Your Dreams Are Mine Now (15 page)

As they talked, the two of them didn’t look at each other. Their eyes stared at the silent waters. It appeared as if they were not talking to each other but to the water in front of them, turn by turn.

‘I have never met an interesting person like you, who has crossed the man-made boundaries of religion and still rejects the idea of God,’ Rupali said softly without expecting any further arguments from Arjun.

But he responded, ‘What’s the point of believing in him if he is not there when you need him the most?’

Rupali turned her head towards Arjun and asked, ‘What do you mean by that?’

It took Arjun a few moments of silence and Rupali a few moments of anticipation before he spoke again.

‘Heard of the Benares bomb blasts in the year 2006?’

‘Yes.’

‘I lost my elder sister in it.’

‘Oh! I am so sorry to hear that!’ Rupali could almost understand why Arjun had lost the faith in God.

‘She was such a nice human being. She used to help everyone in need and didn’t mind sacrificing her time, energy and money for others. Just like you. A lot more religious than me. Yes, back then, I had faith in God—something that I lost after she died in that temple and her dear God, to whom she prayed for ages, couldn’t do anything.’

‘I can see that you have been holding on to this grudge against God for not saving your sister. But eventually, we will all die one day. Everyone who takes birth has to die. Should one stop believing in God then?’

‘Yes, everyone has to die one day. But no one deserves to die that way—in a bomb blast,’ Arjun said, looking at her with some rage.

‘But it was an act of terrorists. Why are you holding God responsible for it?’

‘Because if the world believes that God is that supreme power without whose permission nothing happens, then I have all the right to believe that that very God killed my sister. Yes, that’s what I believe.’ Arjun sounded rebellious. He pulled his eyes away from Rupali, back to the water.

‘Don’t say that, Arjun . . .’ Rupali softly urged.

‘Why not? Wasn’t it God’s wish? My sister had dreams. She wanted to do a lot of things. She didn’t deserve this. What was her fault . . .’

Then he felt Rupali’s hand over his right shoulder. Arjun calmed down. ‘I am . . . I am sorry.’

Rupali noticed his moist eyes. She gently rubbed his shoulder. ‘I don’t know if this is true, but our religion says that our destinies are defined by our karma.’

‘Yes, it says so. And everyone who knows my sister would vouch for her good karma,’ Arjun responded. ‘And my lack of faith in God is not just limited to what happened with my sister. Read the newspapers. Little kids who haven’t even gained consciousness die cruel deaths. What about their karma? Had they even turned old enough to perform their karma? And if not, then based on which karma did God write their destiny?’ he asked.

‘We carry forward our karma from our previous lives . . .’ ‘But isn’t this bizarre? How would I know what I have done in my past life? Shouldn’t this balance sheet of karma and destiny be settled in one life rather than be carried forward from one to the next? Why reward me or penalize me for what I have done in my past life, which I have absolutely no idea about? Why not do it in this life?’

Rupali looked at Arjun. She wanted to change Arjun’s notions on the subject of God, but Arjun ended up challenging her understanding. Her idea was not to win the debate, but to try her bit to make Arjun regain his lost faith.

She looked so miserable that Arjun felt she was going to cry. So he changed the topic.

‘And what karma did I do that a girl from DU ended up tearing the pocket of my kurta in a crowded metro?’

Rupali smiled suddenly. ‘Don’t worry, I will stitch the pocket back,’ she said, grinning naughtily.

‘Really? I wouldn’t mind availing that offer!’ he said, laughing.

Rupali nodded confidently. They had a few light moments after that. And after their heavy discussion, these moments by the side of the sarovar appeared like real bliss.

When evening fell they left for the campus. At the gate of the girls’ hostel, Arjun bid her goodbye, but not before the two of them had decided when and where they were going to meet the next day.

