Changing Shades - 13

Chapter 13 

"Why didn't I tell you?" she asked and laughed almost hysterically. "My god, Arnav, did you ever give me a chance?"

He was taken aback by her attack, and she went on fiercely, her pent up feelings spilling out.

“Since the day you walked into that office, and into my life again, did you once – even once -  ask me, Khushi, how are you? How is Manish? Are you happy with Manish? Are you all right? Once, even once? And when I tried to tell you, the very first day, you shut me up, saying you weren't interested in my private life any more, we had only a business relationship now. You didn't want to hear anything about me at all. You didn't even want to talk to me like a normal human being, like a colleague, let alone like a person you had once known, and, so you say, loved.”

“I did love you,” Arnav said, defensively. “I loved you, and I knew you loved me, and yet you married Manish. I was so hurt, so shattered, that I couldn't bear to see you with him. I left town and went away, I didn't call you both after that, only because I loved you so much that I felt I would kill Manish if I saw him with you. And he was my friend. Can you wonder that I was hurt? I was deprived of my friend and my love at the same stroke. Even when I saw you again, I was still filled with that jealousy.  I still loved you. I didn't want to hear you take his name. I didn't want to hear about him and your life together.” 

“You didn't love me,” Khushi said fiercely. He stared at her, and she looked back at him, suddenly fearless. She put her cup down and faced him.

“No, Arnav, you didn't love me. Is this what you call love? Is love only about possession? About jealousy, about hurt? If you really had loved me, you would have understood my feelings, understood why I did what I did. But you didn't even try to understand. You – who knew me better than anyone else, to whom I had told my innermost thoughts, shared all my secrets … you didn’t understand me at all. No, you didn't love me. Neither you, nor Manish loved me.”

He looked at her stunned, and she turned away and continued bleakly.

“For both of you, it was just a matter of ego. You were the leader in college, the guy who always did the best, was the most popular. So you had to have all the girls falling into your arms. Which they were, all but me. And Manish – well, you heard him in the hospital. You heard exactly why he wanted to marry me. The girl he had known from a tiny tot, who had always followed him around, had hero-worshipped him and his parents - she was his property, how dared you look at her? He would even marry me if he had to, to stop you from getting me. The tussle was between the two of you, and it was me who suffered, because I was in love with one, and so beholden to the other that I could not follow my heart.”

She turned around again and looked at him directly. “He knew I was in love with you, he had always known. Before I myself knew it, he did, and he couldn’t accept that I could look at anybody other than him, especially when he needed me. So he told his parents he wanted to marry me, because he knew it was what they had always wanted. That was enough. He knew I could never go against what his parents wanted, because of what they had done for me. And, you also, Arnav, you were the same. All the years we were together in college, you never expressed your feelings. Only when he wanted me, you suddenly realized you did as well. You wanted me only because he did, and you had to have the satisfaction of taking me from him. You did not love me, Arnav. It was your possessiveness as well – your best friend, and Manish taking her? It was your ego that had to have me.”

“No!” said Arnav, his face pale, and he got up and came to her. Khushi shrank away from him, and he didn't try to touch her. His voice became pleading.

“I did love you. Khushi, I did. Oh, I agree it was not a mature love. It was the love of an immature boy, and love at that age is selfish. But it was love, Khushi, it was my love for you that drove me away when you married him, and then …when I saw you again, then…”

“And then what?” asked Khushi, bitterly. “When you saw me again four months ago in the office, it became a mature love, did it? Such a mature and deep love that you had to cut me to bits every time you spoke to me, that you had to pull me down and criticize me for every move I made or ever had made in the past? You made life a living hell for me, the office, my only sanctuary, a torture chamber. Is this your mature love? What is it now, Arnav? Because if what you have done to me over the last months, is love, then I don't want it, thank you very much!”            

