The Morning After….
I woke up with a start, I looked at the watch, it was 5
am. I had had a bad dream. Good ones never came these days. I tried to recall
what I saw, but all I could remember were blurred images of Rehan merged with
Rayan. It seemed odd that Rayan was part of my dreams and then it hit me, like
a bolt from the blue, the phone call.
I checked my mobile to make sure it wasn’t part of the
dream, that maybe I had just imagined it and that Rayan hadn’t actually called
!
“Yup, definitely received at 12 am”, I just couldn’t get
my mind around the question, why did he actually call? That too after 6 long
years .
I thought about the day ahead, another long day, another
day with the hope of Rehan calling with the hope of him seeing sense, another
day where I had to pretend that everything is alright, and today was worse, I
was supposed to be attending a get together with my old college friends.
“Why did I ever agree to that”.
“I would have to answer loads of questions about myself.”
“AAAAAAhhhhhhh”.
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“Hii Chetan, how are you?”
“I am fine Aashi, My God you look beautiful, how have you
been ?”
Chetan was one of my good friends from Royal, he had come
to pick me up from home. We were to meet everyone at the venue directly.
We had come to ‘Daras’. It was a beautiful place on the
outskirts of the city with the theme of a ‘dhaba’ where you were supposed to
sit on cots rather than chairs and eat. However the ambience was good.
As I entered I saw Rayan and Rudra and a bunch of other
guys and girls. In my messed up state I had totally forgotten how close Rayan
and Chetan were, and that he would definitely have been invited. I mentally
cursed myself.
I met and greeted everyone flashing different degrees of
my smile, For a moment I did feel that I could be normal. Rayan had held back
during this time, he seemed extremely embarrassed. Last nights phone call was
surely on his mind. I contemplated whether I should act angry with him, but
then I thought it might have genuinely been a mistake and he had apologized, so
I walked up to him.
“Hii”
“Hello”, he said
“Listen, I am really very sorry about the call, it was “
“Its okay, no problem”, I cut him short.
And then we started chit chatting, we spoke for a long
time, I really don’t remember what we were speaking about, but I remember
thinking how talkative he was, he spoke with a kind of freeness and honesty that’s
very rare these days. I certainly didn’t remember him to be so talkative, being
so talkative myself.
For the first time in months I found myself relaxing,
rather enjoying my time, everyone seemed so happy …… so free. Everyone spoke
about how they spend the years after leaving Royal, some had done engineering, while
others did their graduation, some were now staying outside Mumbai, some had
come back while many wanted to leave the country. The conversation was an eye
opener of sorts for me. I began to look at life from a different perspective.
I was amazed at the genuine laughter that emancipated
from each one of them, jokes were flying thick and fast. I realized some of
them could eat twice as much as me. Rayan seemed to give me extra attention, it
was a long time since something like that had happened, I lked it and
immediately felt guilty.
Chetan, Ninaad, Rudra, Rayan all came to drop me home. It
had been a wonderful day, I was more happy than I was willing to admit. Yes, a
part of me seemed guilty but that part seemed pretty small at the moment. And
then I got a text,
“Had a lovely time, thanks for coming – Rayan.”
I smiled at the simplicity of the message,
and thus began a continuous saga of texts and messages. I
didn’t really know at that time what it could lead to. Had I known ……….
