by Durjoy Datta
WRONG LANE. THE GIRL I SAW IN MY DREAMS! AREN’T YOU?’
‘No!’ shouted Shreyasi in horror. ‘I’m not!’
‘It’s over, Shreyasi. NOW STOP FUCKING LYING,’ he roared.
He picked her up by the neck. His coarse fingers pressed against her voice box. Shreyasi felt her throat being crushed. The breath was knocked out of her. A shooting pain pierced through her body.
Daman let her go. She fell to the ground in a heap.
‘You came to Goa, you tailed me, but I just happened to bump into someone who shared your name—SHREYASI.’
‘But—’
‘And you couldn’t bear to see me with her so you just wanted to fucking end it all, didn’t you, you bitch? YOU KILLED HER!’
‘All these are lies!’
‘Lies? These are lies?’ asked Daman. ‘Wait.’
‘What are you doing?’
Daman took out his phone from the pocket. He played an audio file. ‘Listen.’
‘What?’
Daman leant closer to her face. ‘THIS. IS. YOUR. VOICE. CAN YOU HEAR THAT, YOU
STUPID SLUT? THIS IS YOU TELLING AVNI ALL ABOUT GOA. YOU ADMITTED TO THE
ACCIDENT!’
Avni: Did you want her to die?
Shreyasi: Of course! But that accident . . .
‘Listen to me.’
‘HOW TWISTED ARE YOU, SHREYASI?’
‘Daman, listen to me. I—’
‘WHAT? What? What do you want to say? That you have leverage? No more. The video against
Avni is gone. The book contract is signed. Check where your phone is?’ asked Daman as he fished out her phone from his pocket.
She got up. But she had barely taken a step when Daman threw it in the middle of the road. A truck passed over it.
‘Maybe you should have kept a backup, bitch.’
‘Daman—’
‘IT’S OVER,’ he said. ‘You come near me or any of my friends and family, I’m going to kill you myself.’
‘You—’
‘FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, SHREYASI,’ said Daman, tears now streaming down his face too.
‘A girl is dead because of you and it’s a shame you’re alive.’
‘When did you know? All of this was—’
‘All of this was a lie,’ said Daman. ‘You really thought I could fall in love with you, Shreyasi?
Everything I said to you, everything I did with you, everything I told you after I was discharged from the hospital was a lie. I never fell in love with you, I never got attached to you, Sumit never dated Avni, he wouldn’t dare to! We used you, Shreyasi. Avni, Sumit and I. We only just got back what you took from me. I just wanted you to admit to the truth, bitch! Does that come as a surprise to you? What else do you think should happen to someone like you? And now. WE ARE DONE.’
Daman turned away from her. He stepped inside his car and drove away to meet Avni. He had missed her all these months.
52
Shreyasi found Sumit sitting in the lobby of the hotel she was staying in. It had been three weeks since Daman broke her heart and lay waste to everything she had painstakingly built over three years. She couldn’t stay in the house and near her husband. The divorce proceedings were already under way. All her leverage was gone without the phone. She wanted to be alone. She had to take a break but the days had turned into weeks and she still hadn’t found the heart to go back.
‘What are you doing here?’ asked Shreyasi.
‘You look like shit,’ said Sumit.
‘I don’t need to talk to you.’
‘Of course, you don’t,’ he said.
‘YOU LIED TO HIM! YOU TOLD HIM I KILLED SHREYASI WHEN I DIDN’T! AND HE
THINKS I’M THE KILLER!’
‘Whoa, slow down, psycho. People are looking,’ said Sumit. ‘And haven’t we always lied to him? Me? You? His family? Shreyasi is dead. Oh, she’s not. The other Shreyasi killed the real
Shreyasi. Truth is always relative, isn’t it?’
‘How did you do that?’ she asked.
‘I thought we weren’t talking,’ said Sumit. ‘Do you want a coffee? I’m sure they can put it on your tab. You are here for how many weeks now? Three weeks? Two weeks?’
He waved down a waiter and ordered for two coffees.
‘How did he believe you?’ asked Shreyasi.
‘You know why Daman would go into a seizure and become unstable every time we told him
Shreyasi was dead? Because he was driving that day and he couldn’t take it that he had killed the girl he loved,’ explained Sumit. ‘But this time, we did something different.’
‘Wha—’
‘The day you gave Avni the offer she came to me, and both of us went to his therapist. It was a pickle of a situation. We wanted him to be normal, believe in the lie that Shreyasi still lived so he wouldn’t slip into an unstable behavioural pattern, but it couldn’t have come at the cost of letting you carry on with your insanity. So we came up with something else,’ he said. The waiter got them their coffees. Sumit mixed two sugar cubes in both of them and sipped his. Shreyasi’s coffee lay untouched.
