Page 111 of 12 Years
‘Take all the time you want,’ Mudit said, smiling.
Strange, dark thoughts ran through my mind on the cab ride from the club to Bandra. I wanted to end it all. I passed by the Bandra–Worli Sea Link.
Mumbai is a vibrant city full of options. However, it offers limited choices when it comes to committing suicide. You can do the usual—slit your wrists, hang from a ceiling fan or pop a handful of sleeping pills—but none of these have the essence of Mumbai in them. These options are also somewhat lame. Nobody would even notice. She wouldn’t notice. And neither would her parents.
I wanted to go out with a bang, literally. I wanted her to see how she had wrecked, shredded, ground and crushed my heart when she left.
Maybe the Bandra–Worli Sea Link? That’s dramatic enough to make the headlines: ‘Saket Khurana, thirty-four-year-old wannabe stand-up comedian jumps off the Bandra–Worli Sea Link after getting dumped.’
She’ll care then, wouldn’t she?
Except that the stupid Sea Link isn’t high enough. What if I don’t die? What if I fall those fifty-odd feet into the sea, and the Koli fishermen who live nearby rescue me? Then they would become the heroes of the story instead: ‘Koli fishermen save failed stand-up comedian, unsuccessful in his marriage, career, love and suicide attempt.’
No, that wouldn’t work. She’d probably become even more convinced that dumping me was the right decision.
Fortunately, the cab crossed the Sea Link and entered Bandra before I could contemplate further on my diabolical plans to make the headlines.
When I unlocked my Bandra apartment, the house felt like my own, even though it was a bit dusty and cold. I kept my luggage in the bedroom and came back to the living room.I went to the window ledge. Pain shot through my chest. Images of Payal sitting there flashed through my mind. They felt so real that I even lifted my hand in reflex, to touch her imaginary hair.
I went to the bathroom to wash my face. The sight of her little plastic toothbrush still in the toothbrush stand was enough to bring back another flood of memories. We would brush in the bathroom together. She would tell me that she had better teeth because she followed a cleaner vegetarian diet. I would argue that eating all that meat made my teeth stronger. I missed that morning banter. I missed talking to her. You can brush away at your teeth, but how do you brush away the longing to talk to someone?
This will get better, right? It has to.
People get over other people. Especially now that she was married.
She’s gone. The Payal chapter is closed. Accept it, Saket.
I brushed my teeth hard in frustration, hoping it would wipe away all thoughts of her from my mind. My gums began to hurt and bleed. I washed my brush for two minutes, listening to the water gurgling down the pipe. What else was there for me to do anyway? My life had become one of those slow Bengali art movies that win awards.
I went back to my bedroom and stretched out on the bed. I had zero motivation to do anything. It was a miracle I was even breathing and managing to keep my heart beating. Thank God for the involuntary respiratory and circulatory systems. Were it not for them, every heartbroken person would fall dead just from the lack of motivation that follows a break-up.
You have to lift yourself up. You have to get over this.
A niggling voice in my head continued to talk sense, even though it spoke in whispers.
Maybe I should look at Akanksha’s Instagram account after all. I’d resisted it so far, but perhaps it would show me, in stark and clear images, that Payal was now married to Parimal. It would help my brain register that she was well and truly gone.
I pulled out my phone and opened Akanksha’s account. She’d shared several new posts since I’d last checked her page. One post was about designing the best picnic for your family with healthy vegetarian Indian snacks.
‘Theplas instead of sandwiches,’she wrote in the caption.‘Far more nutritious, healthy and tasty, and in line with Indian culture and food habits. We don’t need to copy the West for everything.’
I wasn’t sure if theplas were actually healthier than sandwiches, but who cares? The comments praised her for upholding Indian traditions. One person wrote that her post proved how much smarter Indians were as compared to westerners, since we’d invented the thepla. He didn’t mention how westerners invented Instagram and the Indians hadn’t, but I guess that wasn’t the point.
Then I found the posts about Payal’s big fat Jain wedding.
The first couple of posts were pictures from Payal’s sangeet ceremony. It seemed to have been a grand affair held in the banquet hall of one of the city’s top five-star hotels. Payal wore a saffron lehenga and looked prettier than many Bollywood starlets.
There was a picture of Parimal posing on a bent knee, handing Payal a red rose. I thought it was corny, but that’s Ghatkopar chic for you. Another picture showed Payaltouching her in-laws’ feet, while her mother-in-law tried to stop her from doing so. The mother-in-law had perfected the I-love-that-you’re-doing-it-and-you-better-be-doing-it-but-
please-don’t-do-it pose. One more picture showed all the guests dancing, and Payal dancing with them.
If she’s dancing, she’s happy, right?
The next two posts were about the actual wedding. Payal wore a red zardozi lehenga, which, according to the caption, belonged to her grandmother. Parimal wore a bandhgala. I swear, if Payal wasn’t standing right next to him, I would’ve thought that he was a scrawny waiter who’d photobombed all the pictures.
I saw a picture of the jaimala ceremony, where Parimal and Payal exchanged garlands. Another picture showed them doing the pheras. In the kanyadaan picture, Payal sat in her father’s, or rather, in my life’s villain’s lap.
Every time I moved to the next picture, it felt like I was stabbing my own heart. I felt numb at first, but then an excruciating pain shot through me.
