Forever Is True

by Novoneel Chakraborty

  ‘Anyway, when I did muster courage and approached my father, he thought that I was the younger twin. Strangely, he addressed me as Saveer but believed that I was Veer. He behaved as if I had never really existed. I was stunned. I didn’t understand why my brother, my little one, had never thought of correcting my parents. That he was Veer and not Saveer! But there was no place for me at home any more. My parents and my brother seemed to have wiped off all memories of me. Bitter and despairing, I ran away from home.

  ‘Roaming around homeless, I nurtured an anger and hatred against Veer, the brother who had usurped my identity and had stolen my life. I swore to fuck his every happiness till I was alive. Till he was alive. It was then that I went on a killing spree. I killed my parents because I hated them, was disgusted by their nonchalance, their insensitivity to come to my help, their refusal to listen to my complaints against my uncle, but more importantly, to let me go with him against my wishes, even while I cried myself hoarse, to not have made any attempts to contact me, to find out with me, to remember me.

  ‘So I bred the Aedes Aegypti near our house and one of the mosquitoes bit my father and he contracted dengue. After his death, I racked my brains and came up with an even sinister plan to kill my mother. But I didn’t even have to execute it. When I confronted her, years later, she was so shocked that soon after I left, she suffered a cardiac arrest. Maybe she realized that she had committed the most heinous sin ever by snatching the childhood away from a child.’

  The woman stopped abruptly. Prisha tasted her own tears. She didn’t know that she had started crying.

  ‘You are not a woman for real? You are really his brother,’ she said in a choked voice.

  ‘Based on the genitalia an infant is born with, it is either declared a human male or a human female. But this is only one of our many identities. Years of constant sexual abuse had made me shudder at the thought of a man’s touch. I couldn’t see myself in the mirror. I couldn’t see myself naked, you understand?’ The woman sobbed.

  ‘Imagine this: someone scars you so much at an impressionable age that you end up hating yourself. You hate the sex that you belong to. And it is so difficult to acknowledge that hatred, especially when you are born a male in a patriarchal society, when you are taught to take pride in your sex, when you are made to feel emasculated if don’t perform the roles that have been ascribed to men. The most primitive war is between the penis and the vagina. And it has seeped into our system so much that it doesn’t even seem like a war any more. It was meant to complement each other and take life forward but we ended up pronouncing one’s strength and declaring the other, the weaker sex.

  ‘My only blessing was that I was sharp and could therefore find work. The day I turned twenty-one, I underwent a sex-change operation in Bangkok. I had worked hard and collected enough money by doing odd jobs. I killed the man in me. I felt happy to be a woman. I felt alive after a long time. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like I had the body which had been preyed upon. Suddenly, I felt sacred from within. But then I realized, it is even more difficult to be a woman. A man can only be fucked by other men. But a woman is constantly gang-banged by both men and the society. But I survived. Somehow.’

  But the woman soon sounded bitter. ‘The happiness was nothing in comparison to the hatred I felt for Veer. My uncle had only manipulated my parents, but he had manipulated everybody by becoming Saveer. That little bastard whom I loved and cared for so much . . . for whom I had sacrificed my own self,’ she spat on the ground.

  The real Saveer then went outside. Prisha didn’t know what to think, what to say or what to feel. For the first time since she had been kidnapped, she did not think about her freedom. She had always thought that the murderer, whoever he was, had to be a psycho, but she wasn’t so sure any more. We all build our own prisons, sketch our own version of hell and choose to live our whole life assuming there isn’t more to either the prison or the hell. What Saveer—the real one—needed was freedom, not revenge. It was evident he had mistaken one for the other.

  Prisha didn’t eat or sleep that day. Saveer came back late at night and lay down next to Prisha.

  ‘Do you know what your biggest problem is?’ Prisha asked. There was no response but she knew that Saveer was listening to her.

  ‘It’s not your past. Not even what happened to you. Of course, god forbid such a heinous and dastardly thing from happening to any child, or to anyone for that matter, but it had all happened years ago. Your biggest problem is that you are obsessed with your brother and his happiness. In that obsession, you’ve forgotten that you’re actually free. And that’s your only and biggest problem. You have forgotten to live freely. You said you would kill me on his thirty-sixth birthday. But what after that? You know this very well that he won’t involve himself with anybody after my death. Neither will he have a purpose in his life nor will you. You tell me, where do you and your life figure in all this? Shit happens to a lot of people. I agree, in your case it was as ugly as it could be, but does that mean you don’t deserve to live the way you should? With dignity, with freedom, without making one individual the purpose of your life? You tattooed on his back that you will fuck his every happiness, but honestly, I feel that you have fucked up your happiness the most in all these years. He had Ishanvi, he had me. But who did you have? Did you even give anyone a chance? What I know about love is that it can be both a whiplash and a healer. Depends on how we let it affect us. I know you are listening to me, so speak up. Damn it!’

