When Only Love Remains

  Durjoy Datta

  When Only Love Remains

  Contents

  Also by Durjoy Datta

  About the Author

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Read Mord

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  Also by Durjoy Datta

  Hold My Hand

  *

  Someone Like You

  (With Nikita Singh)

  *

  Till the Last Breath . . .

  *

  If It’s Not Forever

  It’s Not Love

  (With Nikita Singh)

  *

  You Were My Crush

  Till You Said You Love Me!

  (With Orvana Ghai)

  *

  Oh Yes, I’m Single!

  And So Is My Girlfriend!

  (With Neeti Rustagi)

  *

  She Broke Up, I Didn’t!

  I Just Kissed Someone Else!

  *

  Now That You’re Rich

  (With Maanvi Ahuja)

  *

  Of Course I Love You

  Till I Find Someone Better

  (With Maanvi Ahuja)

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  WHEN ONLY LOVE REMAINS

  Durjoy Datta was born in New Delhi, India, and completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book—Of Course I Love You!—was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Now That You’re Rich!; She Broke Up, I Didn’t!; Oh Yes, I Am Single!; If It’s Not Forever; Till the Last Breath; Someone Like You; Hold My Hand—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India.

  Durjoy also has to his credit two television shows, Sadda Haq (Channel V) and Veera (Star Plus), both of which have done exceedingly well on Indian television.

  Durjoy lives in New Delhi, loves dogs and is an active Crossfitter. For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1) or Twitter (@durjoydatta).

  To the month of February 2014; to new beginnings; and to my nephew, Reyhan

  One

  avanti

  She measures each step, small and deliberate, and looks at her watch hoping time would stretch out indefinitely, locking her in the moment. Delhi University buses, the U-Specials as they are called, screech to a halt at the bus stops nearby and kids pour out, chattering, shouting, complaining and cursing. Music and strained guitar riffs blare from her pink Skullcandy earphones and yet she can’t concentrate on Devrat’s painful, screeching voice. She makes a mental note to get those noise cancellation earphones at half-price from an online retailer. But they don’t come in fluorescent pink or orange. Then she thinks that maybe it’s not the earphones, and attributes the sound to the decrepit studio in Kolkata in which Devrat must have recorded his music.

  ‘The Endless Road’.

  It’s her favourite Devrat song and she listens to it on a loop every few days, staring in the distance while she does so, imagining herself to be playing a complex, interesting woman in a movie. She often scribbles down the lyrics on the margins of the books and notebooks she uses, but the words seem empty without Devrat’s broken voice and his imperfect guitar riffs. Devrat never does covers of songs sung by others; all his songs are fresh compositions and most of them are recorded on cell phones. He has been uploading his videos for the last five years.

  She reaches the gates of her college to collect the receipt of her admission in a correspondence course. It’s her third day in Delhi and she already doesn’t like it. Going back home to a reserved, stammering, absent-minded father isn’t really her idea of fun.

  Avanti can’t wait for her job to start at Indiago Airlines as a flight attendant. Attending college, taking down notes, running after college professors and getting notes photocopied was never her calling. She was too pretty to score well and be confined to a cubicle.

  There was a time she wanted to go to Xavier’s in Mumbai or Symbiosis in Pune. Back in Dehradun, where she grew up with her grandmother, she had heard great things about both the institutes. She wanted to be the one who zips around in a little pink scooter with her face wrapped like a terrorist or take an auto at three in the morning without the fear of getting raped. Being in Delhi and staying with her father was the last thing she ever wanted to do. But her grandmother forced her to shift out of her house in Dehradun where she had lived for the last twelve years, to move in with her father.

  ‘He needs you,’ she had insisted and she can seldom turn her grandmother down. Avanti hadn’t seen her father in a decade. She had grown up with her grandmother in Dehradun after her mother died in an accident when she was really young.

  She spots a few guys looking in her direction and she shrugs it off. She turns up the volume on her iPod and Devrat’s voice blares into her ears. Devrat, the reclusive young singer, has always been Avanti’s saviour, right from the first song he uploaded.

  Avanti had a troubled childhood. She was only three when her mother passed away, and all of five years when she was put into a girl’s boarding school, a place her unsuspecting grandmother thought would be safe for her. Little did her grandmother know what would happen. The first few months were the worst. Little and lonely Avanti would be woken up by Warden Aunty and taken to the back alley of the library, every night for weeks at an end. She would be stripped and touched all over, and she would cry, she would wail, and the warden would ask her to stay shut or she would be caned the next day. Avanti, scared and crying, would bear everything.

  And then after a few months it suddenly stopped. The warden preyed on someone else. For years, she stayed shut. The few girls she talked to about it would brush it away. The warden eventually left the school and disappeared. It’s said that her deeds had come out in the open and she was thrown out, but there was no case against her because the school wanted to uphold its image as a safe, friendly school.