‘Retrieval-induced Forgetting. The same we did the last time. Last time, we made him believe that Shreyasi was alive because his body couldn’t take the guilt of having killed Shreyasi. This time we told him Shreyasi was dead because we couldn’t have him believe that Shreyasi had come back, or that Shreyasi had always been around, first as a stalker and then as his lover,’ said Sumit.
‘But how did he believe . . . How did he cope?’
‘We told him a different story, a story far more difficult to sell than the last one. He remembered you when he woke up. Every time he woke up, he would remember the accident and panic about
what had happened to Shreyasi. And then he would remember you, the stalker, the supposed guardian angel. He would remember all that you did. He would remember that Shreyasi was back!
He fully believed you were the Shreyasi in the car, the stalker. He would ask for you. But we had to bring him closer to the truth. So we told him every time he woke up that Shreyasi is dead. Every time we told him the truth about you—that you were a dangerous stalker trying to take the dead
Shreyasi’s place—and he would react adversely. We kept trying to tell him that the real Shreyasi was dead but he refused to believe it so we garnished it with a little bit of a lie, of course, for taste. To make the truth more palatable for him.’ Sumit winked. ‘It’s said the most potent of lies are the ones which are 95 per cent true.’
‘So you told him I was in the taxi? That I caused the accident? Just to show me as the killer?’
‘Precisely. So Shreyasi was dead, but another Shreyasi was alive. And it was the one who lived who had killed the one who died. So the blood was on your hands, and Daman’s,’ said Sumit. ‘You had already established yourself as a dangerous stalker. He already had doubts of Shreyasi dying in the crash. We just put you behind the taxi driver. It was hard to sell him the story at first but we persisted. We didn’t even know it would work but we knew we had to try,’ said Sumit. ‘And slowly, he started seeing you in his dreams. We told him it was you who urged the taxi guy to drive faster and soon he had started seeing that in his dreams. He bought it hook, line and sinker. You killed his Shreyasi.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘How many texts have you sent him telling him the same?’
‘He will some day believe me.’
‘Oh, so naive,’ said Sumit. ‘He will not. Stop fighting it, Shreyasi. Your coffee is getting cold.’
Epilogue
Daman’s second book The Girl Who Loved, a book about a boy finding love in his life again, was unanimously loved by both new and old readers. The main characters Daman and Avni had fan pages and fan fiction written on them. The success party, more like a get-together for people who had worked on the book, was in full swing. Daman, for one, was drunk.
‘So,’ he said, putting his arm around Avni.
‘So?’
> ‘Do you like the book, Avni?’
‘I haven’t yet read it.’
‘Oh, haven’t you? I might have written about a girl who might faintly resemble you,’ he said.
‘Have you?’
‘Oh yes, it’s totally you, I think. Though I might have failed a little. She isn’t as ridiculously awesome as you are,’ he said.
‘You’re so drunk. I think I am going to take you home,’ she said.
‘And are you staying over?’
‘Of course, I am. You supposedly wrote a book about me. Why shouldn’t I?’
‘So are we like in a relationship now?’ slurred Daman.
‘One you can’t get out of. All your books will have to feature me now,’ she said.
‘What if I don’t?’
‘I will be watching. And you will have to pay if you try to be smart.’
‘I won’t,’ slurred Daman and kissed her. ‘Did I tell you something? Apart from the fact that I really really really love you?’
‘What?’
‘Jayanti got a call from the guys who compile the bestsellers lists?’ he said. ‘They say it’s going to be the no. 1 book on the list tomorrow.’
‘That is great!’ Avni kissed him back and hugged him. ‘I’m so happy for you!’
It was quite a night and it was 4 a.m. by the time they reached home. Avni couldn’t sleep out of excitement; she had to be the first one to see the bestseller list. Six in the morning, she got up and got the newspaper from Daman’s neighbour. She skipped to the READ section of the newspaper and there it was. The Girl Who Loved. No. 1 on the bestselling list. She looked at Daman sleeping and blew him a kiss. As she sat on the bed reading through the rest of the newspaper, she saw a little article on the fourth page. A girl named Shreyasi had overdosed on sleeping pills in a hotel room in Central Delhi.
‘What is it?’ asked Daman, stirring in his sleep.
‘Nothing,’ said Avni and dumped the newspaper in the dustbin. ‘Your book is at no. 1.’
‘It’s because of you.’
‘I know,’ she said.
‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, baby.’
THE BEGINNING
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2016
Copyright © Durjoy Datta 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Neelima P Aryan
ISBN: 978-0-143-42462-8
This digital edition published in 2016. e-ISBN: 978-9-385-99023-6
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
