Our Impossible Love Read online

  DURJOY DATTA

  OUR IMPOSSIBLE LOVE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1 Aisha Paul

  2 Danish Roy

  3 Aisha Paul

  4 Danish Roy

  5 Aisha Paul

  6 Danish Roy

  7 Aisha Paul

  8 Danish Roy

  9 Aisha Paul

  10 Danish Roy

  11 Aisha Paul

  12 Danish Roy

  13 Aisha Paul

  14 Danish Roy

  15 Aisha Paul

  16 Danish Roy

  17 Aisha Paul

  18 Danish Roy

  19 Sarthak Paul

  20 Aisha Paul

  21 Danish Roy

  22 Aisha Paul

  23 Danish Roy

  24 Aisha Paul

  25 Sarthak Paul

  26 Danish Roy

  27 Aisha Paul

  28 Danish Roy

  29 Aisha Paul

  30 Danish Roy

  31 Aisha Paul

  32 Danish Roy

  33 Aisha Paul

  34 Danish Roy

  35 Aisha Paul

  36 Danish Roy

  37 Aisha Paul

  38 Danish Roy

  39 Sarthak Paul

  40 Aisha Paul

  41 Danish Roy

  42 Aisha Paul

  43 Danish Roy

  44 Aisha Paul

  45 Danish Roy

  46 Aisha Paul

  47 Danish Roy

  48 Aisha Paul

  49 Danish Roy

  50 Aisha Paul

  51 Danish Roy

  52 Aisha Paul

  53 Danish Roy

  54 Aisha Paul

  55 Danish Roy

  56 Aisha Paul

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN METRO READS

  OUR IMPOSSIBLE LOVE

  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!; Ohh Yes, I Am Single!; You Were My Crush; If It’s Not Forever; Till the Last Breath; Someone Like You; Hold My Hand; When Only Love Remains; World’s Best Boyfriend—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India.

  Durjoy also has to his credit six television shows and has written over a thousand episodes for television.

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

  1

  Aisha Paul

  For an average adolescent, I was five years late in getting my period.

  And when I finally got it, I created a scene from a slaughterhouse in the bathroom.

  ‘Maa!’ I howled. I knew my mother would miss her dying daughter’s yelps in the blare from the shrilly mothers-in-law in her favourite soap, Kaahani Kis Kis Ki, now into its eleventh year.

  ‘Maa! Switch off the TV! I’m dying!’

  Blood was trickling down my thighs. The pain felt as if I had given birth to a sixteen-wheel trailer. I pulled out the last tissue from the box and dabbed the blood off my thighs and the toilet seat. The bathroom still looked like a slaughterhouse. I felt every bit like an injured Rambo cauterizing his wounds, except I was mewing and not grunting.

  ‘Maa! Your daughter is dying. Like right now!’

  Finally, I heard the title track play out. My mother was a complete sucker for the show. But thankfully, she’d heard me and came running to the bathroom.

  ‘Were you calling me?’ she asked sweetly; I could imagine her pressing her ear to the bathroom door. God. Yes. She’s a sweet woman, like Mother Teresa Home Version 2.0 and I love her more than life itself. I used to wish her illnesses on me—and then mine on my brother—and I still do sometimes, but I know better. It doesn’t work like that. God doesn’t cut deals with seventeen-year-olds. He’s too busy engineering genocides in his name.

  ‘I’m dead, Maa.’

  She knocked on the door. Perfect. I had locked it from inside. I scampered to the door on tiptoes, like Bambi, around the little pools of my blood as if they were toxic waste. I opened the door.

  ‘What . . .’ Words ran dry, my mother looked around the bathroom like the air had been kicked out of her. But then she smiled. ‘Aisha! Amar bachha!’ she shouted and she pulled me close and hugged me, enveloping me in her arms, blood and all, and cried in joy. ‘I knew Dr Roy’s medicines will work. Ami jaantam.’ She was crying now, kissing me all over my face, even as I doubled up in pain in her arms. I imagine this is what it would have been like when I was born—bloody, disgusting, painful, and joyous. That is if I’m not adopted like my brother once claimed I was.

  ‘Are you in pain?’ she asked.

  Duh.

  ‘Okay, Aisha. Nothing to be scared of.’ She made me sit on the toilet seat, and cleaned me without once scrunching up her nose. In fact, she smiled throughout it all, while I was like, ‘Can’t I just die instead?’ Once done, she gave me a medicine for the pain.

  She taught me, like how she had taught me many other things before, to use a sanitary pad not knowing that I had practised wearing one quite a few times. In fact, I had once worn it to school for an entire week in the hope of invoking the God of Period.

  ‘You’re a woman now,’ said my mother, looking at my reflection in the mirror, peering in to see if anything had changed in me since a few minutes back and made me more woman-like. Quite ironical because puberty was still coming at me from all corners of the ring, hitting me with whiteheads, acne and weight gain in the strangest of places.

  And then she started to cry, and I cried with her. Our tear glands are hardwired. She cries. I cry.

