One Day At A Time

Chapter 45 -Pie In the Sky

Khushi has been seeing someone for a while now, beta. He is a doctor. I've met him. He is a wonderful man.

He pushed his head under the hot spray of the shower yet felt a cold shiver run down his spine as the words that had upended his world eight months ago rang in his head once again. He wouldn't have believed it if anyone else had said that to him. But Anagha Kaki wouldn't lie. She had no reason to. She had known him long enough to know what these words would do to him, but she had shared it with him nevertheless.

He had known in his heart that this moment had been inevitable when days, hours and minutes had passed by without any contact from Khushi. But when it had stared at him in the eye, his blood had frozen into ice. It had been the death knell for his hope, tiny as it may have been flickering deep inside him somewhere. One could say he had been able to handle the breakup somehow. One could say he had been able to understand her walking away from him without a word. But this - this had brought him down completely.

In those fleeting moments of shifting between consciousness and unconsciousness when he had collapsed in his office within a couple of hours of Anagha Kaki's call, it was her face that had stayed in front of his eyes, as if anchoring him to the reality that this world was for him.

He smiled, lowering his head, so the water sluiced onto his shoulders and down his back.

Life had a wicked sense of humour. Time and again, it had shown him in different ways how much this woman meant to him and his life. His inability to move on in life had not been based just on some romantic hope or cries of his broken heart. It had been about experiences too. Experiences that had taught him that nothing he had or possessed or would achieve in life would mean a thing if she wasn't there in his life to share it with him.

The call from Akash that morning had knocked on that door of his heart which he had closed with a hundred bolts and locks. And his first instinct had been to make an excuse for not attending the wedding because the thought, a probability of Khushi turning up for the wedding with Mir, had punched a hole in his heart. But the buoyant mood of conversation after that little chat with Anjali, Payal and Akash had made him realise that he had been running away for too long. And to where? He didn't know. When was he supposed to stop running? He had no clue. Especially when it was dragging him away from his roots, his friends, his family. And so the decision to attend the wedding was made on the spur of the moment. He had decided to face his fate upfront, even if it meant enduring the heart-wrenching pain of watching Khushi in someone else's arms. And probably then, he had thought, would his heart snap out of this madness that had taken over life for so long.

But in that one single heart-stopping moment at the airport when their eyes had met after four long years, Khushi's eyes had told him another story. There had been that fierce longing for him burning in them which had mirrored the one in his. He couldn't have misread or misunderstood it, especially when his life had depended on it. And that very instant, his heart had broken all the shackles and started beating wildly again. Despite a befuddled mind which had suddenly become unsure of what Kaki had told him a few months ago, his heartbeat had accelerated out of all control because of what those eyes were trying to communicate to him. He was lost and sucked right back in when he had been gathering the courage to pull himself out of it.

Every subsequent meeting after the airport one, her eyes and her body language were making him wonder what was going on in her mind when there was already a man in her life. The feeling of loss of control around her had hit him once again after years, and it had angered him. He had felt hope flicker back to life, and he had hated her and the circumstances for making him feel this way all over again. He had tried to stay away from her, pushing her out if she approached him, refusing to engage in any dialogue with her because one look into those eyes had been enough to make him forget the seriousness of the situation. Forcing himself to keep the fear of Mir turning up for the wedding alive in his heart, he had been forbidding his heart to build hope. But it had refused to comply. Instead, he had been drawn to her like a moth to the flame all over again, all rationality and propriety thrown out of the proverbial window. It had always been this way with her. Always. And he knew nothing had changed. Nothing ever would.