Seventeen

The holidays were passing by rather quickly for some reason. There was always something new to do. Rupali was enjoying being a tourist in Delhi. One more thing made her very happy—to pick up a topic and discuss and debate it with Arjun. From religions to reservations, from global warming to local mindsets, their agenda had extremely diverse items. Often they would come up with probable solutions to the existing challenges. And the whole exercise of brainstorming became very interesting. At times they were not in agreement and had contradictory views over a subject matter. But interestingly, they never fought to prove I-am-right-and-youare-wrong. They respected each other’s opinions and politely disagreed. It had become a habit for Rupali to jot down the interesting things she learnt from Arjun.

Little did the two realize how the passing days had brought them emotionally close to each other. They would go to places like India Gate and Akshardham and, at times, roam in the markets of Janpath and Sarojini Nagar, randomly buying something for themselves. They would spend an entire day in each other’s company. Once out of her hostel in the morning, Rupali would only come back late in the evening. If there was still some time left for her hostel gates to be locked, the two of them would chit-chat for a few moments next to the lawns; else Arjun would drop her on his bike. Every passing day made them depend on each other’s company, so much so, that if they did not see each other for one day they missed each other terribly. They didn’t realize this until it happened one day.

Arjun had to go to Karnal to attend a relative’s wedding. In his absence, Rupali accepted the invitation to join a few girls from the hostel on their shopping spree, one that she had otherwise said no to. But that didn’t comfort her at all! She was used to seeing him every day. All of a sudden, his absence after so many days had left a void that she found difficult to fill.

Miles apart from her in a distant city amid the bustling gathering of a wedding celebration, Arjun, too, felt as if something was incomplete. It appeared unusual to him to not listen to her lively chatter, her lovely innocent voice. With happy faces surrounding him, he wondered what was missing. Why wasn’t he happy? Why was he so troubled that he hadn’t seen Rupali?

Marriages, music, celebrations, meeting relatives, all these would excite him earlier. He always waited for such events to happen and would get completely involved in the spirit of it. Then why was it that he did not feel like meeting anyone now? Why was it that he was waiting for the ceremonies to get over so he could go back to the same routine with Rupali?

Something had changed for the both of them.

And the only way to tide over this loneliness was to text each other. So they ended up sending SMSes to each other. To save herself from unwanted attention Rupali had put her mobile phone on the vibration mode. She knew some of the girls she was hanging out with were big-time gossipers.

In the afternoon when Rupali was having a quick meal with her friends in the food court of a mall, Arjun sent a few messages. She thought she would respond after finishing her meal. She also wanted to avoid texting too frequently in front of the other girls.

All this while, however, Arjun kept checking his cellphone in anticipation. He wondered why all of a sudden he had stopped getting responses. It bothered him. He felt he could not concentrate on anything else till Rupali wrote back. It was a strange feeling that was making him impatient.

When he could not wait any longer, he dialled her number. When Rupali saw his call, she was overjoyed. Her eyes lit up even though she tried to keep her feelings from showing. The other girls noticed and smiled knowingly at each other. Rupali avoided their eyes, excused herself and walked away from them for a bit. Now that was a mistake which confirmed the suspicion of the other girls.

‘Hi!’ she said nervously.

‘Hi!’ the voice at the other end responded.

Then there was silence at both ends. A beautiful silence that was pleasant to the ears and that no one wanted to fill. The silence that spoke far beyond just wishes. The silence that gave them butterflies in their stomach.

Arjun, when confronted with this silence, suddenly forgot what he had to say. ‘How . . . how are you?’ he asked, stuttering, and then bit his tongue. Hadn’t he been texting her since he’d left and exchanged at least a hundred messages with her! How beautifully he had put his foot in his mouth with that question!

Rupali secretly laughed at that. She had sensed his discomfort but didn’t add to his embarrassment. ‘I’m fine. How are things there?’ she asked, wanting to know about the wedding celebrations.

‘It’s all nice, but for some reason I am feeling bored.’

‘Bored? But why?’

But Arjun didn’t have anything concrete to answer. Rupali too accepted that it wasn’t exciting for her to come out shopping with the other girls. She too got bored.

‘But why?’ this time Arjun asked her.

Rupali had a concrete answer. ‘Because they either gossip all the time or only talk about what’s in and what’s out of fashion,’ she said.

