My Last Love Story

by Falguni Kothari

  We’d never come up with an answer.

  Rumi’s words transported us back in time. We became entranced with each other, as we’d been countless times before. I lost my will over my senses, and I couldn’t shake my eyes off him. Neither could he with me. His face was shadowed with thick, bristly hair, and it made his lips look white as they pressed together. He swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple moved. I looked at it for a brief second. It was enough to break the spell.

  A fire started in my cheeks and rippled down to my soles.

  Nirvaan, Marjaneh, and all the things that haunted me took their sentry positions around my heart once more.

  I had no wish to start a revolution either.

  For the next two nights, I resorted to sleep aids, deterring any more nocturnal chats. But while my nights were deep and dreamless, my days turned into pure chaos.

  We began practicing the dance numbers for the party scheduled for the end of the month. Nirvaan and I would dance on “Nagada,” a bass-heavy song from the movie, Ram Leela. The guys had several dances to memorize—solos, duos, and group ones. So did I. The guest participants were spread all over the world. All of this was being choreographed and symphonized by dance guru, Hari “Disco” Patel, via video chat.

  Bollywood-esque party-stoppers, personalized by family and close friends, were the lifeblood of any desi celebration. I wouldn’t even bring up how much crazier a party predominantly peopled by Gujaratis got. Strategically placed between the hour of cocktails and dinner, the shows were annoying, to say the least, if you weren’t into that sort of loud thing, and boring in the extreme for the guests not close enough to the family to be participants.

  No one was allowed to be annoyed or bored at this party. Nirvaan had sent out a mass email to all three hundred guests, inviting them to participate in the dance bonanza in whatever capacity they wished. I’d been horrified to learn that more than a third had emailed back with enthusiasm, some with costume options.

  I wasn’t at all sure I could hop and shimmy all over the stage while wrapped in a sari without falling flat on my face. But it wasn’t an immediate concern of mine.

  The sleeping aid got me relaxed enough to face the daytime Bollywood drama with aplomb. Two torturous days flew by, and before I could cry, Uncle, it was Radiation Thursday.

  Stereotactic radiosurgery was a non-invasive procedure and targeted specifically for brain tumors with little to no associated complications for the patient. It was a piece of cake, as offerings of cancer treatments went.

  Nirvaan would check into the hospital the morning of the procedure. His head would be locally anesthetized and fitted with a head brace. He’d go in for an MRI, to facilitate the team of doctors to confirm tumor size and positioning as of the morning, and then wait around until the radiation oncologists figured out the best dosages and angles for the gamma rays to cut or shrink the metastatic tumor significantly. The radiation itself wouldn’t take longer than an hour. After which, they’d wait for the anesthesia to wear off before sticking bandages on Nirvaan’s head where the brace had been screwed in. All in all, Nirvaan would be home by noon, barring traffic situations.

  Still, it upset me when Nirvaan insisted he had this under control, and I should go back to bed. It upset me, yes, but in one cowardly spot in my soul, I was relieved.

  At least he’d offered a better excuse than the one he’d given on Monday. He didn’t want me anywhere near radiation since we were trying to get pregnant, he’d reasoned.

  It was impossible that I’d go back to sleep after the guys left. I had been up since sunrise, had three cups of coffee, shared a huge breakfast with Nirvaan, and showered in preparation for the day. And, now, I had nothing to do but wait in tension till they came back home. Zayaan had promised to text me every fifteen minutes, but…

  What did Nirvaan mean by banning me from the radiation, and on Monday, by not coming with me for my IVF appointment? What did he mean by substituting our presence in each other’s lives with Zayaan?

  I needed to make sense of what was happening.

  It had been impossible to separate from the pack over the last two days and call my shrink, as I’d meant to. And it wasn’t as if Nirvaan didn’t know about her. When he’d come looking for me eight years ago, I’d told him that a therapist was helping me come to terms with the deaths of my parents. It wasn’t a lie. But it had not been the truth, not the whole of it.

  After pouring myself a fourth cup of coffee, I called the formidable woman who’d reestablished my faith in myself one heart-to-heart at a time.

