Can Love Happen Twice? (18 page)

With every reason I gave Simar, I was sure that I meant whatever I said. But for some reason she wasn’t convinced. Her sixth sense was biased towards her own viewpoint, primarily because that is what she wanted and she valued her intuition more than my reasonable logic. The more reasonable I tried to be, the more unreasonable her questions became:

‘What if I will be asked to cook for everyone?’

And to this, I answered, ‘Simar, if both of us will be working, then both of us will be tired by the end of the day; and if being a guy I don’t have the strength to work in the kitchen, how would I expect the same from a girl?’

‘But you do cook, Ravin. You were cooking for yourself after work in Belgium.’

‘Yes, because that was the need of the moment. I was all alone. Here in India we can afford maids to do the household chores. Why are you bothered that much?’

The more I was trying to finalize our marriage, the more I was discovering layers of Simar’s latent expectations and fears. I felt as if a lot between us was changing. The days of our romance and laughter appeared to be very far back in the past. Our love story had entered a new phase of expectations, demands and debates.

‘No! Never! Don’t even of think of me leaving my parents.’

‘It’s not that I want you to leave your parents. I simply want an arrangement where the two of us live together and we visit them at regular intervals.’

She made no sense. I started getting furious over all her nonsense.

‘And look at you, Simar! You wanted me to come and live with your family. How sick is that? You wanted me to join your dad in his business.’

‘That’s because you and I will have a great life. We will have our own business; we can live in a big house. Think of the luxury of life and the ease.’

‘What has happened to you, Simar? When I was in Belgium did you even bother about the small rented apartment I used to be in? Did you even care for a big house, a big car and a big lifestyle then?’

‘Ravz, I love you. But I also want to live a good life and have a grand lifestyle. And if both of us can get that, what’s the harm in it?’

I paused for a while. I thought about what had happened so far and what was happening right at that moment. Since when did everything start changing, I wondered. Since the time I left Belgium and Simar had to live alone, I thought to myself. Maybe because that was the first time Simar was far away from me and this distance was making her reassess her priorities and think about what she actually wanted in life. Or maybe she started feeling differently once she was back in India when she had talked to her parents about all this or maybe when she visited my place.

Something in me choked. Whatever we talked about was very unpleasant for me to hear, more so because it was Simar at the other end of the conversation. I was clueless. It was hard to believe if she was the same Simar whom I loved and cared for. She had changed.

I was clear about what all she said and what all she didn’t say. For everything that was happening I finally had started answering my own questions.

Simar came from a wealthy family. For a while she happened to fall in love with a guy who wasn’t as wealthy as her family was but was doing reasonably well in his life. Not that she wanted to live without me, but she wanted to be with me as well as cherish all her dreams. She had always visualized a great life with all sorts of luxuries. She didn’t want to compromise on that. Back in Gurgaon her family was well known and her parents had a great social network with politicians and businessmen. On the contrary, my parents hardly had any such reputation. If asked something in English, my parents most probably wouldn’t even understand the question, forget about being able to answer it fluently. That, surely, was in huge contrast to her family’s status and lifestyle. How then could Simar adjust with my family? My dad didn’t wear a tuxedo. He’d always worn a humble kurta–pyjama all his life. My family had a simple lifestyle, not that any of us had any issues with the modern Westernized lifestyle. While in our family my mom would cook, in Simar’s family they had the maids to cook and do all the work. Things were certainly different. But not so different that they would become a bottleneck, given the fact that I had always been clear with Simar about my life and my expectations. In spite of subtle differences nothing was going to prohibit Simar from living a life that she used to live so far. I lived in the same family and I had enjoyed all the freedom I wanted. And belonging to the same family I had imbibed the values and upbringing that made Simar fall in love with me. How could the same lifestyle go against her?

Things kept deteriorating between us. I didn’t know where I was wrong and where Simar was right. But I still knew that we needed to work it all out. Simar’s exams were round the corner and hence we called a ceasefire on this subject. We took a break, so that she could concentrate on her studies and rethink everything once she was free.

The only ray of hope had been when she spoke those final words: ‘Ravz, give me some time. Let me complete my exams, and with you I want to work on my fears and insecurities.’

Uncertainties hovered over our fate. Time and again Simar mentioned that she knew I was right and that she would try her best to accept things, but reality was different from promises made in the throes of love. I knew things were going the other way and they were going fast. And I wanted to stop this change. I planned to take a break from my work and go to Belgium as soon as her exams finished. Simar still had a consulting project to work on after her final exams because of which she wouldn’t be able to immediately travel back to India after her final exams. I wanted to discuss things face-to-face with Simar and therefore I considered this a much-needed trip.

But when things are against you, no matter what you do, they are actually against you. For some reason—call it Murphy’s law, I guess!—I got to know that Simar’s consulting project demanded her to visit Canada.