Arjun laughed and when he started to say something, Rupali cut him short and said softly, ‘I am missing the kind of conversations we have every day . . .’

There was that silence between them again.

Arjun admired her for being upfront and telling him. He wondered if he could have said that to her with such ease. He thought for a moment and then asked, ‘So tell me this, had I been there in Delhi, where would we have gone today and what would have been the topic of our discussion?’

‘Hmm! Good question. Let me think . . .’ she said and then thought for a few seconds before she spoke again. ‘I would have liked to go someplace near the airport. I would have loved to see the planes landing and taking off from the airstrip.’

‘Interesting! And what would we have been discussing?’

‘Hmm…Dreams! Our dreams! Flying high in the limitless sky which is considered as limitless as our thoughts.’

‘Looks like we missed what would have been an exciting day!’ Arjun chuckled.

‘Will you take me there when you are back?’ she asked quickly.

The innocence with which Rupali asked that question, touched Arjun’s heart. Those soft words ‘will you take me’, drenched in hope, kept ringing in his ears for a few seconds as he replied, ‘I would love to do that!’

A little later, after they hung up, they were again back to the business of exchanging messages over their phones. Rupali was the first one to do so when she wrote: ‘It’s nice 2 listen 2 ur voice.’ When she realized that she had forgotten to add a smiley in the end, she sent a second message, which was just a smiley.

For the rest of the day, they continued to be in touch with each other. They were not sitting idle and were engaged in the company of their friends and family, yet they picked up every possible opportunity to connect with each other. The joyful wait anticipating the arrival of the next message on their phones and the sparkling feeling of writing the next message to be sent, kept them busy the whole day.

By the time night fell and Rupali was about to sleep, Arjun was in a reception. She had bid him goodnight. But sleep was miles away from her. Somewhere, something had changed deep inside her. It was an unusual feeling; she had never felt this way. She had never missed someone like this, not even her family when she had boarded the train in Patna to come to Delhi. Over the past few days, had she developed feelings for Arjun? she thought to herself. Shying away from accepting it she started looking for facts to deny it.

She found none.

She recalled how, earlier in the day, a friend of hers had caught her blushing and smiling to herself when she had come out of the trial room to show her the outfit. Rupali had been lost in her thoughts. For a moment she hadn’t even realized that her friend had been asking for her advice on the dress. How embarrassed she had been to know that she had been caught lost in someone’s thoughts!

Her interactions with Arjun had been limited to candidly sharing the thoughts in her mind, based on rationale. Since when had this become a matter of the heart? She wondered and immediately rejected her own point. Then why, for the entire day, had she behaved as if she had been addicted to Arjun? When he wasn’t there near her, why had she tried to fill in that void by exchanging uncountable SMSes? Her mind and her heart were in conflict, she thought. But the truth was different. They were not. They were in agreement. Both pointing to the same thing, though in a different way. She might not believe it. But that didn’t change the truth. And perhaps, for the first time, Rupali had become irrational.

You may fool others, but it is difficult to fool yourself. When Rupali turned on her bed and closed her eyes, rejecting all the hypotheses of there being anything between Arjun and her, she could not control her subconscious mind. It was again thinking about Arjun. It felt nice to think about him, to imagine him in his kurta and a pair of jeans. There was a tickling sensation, a secret joy, of imagining herself with Arjun that led to a smile on her face.

The moment her conscious mind learnt about the thoughts of her subconscious mind, she got up in her bed and, in playful anger, she punched her cushion several times. She sat cross-legged and held her hands over her forehead.

‘Why? Why am I not able to think about something else? Why am I not able to sleep?’ she talked to herself. Her problem was not that she didn’t know the answer. Her problem was that she was not ready to accept it.

When the night would end and the sun would rise again, she was still not going to meet Arjun. He was going to be in Karnal for one more day. Rupali realized with mixed emotions that she was only at the halfway mark and that she would have to wait for another full day before she could see him again. ‘After a whole day! Just like that day! Suddenly how difficult it has become to pass thirty-odd hours without him,’ she thought. The sadness of waiting for yet another day overshadowed the happiness of having already passed an entire day.