  It was a big day for her, and I thought it would be a big day for me as well. After all I had been waiting for this day since I was twelve—the first of my friends, Megha, got her period then and for the next few months, till someone else got it, she was supposedly superior and more grown up than her prepubescent friends. But, now that I finally got my period, I didn’t feel much different. If I were to say this to the fourteen-year-old Aisha, who was obsessed about getting her period and spent over five thousand hours reading about PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), whose variant I suffered from, she would have smacked my face.

  How can spilt blood make me a woman?

  Outside, my mother was crying into the phone to Dad while lighting incense sticks and murmuring little prayers from time to time. Over the past five years, the problem of my delayed period had been troubling them emotionally and financially. At last count, I had visited twelve specialists, some of whom charged a limb for advising us to wait patiently. A few had prescribed medicines which were rather discomforting but I did everything without so much as a word of complaint even though I saw through their deception. My parents were stressed out and I could not add to their anxiety by being a rebel.

  Later that night, we went out to celebrate my becoming a woman. My dad couldn’t join us because, like always, he was in a city different from where his family was. He worked in a nationalized bank and took every transfer that came his way, sometimes for a raise as low as Rs 200 a day. That seemingly measly extra four thousand two hundred a month went a long way to provide relief to our extenuating circumstances. My dad’s sacrifice game on a scale of 0 to 10 was Jesus. I loved him, though not as much as I loved Mom because she was a goddamn fairy. But I loved him enough and we loved each other in the way fathers and daughters love each other—a little on the shy side. I never jumped up and
sat on his lap like I did with Mom or hugged him when trying to sleep. Nor would he kiss me all over. But he would forgo food for a month if it meant a new uniform for me or my brother.

  Sarthak and I were both scholarship students, and we skimped on lunches, wore worn-out clothes, but there was never too much to go around. Four more years, we used to tell ourselves every time we killed a desire. ‘I will buy you everything!’ I used to tell my mother. ‘Buy everything you need first,’ my mom would answer, a little guilty at how much her medical bills cost the family.

  So, the celebration.

  The restaurant was clearly beyond our means but thank God it was a buffet and we had with us a human vacuum cleaner of food—my eighteen-year-old brother, Sarthak. He’s only a year older and really, really quiet. He went to a boarding school once. I think that did it—made him serious and broody and ripped. Initially, we would also move with each of Dad’s transfers, which made both my brother and me lose a couple of school years, which in turn made us the oldest in our classes. So Sarthak, eighteen, was literally the oldest guy in our school.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to me while loading his plate with portions rivalling a UN food aid package to Kenya.

  ‘What?’ I feigned innocence because that’s what we do as siblings. Discussions around period, lingerie and masturbation, or any sexual reference for that matter, was out of bounds.

  ‘And congratulations,’ he said.

  Why was he talking to me? Of all the times, he found today to be a supportive big brother!

  ‘If you need anything, let me know,’ he said.

  Stop talking to me. I nodded and walked as far away from him as possible.

  It had taken me three months to teach my mother how to use Skype and she had used this recent knowhow to surprise me—Dad was on the table as well, watching us eat. I think he was crying. I didn’t look at him because I would have cried too. We cry a lot as a family, my brother excluded, who just stares into his books and reads.

  And so we celebrated.

  Because now I was like all the other girls and I could have kids when I grew older. All this when I had just about started to like being different—the girl with a faulty uterus suffering from something as unpronounceable as primary amenorrhoea.

  But now, I was just another girl.

  My mother hugged me to sleep that night and kissed me more times on my back than any of my future lovers would ever kiss me.

  I’m sure I smiled in my dreams.

  2

  Danish Roy

  They keep telling you, you’re unique, you’re different, you have a calling, a talent, a miracle inside of you. I had bought into this theory for a really long time. But no more. I was ordinary and there was no point waiting for that hidden genius in me to bubble to the surface. I would not discover my yet unexplored talent for painting, or interpreting ancient languages, or being a horse whisperer, or interpreting foreign policy at thirty.

  And I think I would have been okay with it, or at least as okay as everyone else is with their ordinariness, had it not been for my overachieving little brother, my parents’ favourite, who was wrecking corporate hierarchies like he was born to do so. Only last year, he got into the top 30 under 30 (at 21) in Forbes magazine for being a start-up prodigy. Fresh out of IIT Delhi, his crazy idea of sending high packets of data over Bluetooth in a matter of seconds sent potential investors in a tizzy. He was always in a tie-suit now, carrying leather folders and taking late night flights to meetings where capital flow, structural accounting and other terrifying things are discussed.

  I’m two years older than him and I hadn’t even won a spoon race in my life.

  Quite understandably, I was a bit of an embarrassment to my parents—my father was a high-ranking official in the education ministry, and my mother, a tenured physics lecturer at Delhi University. It’s not that they didn’t love me, of course they did, but it was only because I was their son and they were programmed to love me more than themselves. But yeah, they loved Ankit more, and I didn’t blame them.

  Even I loved him more.

  I was still struggling to complete my graduation in psychology (a subject my parents had chosen for me) from a college no one knew about, including the government, I presume. I was twenty-three and I had never been employed, a situation that didn’t look like would change in the near future. It was more likely I would flunk my final exams too. Flunking exams by ridiculous margins was my superpower!

