Under The Mango Trees

Chapter Fifty-Six : In Between Aching Hearts

"Dev, wait! Please!" I screamed over my shallow breaths, the cars and the people all around me blurring into little spots of scintillating light. His tall figure strode across the street as elegantly as a model in a fashion advertisement, yet I couldn't reach him. Tears were already burning in my eyes by the time I managed to catch his arm. I was gulping breaths of air like they were little cups of water. "Just wait. . . please listen to me. It's not-not how you think it is." He was clad in darkness and I couldn't see his face, it was as if I was speaking into the void, "You know how my sister is- I know, I know she said some things about me." The void between us spread and I squeezed his arm, trying to desperately curb it, "What happened? Why aren't you saying anything?"

Suddenly, he grabbed my wrist and jerked me towards him, his glassy eyes nailing me on that spot. "Is it true?" His voice was clear and demanding, yet his eyes, they were pleading me to lie. "Is it true, Tulsi?"

I could barely manage to whisper, "It's all in the past."

"You never told me about this," he said almost to himself in disbelief, then his grip on my wrist tightened. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"It was in the past," I repeated in a lower voice, unable to meet his flashing eyes. "She needs me now, that's why. . . That's why I saw her today. She doesn't have a lot of people she can depend on. She's not herself anymore. I have to be there for her. I wouldn't meet her, I swear if it wasn't for how---"

"Did something happen between---"

"Once." I swallowed the lump formed in my throat, raising my chin to meet his fierce eyes. "But it's not how you think it is. She's my first love and I saw her after three years. Three years I didn't know where she was or how she was doing---"

"Do you love me?" he cut me off with those crisp words, his face hard like iron. "Have you ever loved me?"

"Why can't you listen to me completely? I'm telling you that she's not in a good place- of course, I do, I do love you!" I cried out after him as he dropped my wrist and began marching ahead. "How can you doubt that I don't love you? I do love you!"

He stopped short, spinning towards me with his jaw clamped shut. Then he inhaled sharply as if talking to me was a laborious task and said, "You are more concerned about her."

"I'm not."

"Will you meet her again?" He closed his eyes in frustration at my silence, turning around and murmuring, "So you will meet her again."

"I should. I keep on telling you that she needs support and this isn't because I'm in love with her or anything of that sort. She has nobody here and I'm the only one who can take care of her even if it's just talking to her," I found myself rambling to deaf ears as he remained immobile. His lack of response aggravated me and I burst out, uncaring of the fact that we were in the middle of a highway, "Why aren't you listening to me?! You have decided for yourself that I don't love you as if these past years with you was a big joke! You think that I'm like my sister who cheated on your brother, but I'm nothing like her. You don't know half of the things, still, you think you know everything because you're so fucking intelligent---"

His large hands suddenly seized my shoulders as his honey-brown eyes blazing under the streetlight hurled fire at me which were otherwise soft and amused. Today, he was not amused. He stooped to meet my gaze, unflinching and aching. "You never told me about this and don't tell me that it doesn't mean a lot to you. It shows---" He gripped my chin, tilting my face up. "It shows here that you still love her."

Tears were rolling down my face as freely as raindrops from the sky and I could taste the salt on my lips when I broke out, "But I love you, Dev. Why-why can't you listen to me? I know what's in my heart." He searched for something then, something beyond me on my face and when he stopped searching, a lone tear appeared in his eyes that pierced my heart like a shard of glass. I reached out to touch him, my fingers trembling. "Dev. . ."

He caught my hand, held it for a moment, then dropped it, leaving it cold and empty. "It's over, Tulsi."

And he was gone, taking away the warmth, the comfort, but never the love that exploded my heart into bits every second, every minute, every day till it turned into an ugly, festering wound that stung every time I thought of him. That day, I took a rickshaw home, entered my house, took one glimpse of Pavitra lying on the bed in a heap like an unfeeling sack of stones and went to my father. He was cutting onions on the floor and wiping his eyes underneath those foggy, black-rimmed glasses with the hem of his undershirt.

"Baba," I said in a voice that was unrecognisable by my own ears and he looked up, the glasses haphazard on his nose. "Pavitra needs to tell you something."

That was all I said, Pavitra in its sick fantasy admitted to everything in front of my father while my mother was busy preparing her new, eclectic collection of pickles in the kitchen and listening to Gayatri Mantra songs on repeat. Pavitra was locked up in the house for how many ever days it stayed here and as for me, I remained on my bed. Locked up by my own will. In between, Dev's brother arrived at the gate to drop off books that I had lent to Dev, books over which our love had grown. Books that we had read together in the trains and his room, books behind which we had stolen glances and kisses. I opened 1984 with weak, wobbly hands, my heart growing heavy at the words that I had previously denied, Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Tears dotted the pages as I flipped through them, finding all the letters that I had highlighted as a joke to amuse him, Will you marry me?

I turned over the next page and found a word that I had not highlighted, yet it was there, Yes.