Love Lasts Forever

Love lasts forever

Vikrant
Khanna

A sailor by profession and a writer by passion, Vikrant has penned two novels before this. He lives in Delhi with his family. You can get in touch with him at vikrantkhanna.com

Sri
s
hti Publi
s
her
s
& Di
s
tributor
s

N-16, C. R. Park

New Delhi 110 019

[email protected]

First published by

Srishti Publishers & Distributors in 2014

Copyright © Vikrant
Khanna, 2014

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publishers.

Typeset by
Eshu Graphic

Dedicated to my wife.
Thank you for letting me write a book on this topic.

Acknowledgements

Thank you friends and family for your love and support.

Wify for patiently listening to the story and letting me write it.

Purnima
and Samreen for you feedback.

Wasim
for the wonderful cover.

Team Srishti

Swati and Rakesh of Brannia for the branding of my book.

And lastly, thank you readers for picking up this book. I sincerely hope you enjoy the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

PART - 1

1. TODAY, 25
th
June 2011

Transiting Indian Ocean

‘And then what happened?’ I have never been so intrigued with someone else’s story. And that too, a love story of a fifty year old man.

I glance at our Captain. Tears well up in his eyes and he finds it difficult to speak. He doesn’t reply and there is a morose look on his face. I notice a gentle quiver in his stance, and I understand. He hasn’t completed his story and tells me that the worse is still to come.
What can be worse?
I wonder. I mean getting a divorce from your childhood sweetheart just few months after marriage is tragic enough.

Captain Shekhar is tall and sturdy built, but it is those broody eyes that demand all the attention. Until today I hadn’t known his plaintive love story and loss were shielded by them. For the last f
ew days that I’ve known him his they were masked behind that dimpled smile which barely deserted his face.

He looks fit for his age and is mostly bald with some hair left over the sides and back of his head. With his personality I can be sure he’d have been handsome in his youth.

Pensively he looks ahead from our steaming ship
Adriatic Wave
toward a sight that is quintessential of a beautiful evening. The moon is full and over a million stars gleam from above us, shining and lending their luminosity to the late evening sky which is predominantly clear. The dark grey water below bathes in the ivory hue of the moon. There is a light breeze which adds to the serenity of the Indian Ocean.

‘Ronit, do you see something ahead on the horizon, perhaps fine on the starboard bow,’ Captain asks me, wiping his moist eyes, ‘a boat maybe?’ A stark hollowness has understandably crept in his voice.

I pick up the binoculars and adjust my vision through them. Frankly I am so much caught up in his story that I am hardly interested.

‘No, sir,’ I reply nonchalantly, ‘probably a low altitude star.’ I was hardly looking.

I want to know more, dwell deeper into his heart. I want to know why even after the divorce with his wife some three decades ago, he is still madly in love with her?

I presume he is crazy, like all other ship Captains are, particularly at the age of fifty. After spending more than half of their life at sea, all these guys are left with is poignant thoughts. I mean how else can one love
someone forever?

And he hasn’t even seen her in the past thirty years.

I am this ship’s first officer or chief mate as the Europeans like to call me, the first in command to my Captain. We are loaded with almost fifty thousand tons of crude oil loaded from ‘Reliance Jamnagar Marine Terminal’ located in the Gulf of Kutch in Sikka port in Gujarat. Our discharge port is Immingham in the United Kingdom – a two weeks voyage. But that never worries us; it is the transit through the ‘Gulf of Aden’ – a piracy infested area near Somalia - that scares the living daylights out of all seafarers.

Now most of you would have just read about these stories in newspapers or probably watched them on TV, a reporter regurgitating the
breaking news
with the slightest of emotions about Indian seafarers being held captive by the pirates. But if you were here, with us on this ship, you would have started feeling the tremors right at the onset of the voyage.

Here on the bridge – the place from where a ship is navigated – the atmosphere is pretty tense. I mean who would want to be under the captivity of these inhumane people for months or even years. Although personally, I don’t think I’ll mind too much. At least that would ensure I won’t see my wife Aisha for that long.

