Page 44 of Can This Be Love?

‘Do you need more time?’ he said, subconsciously pushing the ring towards me.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. ‘Purva … if I don’t feel I will be able to give you or our relationship a hundred per cent … I will not, and should not, marry you.’

Purva stared at me, his face now gradually clearing.

‘I did not see this coming…’ he said after a pause.

‘Neither did I!’ I said, swallowing hard.

Our eyes met; his shocked and mine desperate.

‘You don’t love me anymore,’ he said, calmly, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘Probably never did.’

A knife went through my heart as Purva quietly took the ring and put it in his pocket.

18

6 May 2013, 9.00 a.m.

‘You’ve lost it, Kas,’ said Pitajee’s text.

‘I know,’ I replied.

6.00 p.m.

‘Pitajee,’ I said, into the phone.

‘I hate you, Kas,’ he said.

I stayed silent for a minute. ‘You do, don’t you?’ I asked him.

‘I don’t want to lie to you about this, Kas, but I hate what you have done … I fail to see the logic,’ he said, in a dry voice.

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Speak to whom?’

‘Purva!’ I said, exasperated.

‘Oh, you mean the man you ruthlessly ditched?’

I cancelled the call, anger surging inside me.

6.01 p.m.

‘Kas,’ said Pitajee, calling me up the next instant.

‘Don’t talk to me,’ I said angrily.

‘This is not us,’ he said, his voice sad. ‘We never fight like this.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We never do. Everything has changed, Pitajee…’

‘I met Purva,’ he said, interrupting me.

‘And?’ I said, crossing my fingers. ‘Is he all right?’

‘Yeah. He told me what you had said to him. He seems to have doubled shifts and is working enough for forty bulls…’

---