  Prisha was right. Every word of hers had been consumed. The woman turned to face her.

  ‘Come to the point,’ she said.

  ‘The point is simple. If you still feel that imprisoning me here and then killing me on his birthday will solve anything then you are delusional. If someone, years ago, destroyed something as beautiful as your childhood, then now, years later, you too are doing the same. You are destroying a beautiful life which I can have, which he can have and which you too can have.’

  ‘Come to the point,’ the woman repeated herself.

  Prisha took a deep breath. It was time to say what she had on her mind.

  ‘You allow me to go. I will call up the police and tell them where I am. They will come fetch me. I will feed them a false story, say that I don’t know who my abductor was or what he looked like. I’ll tell them that I somehow managed to escape. I won’t tell them anything—not even that you are a woman now. And that frees you for life. You may have killed people. In fact, you killed my friend too. But I now know this for a fact that you are not a killer. You are not a murderer. You are not your uncle.’

  Saveer blinked, tears rolled down her cheeks. They kept looking at each other. After a while, Prisha said, ‘You hold the guy I love the most responsible for your unhappiness. Have you ever tried to know his version of the story? Maybe he was not the one who betrayed you. Maybe he had been fed a wrong story. Did you ever give him a chance to explain? Did you? All hell had broken loose on him for all these years. He is your brother, after all! Your little one! What if you came to know that he had been innocent all along? Won’t it destroy you as badly as your uncle had destroyed you?’

  Each and every word was an unexpected punch. The woman had not expected a young girl like Prisha to have interpreted her story in a way that she herself had never thought of. It was as if till now her life had been one long running sentence and Prisha had just told her that it was high time she put a full stop. And a change of paragraph didn’t mean an end to the story. It meant another beginning. Do I really have a life beyond this complicated mess that I have created for myself and others? she thought. She could smell freedom in the thought which Prisha’s words had created in her. And a soul, caged inside its own dark thoughts, can’t be imprisoned any more after it had sniffed the scent of freedom. She turned and blew out the flame in the lantern—the only source of light in the boat.

  29

  On the thirteenth day of Prisha’s disappearance, Saveer got a call from an unknown number.
He had not had a wink of sleep in the last thirteen days. He picked it up after the third ring. His heart raced, hearing Prisha’s distressed voice. She told him she was calling from a PCO in a village near Bengaluru. Saveer, who was with Shetty at that time, put her on speaker. Shetty jotted down the details of the location and passed it on to his team. Prisha was asked to stay where she was. After the lead given by the courier company’s guard, the police had considered that Prisha could be in Mandya but had failed to trace her. She was finally tracked down after two hours. Saveer, Gauri and her parents accompanied the police to the village.

  Prisha and her parents broke down when they met each other. She looked weak and fragile. Gauri sobbed while hugging her.

  ‘You almost killed me, bro.’ she said.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Prisha said and looked across at Saveer. Standing right behind her parents, he felt like a curse had been lifted from him. They neither hugged nor shook hands.

  The police wanted a statement from Prisha. She directed them to the boat where she had been kept as a captive. She told them it was never a woman but a man. Saveer’s twin brother, Veer. He was there with her for twelve days, after which he didn’t come back. Prisha managed to call for help and was rescued by some locals. She also mentioned that Veer did not torture or harass her during the time he held her in captivity. The police continued their search for a few more days but they couldn’t track Veer Rathod. On Prisha’s request, Saveer asked Shetty to close the case.

  ‘He didn’t tell me if every death was a coincidence or not, but he confessed to having pushed me off the hill,’ Prisha told Shetty in her statement. Her over-defensive stand raised his suspicion but he had no lead to prove otherwise.

  ‘What about Diggy?’ Saveer asked.

  ‘He wasn’t involved. That was someone else. At least that’s what he told me. I don’t think he had any reason to lie to me at least,’ she said. Saveer did not have any reason to doubt her. Through all her lies, Prisha knew that she was setting someone else’s life right.

  Prisha was staying with her parents in a hotel. Though she had convinced her parents once again to let her stay back in Bengaluru for her studies, her father couldn’t digest the fact that her boyfriend was double her age. And that she had faced serious, life threatening danger because of him—twice.