  I was the most self-aware dumb person I had ever met.

  Throw me a Suduko and you could study human behaviour in hostage situations. Medieval torture had nothing on me but keep a mathematics exam paper in front of me and I would start shitting bricks.

  Today I was in bed, faking an illness, because my father had invited all his colleagues for an informal dinner where he would talk endlessly about my brother’s million-dollar seed funding, shove in their faces little cut-outs of my brother’s articles, while my mother would half-heartedly ask him to stop. We had been an upper-middle-class family, living in a duplex, with two cars, an AC and a television in every room, but there we were, talking in millions with dollar signs at the end of it. It wasn’t hard cash but it still was money!

  I had no business in such get-togethers where parents update each other about their sons’ and daughters’ acquired trophies, college admissions, jobs and citizenships, in the US. No, thank you. I was not jealous of them or my brother. I was merely embarrassed. Okay, maybe it was more than mere embarrassment; I could do without feeling suicidal about my failures.

  ‘But do I need to stay in the house?’ I asked my mother who looked beautiful in her green saree and the jewellery she had made my father get from the bank’s locker.

  ‘Yes, you do. They will think we are hiding you.’

  ‘Why would they think that?’

  The stupidity of the question immediately hit me. Obviously, I needed to be hidden, like an old mentally unstable uncle who roams around naked, slapping his head. ‘Can I at least pretend that I’m sick and not come out?’

  ‘You can,’ said my mother after a pause. ‘But you have to greet everyone as they arrive. After that you can go to your room. Touch everyone’s feet, okay?’

  I nodded and walked back to my room on the second floor, where Ankit and I lived in adjacent rooms, curled up inside my blanket and practised the sick routine I had perfected over the years of usage against unit tests, PTA meetings, annual functions etc. I was just getting into the groove when the covers were pulled off me.

  ‘Bhai. Get up. It’s time. Everyone must be coming,’ said my brother, looking quite dapper in a crumpled cotton jacket and jeans. His hair was slick and wet like a gangster’s, his face smooth as a baby’s bottom and his eyes were twinkling. He was the better-looking brother—the one with the high metabolism, finer hair, and even straighter posture. The gene pool had been quite partial. Maybe I came from a contaminated test tube.

  ‘I’m sick,’ I groaned.

  A look of pure horror came over his face and he rushed to touch my face. ‘You seem okay? Have you told Maa? You want a Flexon?’

  I should have hated him but I loved him, quite a lot, that beautiful, overachieving brat of a younger sibling whose brotherly love for me was sickening and claustrophobic. ‘I had asked you to get the AC shifted to the other corner.’

  ‘I’m not sick, Ankit,’ I said. ‘I just don’t want to go outside and socialize.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t have pestered you but the Khannas’ daughters are joining their parents. You might want to meet them.’ He thrust the cell phone in my face and started to flick through their pictures. I was tempted but not enough to walk into the minefield of questions, humiliation, sideways glances and smirks.

  ‘Today is your day, Ankit,’ I said.

  ‘I want you as my wingman. I like the younger one a lot and without you, how am I going to separate the two? Please?’ He made that face. Fucking prick.

  ‘Fine, I will be the untalented, boring bro
ther and take the ugly sister away. Years of practice,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not that bad, brother,’ he said, shook my hand and left the room.

  ‘Of course I am.’

  3

  Aisha Paul

  So now I was like everyone else. I missed my pre-period self. These past few years had always been about me not getting my period.

  Who am I if not the girl who’s waiting to get her period and finally be a woman?

  The last time I felt this uneasiness in my chest was when I was in the seventh standard and someone remarked at my boobs, or rather about the lack of them. Was I my boobs? I had asked myself then.

  But God! The year before my breasts sprouted was torture!

  ‘Have they come yet?’ asked the boys in class one day, then giggled and scampered away like little mice. And believe you me, following that day I had slept clutching my chest every night, hoping they would sprout the next morning. As if being left out in the period-race wasn’t enough, my chest was in no mood to comply with my prayers.

  ‘I will take good care of them! Even small, perky boobs will do,’ I used to say.

  This was also the time I discovered masturbation, the pastime of the gods. Touching myself, thinking of a naked Michael Douglas, was fun, tingly, and sent me to sleep quicker. I never shared about this secret pleasure-giving pastime with my friends, not even with Megha, whose boobs had come at the same time as her period, because I thought it was dirty.

  But my relationship with my fingers didn’t last long.

  I started getting acne and I thought it was just punishment for having touched myself. My face was suddenly a battleground of red hills and craters. I rallied with my entire arsenal of toothpastes, creams, face washes and Dettol but the acnes emerged victorious.

  And I still didn’t have boobs.

  In the eighth standard, slowly and thankfully, my chest started to grow and quite soon I needed a bra the size of two salad bowls. The boys shut up. Now they would keep staring at my tremendous chest, which was a victory of sorts in the beginning. I would strut about proudly, the buttons of my shirt tested for strain.