  She picked up on the first ring. “Hello? Dr. Asha Ambani here.”

  The calm, melodious voice was a balm to my nerves. “Asha Auntie, it’s Simeen.” I didn’t know why she’d asked me to call her Asha Auntie instead of Dr. Asha or Dr. Ambani on our first meeting. I only knew I’d never addressed her as anything else.

  “Simeen, I was expecting your call.”

  I pictured her face—bespectacled and oval with rounded cheeks that jiggled when she talked, perfect white teeth and fleshy lips that were never without gloss. She was a large woman with an ample bosom that I’d used as my crying pillow during many a therapy session.

  “Really?” I said, blinking. “Sarvar called you?”

  “He emailed. So, tell me, bachcha, how are you doing?”

  One of the reasons Dr. Asha Ambani was so successful at her job was because she was the mother most of her clients had never had. She worked exclusively with troubled young women, and somehow, through sheer force of will, she would make us believe she was on our side.

  “Physically, I’m fantastic. Emotionally and mentally, I’m floundering,” I said, hitting the issue head-on. “I’m angry the cancer is back. I can’t bear to think about what’s going to happen. I hate seeing Nirvaan like this. I want to make him happy. But I’m afraid I’ve promised him the moon, and now, I don’t know how to get it for him. I’m not sure I even want to.”

  I stopped being vague and poetic. I told her about the IVF and the trust fund…about Zayaan. “He can’t want us to be together. He can’t. He knows all the reasons why I can’t be with Zayaan. He was the one to point out most of them.”

  From the beginning, or when we’d begun dreaming of marriage, Nirvaan had cautioned me against Zayaan’s family and our cultural differences. But I’d put it off as jealousy and bias then.

  “He doesn’t know the real reason, Simeen. He can’t read your mind,” she said, a not-so-gentle reminder that I hadn’t told Nirvaan about the rape. Even so, she didn’t ask me to tell him.

  Back then, when it had just happened, she’d told me to do what I thought was best for me. File charges or no. Tell Zayaan about his despicable brother or no. Only once had she counseled me to reconsider keeping a secret from my fiancé, and that was also because she’d known I still abhorred a man’s touch. But that had been then, and this was now.

  “No. I can’t do that to him…to them. I won’t allow them to blame themselves for not protecting me that night.” Tears crept down my face, but I wasn’t crying yet. I got up from the sofa and snatched a few tissues from the coffee table before walking out on the deck.

  From inside the house, it looked like another beautiful day in May with picture-perfect blue skies and a jostling of clouds tumbling toward the sun. But chilly air hit me like a bulldozer as soon as I opened the patio doors.

  Life was just such a farce. It came in a warm, fuzzy package, but once you opened it, it smacked you hard like Pandora’s box.

  “He sent Zayaan with me for the IVF consult. And, today, he took Zayaan with him for the radiation. Why is he doing this? What’s his game?” I’d been haunted by these questions for the past two days. “Why won’t he touch me? What did I do wrong?”

  “Do you think he’s punishing you for something?” asked Asha Auntie.

  “Doh,” I said through my nose because I was crying now. I paused to blow it. “No, he’s not punishing me. I think he…loves me too much.”

 
; I was a bad person. I took and took and took. Then, I stole into another man’s room in the middle of the night and looked at him with lust.

  What’s one more Romeo between your thighs, hmm?

  My head began to pound. I’d kept the nightmares at bay at night, but I couldn’t do anything about them with my eyes open.

  “Don’t you deserve his love?” Shrinks had a brilliant way with rhetoric. “Do you not love him just as much in return? Haven’t you made him happy all these years?”

  Cock-teasing bitch. Is this how you keep those motherfuckers sniffing around you?

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” I wanted to vomit.

  Early in our marriage, Nirvaan and I had fought like cats and dogs—mostly about Zayaan, but not in the way most people might expect.

  After my rape, I’d broken contact with the guys. I’d made Surin bar them from contacting me, to stop circling me like dogs around a bitch in heat, as people had begun to talk. I was a young woman now. I wasn’t a child running around playing pranks anymore.

  “Do you want her reputation in shreds?” he’d thundered at them.