‘Believe me, Ravin, I had no idea that they will ask me to travel all the way to Canada. At the last moment the client changed their outsourcing plan.’

It was a test of my patience. For various reasons it was no longer feasible to be together and discuss things face-to-face. I found that I started focusing less on my work and more on how to bridge the growing gap in our relationship while Simar was far more focused on her career than on working out our problems. I was still okay with that. I didn’t want her to play with her career.

From her final exams that wait had now stretched to the end of her consulting project.

‘Two more months, Ravz!’ she had told me.

But our emotions didn’t wait for that long a time. We ran through a spate of terrible moments. The vacuum I felt within was enormous. We fought and we missed each other, we cried and we held each other responsible. It was an undefined state we were in. At times we made wild love over the phone. When there is a vacuum, it feels as though a wild gush of wind—brutal and cold—runs in to fill up the space. But in the end we found ourselves at the same hurdle. We both were on the opposite side of a wide gap.

Love, like life, is so insecure. It moves in our lives and occupies its sweet space in our hearts so easily. But it never guarantees that it will stay there forever. Probably that’s why it is so precious.

The consulting project unfortunately stretched on for an additional three months, making it a total of five months. That was a long time. In our case, long enough to bring our relationship to the verge of falling apart. That’s the brutal truth.

It was difficult for me to wait for her. It was difficult for me to forget her. I think the most difficult thing was to decide whether to wait for her or to forget her.

But the unexpected was no more unexpected. It was all clear.

My wait to finalize the marriage turned infinite. The prime reason behind this was that Simar’s list of concerns had turned infinite. The more I had stretched myself the more I was further expected to stretch. Unable to accept my wish of wanting to live with my family, and thus finding it difficult to marry me, Simar gave birth to newer issues. Some were stupid enough.

‘How do I live with a non-vegetarian? You are an atheist whereas I wanted my life partner to believe in God. Also I need more time as I am thinking of doing my PhD now.’

I was an atheist and I was a non-vegetarian when she was first attracted towards me. Overnight these attributes had started bothering her. I well remembered one of her last calls. She didn’t even think twice before saying that one of her concerns was that she would be known as the second girl in my life, when the rest of the world knew about Khushi and me.

‘On various social networking websites every fan of yours talks and will continue to talk about Khushi and you for ages.’

She wanted me to make her feel comfortable about all that. In a way she meant that my same book—which she had once loved and which had made her fall for me—was now bothering her, because it had my memories of my dead girlfriend.

I didn’t say anything. My silence spoke a thousand words. She didn’t hear any of them.

I hung up the call. There was no need to explain anything. She had pierced my heart with whatever she had said.

One can go miles to get the love of his life and then sacrifice a great deal to keep that love alive. And I too had done that when I was ready to settle down abroad, when I promised Simar her entire independence, when I said that: ‘For you I can even turn vegetarian and you are so precious for me, that I will push myself to regain my faith in God only if you are there with me.’

When you are in love, you tend to think from the heart. That’s what I kept doing for most of the time. The sad part was that it was just me who kept doing that. But a relationship only works when both the people are willing to make sacrifices. I wanted to be her better half and not her slave. Unlike her, I didn’t have a long list of clauses which she had to fulfil before she could marry me. I simply wished for the obvious to happen and for her to accept my family. But that one wish was unacceptable to her, and became a bottleneck in our relationship. It turned everything between us sour.

Someone said it right: change is the only constant. With time, things change, seasons change and, amidst a list of change-prone entities, we surely read that people change too.

By the time Simar actually came back to India after her consulting assignment, things had boiled down to a yes or no decision. It was paradoxical how we ended up having nothing left to say to each other when, some time back, we couldn’t stop ourselves from talking to each other. The present condition threw a lot of questions on the truth of the love we were in. Was it all real?

The problem with being in love is that you find it difficult to survive without the other person. No matter how many times you decide not to succumb to it, you eventually land up trying one more time. Things would have been simpler for humans if we were born with only a brain. The addition of heart has brought in all the complexities in my case.

I kept my fingers crossed and I kept them crossed for long.

It is night. From behind the wheel, I keep looking at the date on the dashboard of my car. I am shocked to look at it and realize how cursed it is for me. I am not able to move my eyes away from it. I rest there in my car for a long time. I am feeling suffocated and breathing heavy. I have rolled down the windowpanes. I feel as if something sharp has just been stabbed in my chest. And I am hanging in that tense but short period between being hit and feeling the terrible ache that follows. I know it is going to hurt in a very short while. As if some kind of poison is going to run in my veins and paralyse me. I am split seconds away from that terrible pain. Probably that’s why I am scared to look anywhere else and, instead, am left staring at that date. A lump of saliva in the back of my mouth gets stuck in my throat. I can’t swallow. I want to run away to some place—I don’t know where.

A part of me still wants to believe that all that had happened was just a nightmare and that it will soon be over the moment I wake up. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sleeping. It was all real.