.

Lavanya had a sudden vision of him preparing a breakfast tray for her while she slept peacefully—in a parallel world where they were in love and she wasn’t sick. But he was not carrying breakfast with him that morning. The thought made her want to hide her face under the comforter and cry. ‘Morning,’ she said.

‘What’s with you?’ Shourya asked. She saw the expression on his face change from concern to alarm as he looked at her. ‘Are you okay?’

She had been foolish to think a face wipe was going to rid her of all signs of distress. This was Shourya. He could figure out she was sad from even the slightest downward curve of her lips. Lavanya was surprised that she had been able to keep something as enormous as this hidden from him in the first place. It had been easier when they hadn’t been sharing a hotel suite. Now she had nowhere to run.

Nor did she want to.

Shourya sat down on the bed, facing her. It took all of her willpower to stop herself from reaching out and touching his face.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

She could not say it. She could not say anything. She could not tear her gaze away from his.

‘Tell me. Lavanya, talk to me.’ His voice was gruff, and there was desperation in it.

They had something in common then. She felt the same sense of anxiety inside her too.

She sniffed. Her lower lip started to quiver.

Shourya held her by her shoulders, the same way he had that night in the parking lot. Lavanya broke eye contact. She could not bear to look at him, knowing he wouldn’t be a part of her life . . . She looked down at her lap, and lifted her hand to her throbbing temple.

Shourya pushed it away. He held her chin and tilted it upwards. ‘Speak.’

Lavanya saw him grind his jaw. She was confused; she didn’t know whether he was angry or annoyed or concerned. ‘I can’t . . .’ her eyes pleaded with his.

‘Yes, you can. Be honest with me for once! I know something is going on in that head of yours. What is it?’ he demanded, clearly angry with her, but she couldn’t fathom why.

She collected herself and began to speak. ‘Shourya, I cannot do this to you. You . . . you have a life, and you are going back to it in four days. I cannot expect you to disrupt your life for me. You have to leave . . . you have to go back to Deepti.’

‘You don’t get to decide that,’ he responded, pulling his hands away from her.

‘But you will. It is the decision that you will make.’

‘How do you know that? Just because
you
want me to go, you’re telling me to get back together with her. I never said that was what I wanted.’

‘But you love her. You told me you do.’

‘That was before.’

‘Before what?’

Shourya was not looking at her. This time Lavanya put her hand under his chin and turned his face towards her, the same way he had done to her many times.

‘Before what?’ she repeated.

‘Don’t make me say it, damn it! I tried to say it once and you asked me not to. Now I’m asking you not to force me to,’ Shourya huffed. He ran his fingers through his hair and looked up at the ceiling. His nostrils were flaring with every breath he took.

Lavanya could not look away from him; it was as if she had lost all control of herself. Her hand dropped from his chin when she realized what he had just said. Her heart stopped beating for a moment. And started beating again at twice the pace. ‘Shourya?’ she murmured.

‘If you can’t see it yourself, if you’re
that
blind, I don’t think my explaining it to you will do any good.’

Every moment Lavanya had spent with Shourya flashed in front of her eyes. From the time they first met, till the time he had come to the airport to see her off when she was leaving for Harvard. He was crying unabashedly. He had managed to get an airport pass for the night, so once Lavanya said her goodbyes to her parents, he came with her all the way to the departure gates. After they collected her boarding pass and checked in her luggage, they got a cup of instant noodles from one of the stalls and sat down in a relatively isolated corner. She refused to meet his eyes. Her own filled with tears over and over again, but she did not let a single drop flow out. She kept blinking to hold them back. He concentrated on the cup of noodles they were sharing and she did the same. They pretended to be okay, and they succeeded . . . just as long as they didn’t have to look at each other.

But then their time was up. Her flight was called to board. She looked down at her watch, and without a word to each other, they got up. That’s when she had seen Shourya’s eyes. They were red and haunted. His lips were tightly sealed into a thin sad line. Lavanya had never seen him that miserable before. He had always been the strong one. That was the moment she realized the extent of what she was doing to him. That was the first time she had wondered if she was making a huge mistake.

Shourya had been asking her not to go for months. She had begged and pleaded with him to stop saying that because her decision was final and as her friend, he should have been happy for her and supported her. And that’s what he had done, minus the few bouts of weakness when he would ask her if this was what she really wanted, if she had thought it through and if there was no other way. She had known he did not want her to go, but she had thought it was mostly because he was worried about her. But that night at the airport, when he pulled her into his arms and rested his head on hers, leaning on her as if unable to support his own weight, that was when she realized just how much she was hurting him. But it was too late. She could not imagine returning home, to her old life.

She had felt his body heave as he held her that night. Felt his heart race and his breath come in gasps. When she tried to pull out of his embrace, he did not let her. He had kept on holding her. She had seen him break, right in front of her, in her arms. When he finally let her go and she looked up at him, she could tell from his pained expression that he was trying very hard to keep it together. He looked like a little boy, the kid she had met in kindergarten. The kid she had known all her life.

She could not look at him after that. He had walked with her till the queue at immigration. They stood there like a pair of statues, unresponsive, looking straight ahead. But he held her hand. When she was called, she gave him a half hug, stole her hand out of his and walked forward without looking at him.

She had felt his presence, but she was not strong enough to turn back. After she was done at the immigration counter, she moved ahead, and kept walking until she was sure he would have lost track of her in the crowd. She knew he would not leave as long as he could see her, and she would not have been able to board her flight if he was still at the airport. She hid behind a wide pillar and searched for Shourya, and when she spotted him in the crowd, standing exactly where she had left him, she saw he was looking for her too. She fought the urge to run back to him and put him out of his misery. He had searched for her for five more minutes before his head drooped to his chest, before walking away.

Thinking about that night now, she could not hold back her tears any longer. The image of him walking away, as he had so many times before—but always returning the next day—tore at her heart. That time, she was going too far away, somewhere he would not be able to reach her whenever he wanted, or she needed. That was when she had realized that she had to break ties with him. Despite what Shourya seemed to believe, she had not planned on it all along.

When she had left then, she had thought that the pain they were feeling was only momentary, and they would be okay in a few weeks. She had realized how badly mistaken she was only when she got him back. And now she could not let him go again.

‘I love you too,’ she said, before she could stop herself.

Shourya’s head shot up, his eyes narrowed questioningly, as if searching for answers in hers.

‘Yes, I do. I love you. I have run away from it for too long, and there are so many reasons we cannot be together, but I am tired now. I am so tired of running from you. I love you. I always have . . . I just didn’t know.’

Shourya could not believe what he was hearing. Lavanya loved him. She loved him. After all this time. No matter how many times he repeated it in his head, he could not make sense of what was happening.

They had met by chance, on trips to their hometown that coincided, otherwise would they even have got in touch again? He doubted it. But ever since she had come back into his life, everything had changed. She had changed it. She had changed
him
.