“No,” he said, in a low voice, not looking at her. “What I have done with you, the way I've behaved, is despicable. I know it, and I've hated myself for doing what I did, for talking to you the way I did, for behaving the way I did, but I couldn't help it. Whenever I saw your face, in the office, you seemed to be followed by an invisible Manish, and I would visualize you going back home to him, to his arms, and I couldn't take it, Khushi. Why do you think that never once in these months, did I ask you about Manish, about how he is, family, anything? I still could not bear it, couldn't bear to hear you speak his name, any more than I could bear it four years ago. You say my love was selfish then? Maybe it was, but then, in that respect, it hasn't changed. I still couldn't bear the thought of you with him, even if you were blissfully happy.”

“This is not love, Arnav,” Khushi spoke bitterly. “If this is, this is not what I want. This is possessiveness. Love is what I saw today between two sick people. They are dying, and still their concern is for each other. That is love, true love.”

She looked at him again, directly.

“That's what I want, and this time, I will not settle for less. I made the mistake once of marrying without love. I will never do it again. It brings too much unhappiness. I can't deal with that again. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than go through …” she stopped, swallowing, her throat aching with unshed tears, her mind awash with memories.

Arnav was silent for a while. He watched the emotions playing across her face, glowing red and orange in the flickering light of the fireplace, and he fought to control his own feelings, the urge to take her in his arms, hold her, comfort her – four years too late, he thought bitterly … or maybe four months … the longest four months of his life. He looked at her again.

“Will you at least tell me what happened? How did all this happen? When did Manish come here? Khushi …” urgently, “… Khushi, I need to know. Please. How did it start … when did it start? Tell me?”

She looked at him, and then nodded. He moved away to sit to one side on the large sofa. She turned away from him, and stared into the fireplace again.

“I knew one side of the story till now,” she said in a low voice. “Today I heard the other side. There may be gaps … I’m trying to put it together still.”

He nodded briefly. Khushi was quiet again, gathering her thoughts.

“Did you know that Manish had started taking drugs in college?” she asked abruptly.

Arnav stared at her uncomprehending for a long moment, then gave a low whistle, and banged his hand against his head.

“So that was it! What a fool I was!”

She turned around incredulously, accusingly. “You knew?”

“I didn't, but I should have guessed. Those mood swings in the final year! Those bouts of sudden grandiosity, and then the bouts of depression. Sunny, Neil and I talked about it so many times. He seemed to have changed completely. We couldn't figure out what was the matter with him!”

“The matter with him was drugs,” said Khushi bitterly. “He started taking them in final year. Initially it was like everybody else, to stay awake to study, then they stopped working, so he went on to stronger ones… oh, the usual story. He had money, and his suppliers found out he would pay almost anything. Plus that recklessness that was always in him – he wanted to try out more and more, and he felt he was in control all along. Then Baba announced that Manish would work with him in the firm after he qualified, and Manish was nervous. He was always scared of Baba, and now he would have to work directly with him, and Baba would find out Manish had pretty much wasted his time in college. Manish never wanted to be an architect in the first place, and he never wanted to work with Baba. I don’t know which came first – it was a chicken and egg situation. So Manish decided he would get me to work with him, counting on me to cover his weakness at work from Baba. And then he realised that I …” Khushi stumbled slightly, and went on without looking at Arnav, “that I …”

“That you and I had become close,” Arnav completed for her, and Khushi nodded imperceptibly.

“He got worried … if we … got together, then I would go off to Mumbai with you. How would he face Baba, and how would he manage to work with Baba. He got more and more scared, and as a result, he started getting deeper and deeper into his drugs. And in that state, he got the brilliant idea that he would marry me, we would work together, and his problems would be permanently solved. For that, he had to separate you from me, but that was simple. He knew his mother loved me … and that I couldn’t deny her anything. Besides, I was his friend first, he had known me most of our lives … he had more claim on me. I had no business being with anyone else if he needed me. His mind was twisted by the drugs … so was his reasoning. So he told his parents that he wanted to marry me.”

Khushi looked at Arnav.

“He told me all this on our wedding night,” she said evenly, and heard Arnav’s quick intake of breath.

But he didn’t say anything. He kept looking at her steadily, his expression hard to fathom. She took a deep breath and went on.