  It had worked. They’d backed off.

  On the pretext of a better college education, I’d moved to Mumbai to live with a cousin, distancing myself even further. It had been easy to break away from Zayaan, as his family had been going through their own hell and had moved to London soon after. Nirvaan hadn’t been so easily rebuffed. He’d kept in touch even though I never returned his calls or replied to his emails. He kept coming to Mumbai to see me even when I always stood him up.

  Only when I’d moved back to Surat four years later had he forced the issue by barging into my house. We’d fought that day. Nirvaan had wanted me to speak to Zayaan. He’d wanted us to make up and be friends again. He’d wanted to know why we’d stopped. I’d thrown his latest gold cell phone to the ground, smashed the screen, and walked away. He’d accused me of hiding from life, of being a coward and giving in to society’s demands. I’d retaliated with apathy. But no matter how cold I’d been or how viciously we’d fought, he hadn’t left my side since.

  Right after Nirvaan had gotten sick, he’d tried to divorce me, using our infamous fights as an excuse to shove me away. When the tactic hadn’t worked, he’d tried to convince his family that I was too young to be stuck with a dying man, that I’d be better off as a twenty-five-year-old divorcee.

  I’d stopped going out without him. I hadn’t wanted to do anything without him. I’d been content to sit by his bed and read. He’d resented me for that more than anything else. Hated me for choosing to stay home when he would’ve sold his soul to go out and live.

  You always wanted the things you could never have. It wasn’t even when you finally had it that you didn’t want it anymore. The grass isn’t always greener across the pond. But you couldn’t “want” something you had, or had acquired, because want implies a lack, and if there was no lack, there was no want to fulfill.

  I’d stopped wanting for a long time. I wasn’t as bad now, but Nirvaan was afraid I was heading down that path again—the lack of desire, feeling, connection. He wanted to make sure I’d have something or someone to live for once he was gone, and that was why he was doing all of this. He fancied himself as Jack, and I was his Rose.

  “I know what he’s doing, Asha Auntie. But it won’t work. He’s not some light bulb I’ll replace with a baby when he winks out.” And I definitely wasn’t going to replace him with Zayaan.

  How could I love him still? How could I burn for him right under my husband’s nose?

  The fact was, no matter how vile Rizvaan’s actions had been, his assessment of my character hadn’t been wrong.

  I was a slut. I was faithless. What was inside of me wasn’t normal.

  For three years, we’d built up to the night of our eighteenth birthdays.

  Of the three of us, Nirvaan was the most adventurous, and most of our shenanigans were his brainstorms. That didn’t imply Zayaan and I were content to stand by and twiddle our thumbs. Oh no. We’d hear out Nirvaan’s suggestions and spice them up to the next level.

  “Flicked the keys to my aunt’s bungalow,” Nirvaan said, dangling the bunch in front of our faces. “It’s at Ambavadi, not too far, and completely empty for the summer. Better than a hotel room, yeah?” He waggled his eyebrows, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

  A thrill shot through me. We’d been in discussions about tonight since Christmas—Zayaan and me, Nirvaan and Zayaan, all three of us on conference calls—but seeing the keys to the bungalow gave it a ring of truth. It was really going to happen, and I was beyond excited. I was electrified. I’d forgotten how to be afraid.

  “I’m not sure we should do this. What if you get pregnant?” asked Zayaan, ever the doomsayer.

  Nirvaan and I turned to give him the you’re-joking-right look.

  We’d planned it all out, down to the last condom, and he was still unsure. I’d even gone to a gynecologist a few weeks ago to get myself checked and to get a prescription for birth control pills. I’d found the doctor through the recommendation of a recently married classmate. It turned out that pills weren’t magic wands and didn’t work instantly. I needed to be on them for a month at least, two would be safer.

  To be safest, we decided to use more than one prophylactic aid.

  Randy and audacious we might be, but we weren’t stupid.

  “I brought half a dozen boxes of condoms from California, chodu. Wear two, one on top of the other, if you think that’ll help,” said Nirvaan.

  I started giggling, and Zayaan cursed Nirvaan for being so flippant all the time.

