The Promise (10 page)

'Now, your turn-tell me about yourself,' Shambhavi asked. 'And not the stuff that is already on Google, because I know all of that already'

'You Googled me?'

'Yep. Didn't you Google me back? You would not have found much, but still. People do that nowadays, to find other people on social networks and places like that,' she explained. She looked surprised at the fact that he did not already know about all that she said.

'No, I did not search you on Google,' he replied.

'Never mind. I told you about me anyway. So tell me-all good hidden things about you. Something that no one else knows.'

'I do not know how to do this. I am just a regular person. There is nothing extraordinary about me, nothing to tell.'

'Oh, don't kid me. There is nothing regular about you, okay? When I first met you, I thought you had a red room of pain hidden somewhere,' Shambhavi said and winked at Arjun. The humour was lost on him. He stared at her with a blank expression.

'What?' he asked.

'Arey, like Christian Grey, from the Fifty Shades trilogy!' When the look on his face still did not change, she explained,'He was into BDSM, and had a room for that. I compared you to him because you have kind of a dark air around you, too, like there is something you are hiding, under that gorgeous exterior of yours.'

'There's something dark about me?' Arjun asked, as the food was served.

'I used to feel so, but I don't know. You seem okay from up close.'

They started eating and for the next few minutes, there was silence at the table except for the rhythmic clinking of cutlery. From the look on her face, she was satisfied with the food, and so was he.

'I'm sorry. It must be such a turn off to see a girl hogging down food like this, but my lunch was overdue, and I had not had breakfast this morning,' she explained him between bites.

'I do not mind. In fact-it's quite the opposite. Watching you eat is better than seeing you play around with food on your plate and eventually wasting it.'

'Why would I do that?'

'I don't know. Girls do that. They order things and do not eat. Ultimately, the hotel throws it away,' Arjun said.

'Not all girls are constantly dieting, you know?' Shambhavi said and turned her attention back to her food.

'Point taken.'

'We need to come here again. Now that I have tasted this, I cannot live without it for long,' she said, pointing to the chocolate tart they had ordered for dessert. 'Oh, I have an idea. Let's go out tomorrow night? I know the perfect placethey have the best Chinese food in the city. You'll love it. My treat.'

And that is how she asked herself out on a second date, as Arjun sat there, partly shocked, partly oddly excited.

It was 1 am and sleep was nowhere in sight. He reprimanded himself for getting weak and letting her get under his skin. He should never have asked her out for lunch. She'd thought it was a date, and they had another date set for the next night. As he lay in his bed that night, he still did not know how it had happened. How could he let it happen?

He had been trying to hold back and not get close to her. That was what was best for both of them, but he failed. He let her believe that they were dating, and she was bound to get hopeful about their future together. That is how the female brain functions. The female brain also senses wealth and can do anything to have it. That is how it is with women. What's in a man's pocket is more important to them than love.

He considered the chance of Shambhavi being different, but he could not take the risk. Money was too important to her. And he had too much of it in his bank accounts.

He knew that he needed to end it. He could not give her false hopes; that would not be fair to her. But he also knew that if he pulled back once again, he might lose her forever. She would not stand by him and wait for him to come around forever. She was attracted to him because of the mystery around him. Sooner or later, the charm would be lost and she would no longer feel the magic she seemed to feel between them.

Or maybe she was in it for his wealth, in which case, the charm would never fade. Not until the money did, anyway.

He hated himself for thinking like that about Shambhavi. But the lessons life had taught him had made him cynical. He could not just accept things without thinking about them first and finding flaws in them. Some things were too perfect to be true.

He tried and failed to sleep that night. Finally, a few hours of result-less efforts later, he got out of bed and made his way to the kitchen. He put on some coffee to brew in the coffeemaker and sat at the kitchen table, waiting. Once it was done, he filled a mugful of the hot liquid and took it with him to his bedroom.

He turned on the television. After surfing for a while, he found that a rerun of some crime show was on. He stared at the TV screen to ward off uninvited thoughts. When the show was over, he flipped through the channels again but failed to find anything remotely interesting. He wished he had someone he could call, if only to be able to fight the fierce feeling of loneliness. But he had no one. He had cut all ties with human beings a long time ago. His life was his work. The person closest to him was probably his assistant, and he could hardly call Faisal to have a chat at 5 am, without coming across as a madcap.

And then, his thoughts came back to her. Shambhavi. Ever since he had first met her, the direction of his life seemed to have changed. That scared him to a large extent-to think that a girl could have so much power over him, in so little a time span. And he tried with all his might, but was unable to block her out. Her sweet face and huge smile broke through all the defences he had built up.

He thought long and hard about it, and decided that she needed to be put down. He would have to cancel his next date with her and let her know that whatever they were to have from then onwards needed to be strictly professional. That was how it was going to be.

With the decision finally made, his restlessness was put to a state of comparative ease. He fell into a dreamless, uncomfortable sleep.

All it takes is one turn of events, to change lives forever. Some consequences remain irreversible for a lifetime.

rjun was seventeen, living on the outskirts of Indore, in a place called Dewas, when his parents decided to take him to the city so that he could get proper higher education. He had just taken his XII Boards and harboured dreams of becoming an architect. His father owned a furniture store, which brought in decent amount of income home. His mother used to teach in a government school, and did her part in providing for the family. He also had a sister, ten years younger to him.

Even though they never had a shortage of money, they never had an excess of it either. They had been happy. His parents worked hard and as he grew up, he wanted to do his part to help the family. He had always been good at studies. Studying in a simple convent school all his life, he was excellent at English, driven by courtesy, and curious to learn. He also made sure his sister knew everything in her textbooks by heart. Everything went smoothly till he passed out of school.

Then one day, the time came for him to go to college. He was working hard enough to get a scholarship, but they still needed a student loan, like all middle-class families do. Arjun was hell-bent on paying back the money to the bank himself, once he passed out of college and started working. With that thought in mind, he joined college, excited about studying architecture, the subject he was going to graduate in.

The first semester went by, and everything was smooth. Arjun found his subjects engaging and interesting and big plans for the future started to take form in his head. One weekend, his father was coming to Indore for some work and his mother and sister had decided to tag along to meet Arjun. He showed them around the city and they ate out in the heart of the city-Rajwada. He promised his sister to take her to Chappan Dukaan-Indore's food destination, a set of lots and lots of small outlets serving anything from hot dogs to Bengali sweets to pani puri-when she came to the city next.

That never happened. On their way back to Dewas, the minibus they were travelling in got hit by a loaded truck, coming from the opposite direction. It being a highway, both the vehicles were moving at high speeds and the collision was powerful. Too powerful for people inside the vehicles to survive.

As soon as Arjun got to know about the accident, which was a good twelve hours after it happened, he rushed to the filthy government hospital his family was taken into. Once there, he found his father missing a limb and bleeding profusely, but still breathing. His mother and sister were not as lucky.

Arjun had no means of getting his father transferred to a better hospital, a private one. He cursed the day he let his parents put their entire life's savings into his college tuition, in order to get that student loan. He felt helpless. The amount left with them was too meagre a sum to be of much help.

He managed to get his father transferred to a private hospital and get better treatment, but the hospital was not much better than the government one. Arjun was seventeen, too young and too panicked to deal with it all by himself. And he did not get a chance to ask anybody for help.

He saw his father bleed to death, right in front of his eyes.