  ‘Big deal! It happened three years back, naa? Forget it now. Move on,’ her best friends would tell her.

  But it was hard for Avanti. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. She tried the hardest she could. She was still the most talkative, ebullient kid in school who participated in everything, but when alone, she used to be a scared little girl fighting with those images of being naked with the warden, her rough fingers on her body, her voice telling her to shut up, telling her that what was being done to her was nothing unusual, and every new kid goes through the same. The more she talked, the less she was reminded of those long, torturous nights. So Avanti hasn’t stopped talking since then . . .

  There were years when she wouldn’t sleep
in the night with the lights off. And if any roommate would switch them off, she would curl up in the corner of the room, and cry herself to sleep, scared. She had even tried to cut herself a few times over the years. She doesn’t do that anymore, but the scars remain.

  It took eight years for her to sleep without fear. It wasn’t until the time she was thirteen that she got a grip on the situation. It wasn’t therapy or her grandmother’s love, who knew nothing about what had happened, that gave her a fresh lease of life. It was the songs of a fifteen-year-old boy, Devrat, singing in his modest house in Kolkata that gave her the strength. She had stumbled on those songs on a networking site and had downloaded them on her iPod. The boy had floppy hair, puppy-like eyes and a strange voice. And since that day, it was as if this boy was singing to her. And since that day, whenever Avanti is down and out, scared, or crying, she just listens to his songs and suddenly, everything is better. It was Devrat’s songs that drew Avanti out of her fears and gave her another chance at life.

  The boys are still looking at her. Avanti has been through the entire lifecycle of being the cute, chubby toddler to the adorable adolescent to now—a very attractive young girl. She’s wearing a T-shirt three sizes too big, her shorts barely visible from under the T-shirt. A school bag hangs loosely across her shoulder and her thick curly hair is a careful mess that took two hours, a curler, hairspray and unwavering patience.

  ‘You’re a dream,’ a boy in the fifth standard had said and she remembers it like yesterday.

  She used to look at television actresses and wonder if she were better-looking than them, and she still does. She has a face fit for television but acting never held any charm for her. ‘It must be exhausting to be someone else,’ she thinks.

  She was smart enough to know that she wasn’t going to win the Nobel Prize for physics or find a cure for AIDS, and so when she heard that Indiago was looking for flight attendants, she took the bait. It was either that or staying with Dad and doing college full-time, neither of which were acceptable.

  As soon as she passed her twelfth boards, she took the interview for the airlines and sailed through it. The interviewer had asked her why she wanted to be a flight attendant and she had smiled—it had always worked—and told the interviewer that she had always wanted to travel, ever since she was a little girl. I just want to run.

  ‘Why are you doing this? I was sending you to Delhi to spend a little more time with your father, not this!’ her grandmother had said angrily.

  ‘Nani, I really want to do this. And my base is still Delhi, and I will still live with him,’ she had answered.

  ‘But you will fly most of the time! When will you get the time to spend with him? He’s your father, Avanti,’ Nani had protested.

  ‘I will also see him.’

  ‘Avanti, your father needs you now. He’s getting old.’

  ‘So are you! And if he needed me, he could have come and told me that,’ she had snapped angrily.

  ‘You can’t be angry at him. I told you how he is.’

  ‘Nani, you know that I really don’t mind him. I’m not really angry at him; I never was. I just don’t know who he is. He’s a stranger to me, Nani. And moreover, I just don’t want to study. I want to work and I know I will love this.’ Avanti draws her breath and calms down before she continues, ‘And I will be staying with him as much as I can and I will take care of him, I promise!’ That had been the end of the discussion.

  She’s at the counter to collect the receipt of her admission into the correspondence course when her phone rings. It’s her grandmother.

  ‘Hi, Nani!’ she greets her.

  ‘Beta? Reached college? You ate something before you left? What will you do for lunch? When will you go home? Give me a call when you reach home, okay?’ Her grandmother pauses for breath to throw more questions at her.

  ‘I am okay, Nani. Don’t worry about me,’ she says and hopes it will be an umbrella answer to all her questions. She loves her grandmother to bits and beyond, but no one likes too many questions. It was cute at times, but right now . . .

  ‘How’s Rajiv? He is taking care of you, right?’ she asks and coughs. Her grandmother has been on the verge of death for over a decade, legs dangling precariously over her grave—but she hangs on stubbornly, for now. There is no other way that Avanti remembers her grandmother other than being old and sick, coughing and wheezing but still convincing everyone that she has another thousand years to live.

  ‘Yes, Nani, he is,’ she lies. ‘I will call you when I get back home. I love you. Bye!’