Getting married was the worst decision of my life; to her, worse than worst. We were in love for seven years before making that horrible decision and since then our love has been nose diving in an abyss. And now I hate that bitch. Barely a month into our marriage and I could sense her true colours. It now seems to me that she only married me for my money. I have decided to divorce her after I complete my tour of three months here.

With a shake of my head, I try concentrating on the job at hand
, and ensure absolutely no suspicious boat hovers around our ship or approaches us. That could be
them
. I look at my Captain; he doesn’t look interested in talking anymore and is staring at the radar screen – to get an early warning of any approaching boat.

‘Do you see that Ronit,’ Captain says, pointing toward a white light which is barely visible over the horizon. ‘That is the same light I showed you some time back. It has come close to us now and I sense something fishy. That ship or whatever it is has been changing its speed frequently. I wonder what it is up to.’

Yeah whatever!

I am least interested really. It has been just a couple of weeks since I joined this ship and I can still not get over my wife’s taunts.
Where did all the love disappear?
Perhaps my school friend Joe was right by dissuading me not to get married. ‘Men and women are not meant to co-exist,’ he’d reiterate. I always thought that was a quote from some Hollywood flick, but never figured out which one. Now only after our marriage have I found sense in that line.

I
see Captain panicking a bit as he wobbles about his toes, pacing up and down the bridge. I look ahead. There are two lights on either side of the ship – port and starboard in marine terminology. Both the lights are bright now as opposed to the faint aspect a while earlier. And they are close to us, pretty close. Baffled, I look at my Captain who himself appears vexed. I can bet he has the same question in his head as I have, ‘From where the hell did this second boat appear?’ There is something terribly fishy happening now. I shun away the thoughts of Aisha.

‘H
ey Ronit! This boat on our left!’ Captain says, pointing toward it in an uncharacteristic shriek. ‘It has just lit their light. It was dark all this while. What are these people up to?’

He scampers outside to the bridge wings to get a better picture.

I am up on my feet now. Both the boats are just about two nautical miles from us. Captain comes running inside shouting
Emergency
and raises the alarm. He orders
hard-a-starboard
to turn the ship to the extreme right, away from the boats. But as soon as he says that, we watch in horror as both the boats ahead suddenly come close to us, and the next moment are alongside. The pirates employed their age old technique of boarding ships.
Two boats are tied with thick hawsers or rope that is underwater so the navigating officer on the ship has absolutely no clue about their collusion, and when the ship touches the hawser, automatically with the ship’s momentum, the hawser is pushed ahead and the two boats come alongside.

It is game over for us now. It’s a macabre sight to see the pirates launching hooks and rope ladders up our ships’ railings and in minutes there are more than a dozen of them onboard.

Two minutes later, three armed pirates enter the bridge and place a gun on Captain’s forehead.

‘Your ship is hijacked Captain,’ the taller of the three pirates sneers.

2.  GRADUATION DAY

February 2004, Mumbai

It was a splendid morning in Mumbai – clear blue skies, crisp sunshine
, and a gentle breeze. The day felt even better as after almost a year of rigorous training our batch was finally passing out. The crazy schedule - getting up at four every morning, doing PT exercise in those embarrassing white shorts that flexed our scrotum, and then working and studying till eleven every night - was finally getting over. We were thrilled to say the least.                      

T.S. Rahaman, our pre-sea training institute, is located at the head of the navigational channel of Mumbai Harbour, on the mainland of Nhava. It boasts of a twenty- two acre lush green and beautiful campus with a sea front on the north west of Nhava. Every day in the past one year, we had regretted our decision of joining merchant navy. The proverbial ‘Life at sea is tough’ had made sense to us now.

As we woke up in the morning in our measly room, both of us – Joe and I – had a wide smile on our face, actually, Joe Singh and I.

I’d always found it very outlandish for a Sikh to be named Joe. Despite that, right since our school days, I’d been referring him as Joe Singh. I always thought it was more fun that way.

Joe Singh is sturdy built, dark, and I always thought being a surd, he is sort of handsome. From the early days that I’d known him, he’d always been easy going and carried himself with aplomb. Friends for more than a decade, we’d first met in a school in Delhi. Joe Singh’s uncle was a Captain, earned loads of money, travelled the world, and bought properties in Mumbai every year. It was pretty much then both of us had made an irrevocable decision of joining navy.