  “And in case something does go wrong—which I highly doubt—you planned to marry anyway. So, it’ll be a few years early.” Nirvaan shrugged, as if a shotgun marriage at eighteen was no biggie.

  No biggie for him maybe. His parents were cool, and he was loaded. But Zayaan and I had a long road to travel before we could commit like that—education and job security, getting a nest egg started, convincing his Medusa of a mother that I was way better than any imam’s daughter.

  “Are you game? Or are you having second thoughts, too?” Nirvaan asked, quirking an eyebrow at me. He got into his cousin’s Opel Astra that he’d borrowed for the night and started the car.

  This night was my birthday present, and I wasn’t going to let Zayaan’s latent possessiveness or practicality doorstop my way. He’d already delayed our sexcapade for so long. He hadn’t allowed more than smooches and touches until I turned eighteen. To be honest, I was grateful for his sense and restraint, but I didn’t want to restrain myself a second longer.

  “No second thoughts. We’re coming,” I said as I pulled Zayaan’s arm.

  He allowed me to push him into the backseat. I took the front seat, and we were on our way. I turned around, grinning at my sweetie pie. He looked cute and slightly tense. I loved that he worried about me, but he really didn’t need to. And I was positive he wanted this as much as Nirvaan and me.

  “Hey. It’s us, the three of us, like we always planned. And I bought special clothes for tonight. I’m not letting them go to waste.”

  “Oh, baby, what have you got on…or not got on?” Nirvaan tried to snake his hand under my skirt, but I slapped it away.

  The car swerved, and we were blasted with a lot of car horns and shouts from other drivers on the road.

  “Drive. Don’t kill us before we get there,” I said, laughing.

  I’d put a lot of thought into my attire and decided on a fairly new print silk shirt, a black thigh-length flared skirt, and brand-new black cotton undergarments. The only thing I wasn’t sure about with this whole affair was my body. I couldn’t seem to shake off my stick figure. I was hesitant about getting naked. It would get awkward enough without full exposure.

  They’d dressed up, too. Nirvaan was in a crisp new Polo shirt and jeans while Zayaan wore a starched white shirt and stonewashed jeans. They smelled identical. Nirvaan always bought them the same co
logne on their birthdays. I’d dubbed the scent Nirvana.

  Ten minutes into the drive, Nirvaan’s mobile began to ring. “Shit. Can you fish it out of my pocket?”

  “You’re just trying to get me to feel you up first,” I said, with an eye-roll. But I did as he’d asked while he made fake orgasmic sounds. I flipped the phone open and put it to his ear.

  “Yo! What? Yes. Yes, he is.” He jerked his head away from the phone and darted a quick look at Zayaan through the rear view mirror. “It’s your ummi…your mom, man.”

  Wow. Gulzar Auntie’s radar had struck again. How she managed to interrupt our dates every single time, I had no idea. Talk about possessive mothers. As Zayaan didn’t have a cell phone yet, she treated Nirvaan’s and mine as if it was Zayaan’s.

  I made a face but handed the phone over, thinking how surprised Zayaan would be at midnight when we handed him his birthday present—the latest Nokia in lacquer black.

  My internal glee faded as Zayaan’s expression changed from puzzlement to screaming horror. His face went white, and his ears flashed fuchsia. Most alarming was, he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Turn the car around. Abu had a heart attack.” Zayaan’s voice wobbled, but he sucked in a breath and went on, “Rizvaan is in trouble. The police are looking for him. They have an arrest warrant out for him. Abu collapsed after the police left, and my uncles rushed him to the hospital. Ummi’s waiting…I need to go. My sisters…I need to…I need…” He looked scared out of his wits. “Fuck. What do I do? What the fuck has Rizvaan done?”

  My heart had begun to beat wildly as Zayaan spoke, and now, it was lodged in my throat. Nirvaan asked for the phone back and dialed furiously with one hand while whipping the car around in an illegal U-turn. The car swerved madly again, and we just missed hitting a van. Horns blared, and drivers shouted at us, but Nirvaan didn’t slow down.

  Don’t think of the accident. Don’t fall apart. I shoved my parents’ car accident out of my head and held on to the dashboard with both hands.