“But things didn’t work out quite the way he thought. He got through the exams somehow when he was not really hooked very badly, but soon after our marriage, it got worse. The drugs killed his…performance, his manhood, and he couldn't take that. He started taking more and more. They would pep him up, so he felt strong, and masculine, but in bed…,” she stumbled slightly, and did not look at Arnav, “… it was a different story. His work started suffering, and Baba got mad at him. That made him more tense and scared of Baba, and things just got worse. At home, too, he was unhappy. He knew I didn't love him, he knew I had loved you, and though initially he tried to make it up to me, I think somewhere he started feeling the guilt that he had separated us. So there were pressures both at work and at home, and that drove him deeper into drugs. He felt a failure, both as a husband and as a son.  About six months after our wedding, I realized that there was something terribly wrong, but the damage was done, and he had gone too far to come back on his own.”

She turned to look into the fireplace again, her face bleak at the memories of those nightmarish days.

“Then the nightmare started. He would disappear for days and weeks on end, and we wouldn't have a clue where he was. After about seven or eight months, we managed to drag him to a psychiatrist, and got him admitted to a rehabilitation centre. He ran away from there and disappeared again. Again and again he came back, we took him to the doctors, and the rehab centres, and again he ran away. Whenever he ran out of money, he would come back. Then he started signing the company checks to get money. Baba stopped his signing powers. He stole Mummy's jewellery, and mine, from our lockers – he went to the banks and picked them up, and they obviously didn't stop him. He was a signatory to all the lockers and before we realized what he was doing, he had taken everything.”       

Arnav was listening in horror. But Khushi wasn't through. She went relentlessly on, as though, by telling him, she could relieve some of her own pain.

“Two years ago,” she said, “he came back home in a desperate mood. He had gotten involved with a big gang dealing in drugs, and had started working with them. But he made a mess of things, and owed them a huge amount of money, due to a consignment he had somehow…lost. Whether he lost it, or sold it or used it himself with his ‘friends’, I don't know.”

“How much money?” asked Arnav. Khushi told him. Arnav whistled in shock.

“Baba didn't have that kind of money,” Khushi said, bitterly. “The business had gone down, because we weren't able to give it any attention, and we'd sold a lot of assets to pay for all his treatment. So Baba sold the house, gave him that money on the firm understanding that it was the last time. For a year, we lived in the house they had given my uncle – my uncle had gone back to his village. Manish went for two days, he told us, to repay the money … and he disappeared, and didn't come back again. He gave the slip to the company accountant who had gone with him. That was the last straw for the firm. Word started getting around, and the clients dried up. We had no income, and by last year, we were in really bad shape. The firm had no work, baba's health had gone down, and we didn't know how to find the money even for his medicines and treatment. Whatever little money was there, went in trying to locate Manish … with no result.”

She stopped, as though remembering, and the pain, the despair of the time gone by, was in her voice. Then she shook her head slightly, and continued, not looking at Arnav. He was listening intently to her, straining to catch every word.

“A year ago, Baba got a letter from some people, a threatening letter, again for some money that Manish owed them. We had nothing left except goodwill.  Baba sold his business due to that good will, and got the money to pay those people off. The day after the papers were signed, Baba had a stroke, which left him how he is today. We knew the doctor who runs the nursing home, and Mr. Suri was an old friend of the family. They both urged us to leave and come to Mumbai, so we did. We had nothing left to stay there for. I started working with Suri Constructions. Baba and Mummy stay at the nursing home free of charge, but we have to pay for the medicines and the treatment. Baba seems to have lost his memory of the last few years, or maybe, he doesn't want to remember. He seems to think that Manish is still working in office, and we, Mummy and I, kept up the pretence.”

She stopped, and then went on more slowly, as though speaking to herself.

“We kept up the facade till now, because there was some hope, that we would find him some day. Now what I will do, when I go back, I don't know. How will I tell them? I have to tell Mummy. Baba is beyond understanding anything. He is in a world of his own. But Mummy…her last hope…”

Khushi stopped, her voice breaking. She whispered again, “How will I tell her? What do I do?”