  She disconnects the call and imagines her distraught, sick Nani on the other side of the phone. She must be looking at her cell phone wistfully, wondering how Avanti was just a child a heartbeat ago. Avanti misses her grandmother’s wrinkled fingers on her face, her repetitive questions, and her undeniably fattening food. She hates the thought that she would be gone in a few years, but she tries not to think about it. She’s standing in the long line to collect the receipts for admissions when a voice from behind says, ‘You’re from Dehradun?’ It’s a boy. He’s drooling and he’s not even trying to hide that he’s hitting on her.

  ‘I live in Delhi with my father. My mother died when I was three. And I have cut my hands a few times because I was raped when I was five. Also I have a boyfriend,’ says Avanti, coldly, and shows the boy the little scars on her hands. These tricks are really old, but they never fail to work. Conversation dries up. The death of a sibling, of a mother, rape, failed suicide attempts, a terminal disease etc. are certified conversation killers. It’s assumed that anyone who has gone through any of these must be under continual and unending trauma. The boy says nothing, a little confused whether Avanti is joking, and even if she isn’t, he doesn’t want to take the chance.

  Avanti misses Dehradun. She misses the idyllic surroundings, the blue Vikrams, autorickshaw-like vehicles, she never boarded, the handful of quaint cafés, the drive to Mussoorie and Landsdowne, the house parties of her friends, the quietude of the little town, and the raging gossip circles—where even the men were as interested as the women.

  Just as she is about the leave, her phone rings and it’s Shekhar Malhotra, the most handsome and unnaturally ripped off boys in Dehradun. A walking piece of muscle and a perpetual protein shake guzzler. She’d started dating him when she was fifteen, and he was eighteen, a college boy. It all started when one day he forcefully made her drink at a small party. He kissed her that day, and she, drunk, had regretfully kissed him back. The news spread like wildfire in her school and his college and since Avanti didn’t want to be called a slut, she started dating him. She dated him for two long, torturous years before they broke up last year.

  For those two years, Avanti was nothing more than a piece of furniture to him, something that he owned and could be territorial about. Now that Avanti thinks of her relationship with Shekhar she can’t find a single reason why she was with him. Yes, he was the quintessential possessive boyfriend. He never allowed anyone near Avanti, which at times was comforting. He was also very connected (his father was an IAS officer or something), so when Avanti had told him about the warden and her molestation, he and his friends in the police had hunted the woman down and she was beaten in Avanti’s presence. Ever since Shekhar had done that for her, she was indebted to him somehow, and she didn’t know how to pay back that debt. So she stayed with him and put up with Shekhar’s abusive behaviour, his anger problem and his highly chauvinistic attitude.

  Most often he would get angry whenever Avanti refused to get intimate with him. In the two years that they were together, Avanti hadn’t kissed him more than twice and she got slapped quite a few times for her resistance. But she just couldn’t free herself of him.

  ‘Everyone’s doing it, why can’t you fucking do it as well?’ he used to shout. Avanti used to break down into tears and tell him that she wasn’t comfortable doing it. ‘Oh c’mon! Just because y
ou were molested when you were five, you can’t continue being depressed and never do anything! SHE WAS A WOMAN AND SHE FORCED YOU! I’M NOT RAPING YOU!’ And then he would grab her by her arm and shake her. And strangely, his touch reminded her of the warden’s.

  ‘TELL ME!’ he used to shout.

  Avanti used to cry and beg him to leave her and he would. She never gave into Shekhar and eventually they broke up. Shekhar has had a few flings since then. But till date, Shekhar acts like he owns Avanti, and though Avanti is an extrovert, a happy girl, she still gets scared and apprehensive and guarded whenever Shekhar calls. She’s not sure if he’s any less scary than the warden who had molested her.

  ‘Hi Shekhar,’ she says.

  ‘Where are you? I called you yesterday and you didn’t answer. You were in college, right?’ he asks in a tone that only steady boyfriends and parents can use.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was just that Dad was around,’ she answers.

  ‘You could have called back.’

  Avanti can already sense his anger on the phone so she apologizes again. ‘Let me send you a phone from here so that I can call you on that number. You can use it just to reach me. How about that? Can we do that? The new iPhone just came out. It’s awesome and it’s only for seventy thousand.’

  ‘I don’t need a phone, Shekhar. My phone works just fine. I would have called you. You just got to be a little patient with me. It’s just that Dad and the college formalities and . . .’ she pleads, her voice imitating a small puppy’s. There’s nothing to sort out between her and her father; it’s a dead relationship, but she’s hoping Shekhar will withdraw.

  ‘Okay, okay! Fine. Next time, pick up my call on time,’ he grumbles. ‘If you need anything, a friend of mine studies in the same college. I will ask him to keep an eye out for you. He is connected. And next time I call, pick it up at once.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She wants to shout and ask him to fuck off, but somehow her voice fails.