  ‘It’s all over now, Papa. Nothing bad will happen again,’ she assured him. They were in the hotel room. Prisha knew that she needed to be more convincing. But she had a lot of time to do that. Seeing her family happy, Prisha remembered the real Saveer’s story. There were parents out there who were responsible for destroying their own children’s lives. Prisha felt lucky to have parents who had always supported her dreams and aspirations. It was both an experience and a lesson for life. Never in her wildest imagination could she ever feel what the real Saveer must have gone through. She cried many a time under the shower recalling the story but promised herself to not reveal it to anybody no matter what. Not even to her Saveer.

  As she came out of the shower, she received a message on her new phone: I’m at the lobby. Prisha excused herself and went downstairs. Saveer was waiting for her. She hugged him tight.

  ‘I thought I had lost us,’ Prisha said.

  ‘You thought? I was sure.’

  Prisha broke the hug and said, ‘Didn’t you know your brother was alive? And that he was your twin?’

  ‘No! I was pretty young when it had all happened.’

  Prisha was happy to know that his version matched the story she had heard days ago from the real Saveer. Even then, she felt sorry for him—his parents had lied to him about his own brother.

  ‘But I realized something.’ Saveer said, ‘I used to look for him everywhere after he was gone but my parents convinced me that there had been nobody. When I told them I had seen someone resembling me before and he wasn’t there any more, my parents said I used to look at my own reflection in the mirror. I simply couldn’t guess that I had a twin brother. I was just four or five at that time for heaven’s sake.’

  Someone else was also four or five then. And he had been subjected to hell.

  ‘What I never understood was why my parents would lie to me about him?’

  You may not know ever, but I do. And I also know that you are Veer, the younger one. The little one, Prisha thought. She was tempted to ask how he had become Saveer from Veer, but knew he would probably not have an answer to that. His parents were dead, and that part of the story had gone with them. All that remained was a sibling saga in which one brother had misinterpreted the story and the other was misinformed. Hadn’t the real Saveer mentioned that he would often pretend to be Veer? Could it be that that confusion had persisted? Was it possible for the mother to have not been able to distinguish between her sons? Did they think it was Veer who was becoming wilder by the day? Did the uncle think that it was Veer whom he was taking away? Did the parents never realize their mistake? But why didn’t Veer himself correct them as Saveer had pointed out? Or did he simply abide by what his brother had taught him: to pretend to be him? Who knows? Prisha realized that neither she nor Saveer or Veer would ever get to know the truth. Maybe it was time to move on and let bygones be bygones.

  ‘Listen, I want you to join my parents for dinner tomorrow. Not as my professor. But as my future . . .’

  ‘Future?’

  ‘Life partner. They don’t get the concept of a double-my-age boyfriend.’

  ‘And what about life partner then? Are they okay with that?’

  ‘We will see. They are old school. If there’s anything they will be okay with, it would be a life partner.’

  They smiled at each other.

  ‘Just remember, don’t look your usual sexy self,’ Prisha said with a straight face.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t want my parents to know that their daughter has become a horny bitch staying alone here.’

  Saveer laughed hard, feeling happy after a long time. What he didn’t know was that someone somewhere didn’t have a problem with him being happy any more.

  30

  Months later

  Saveer’s thirty-sixth birthday

  The alarm woke him up. He had set it for 12 a.m. It was his birthday. And before Prisha could surprise him, he hoped to tell her straightaway that he only wanted her by his side. Not any surprise. He had got his fair share of surprises already. Now he wanted to be certain about everything. After all, his life wasn’t his any more. Life was theirs. Their individual journeys may have been different, but now they had come together. It was one road from here onwards. The sun would be theirs and so would be the shade. The complaints, the mistakes, the lessons, the realizations and the happiness . . . they would share everything. Saveer and Prisha had got engaged a month ago. It had been difficult convincing Prisha’s parents, and they accepted him only after he had slipped a ring on Prisha’s finger. They would get married a few years later.

  Saveer tried opening his eyes but realized that he had been blindfolded. He immediately got alarmed and tried taking it off but realized that he was handcuffed to the bed. His legs were tied as well. He was only in his boxers. Saveer was about to shout for help when he felt something ghastly cold on his right foot. He squirmed and goosebumps appeared on his leg.

  ‘Prisha, is that you?’ he asked loudly and then realized it couldn’t have been her since the house was locked and she did not have any spare key. He was about say something else when he felt something warm on his left foot. As if someone was holding a flame above it. The coldness and the warmth together started climbing up his legs as Saveer fidgeted on the bed helplessly. In the midst of all the confusion, he couldn’t help but feel aroused. There was the sound of muffled laughter. The coldness had travelled all the up to his inner thighs and was dangerously close to his shorts.

  ‘Whoever you are . . . fuck you!’ Saveer said, unable to take it any more. He already had an aching hard on.

  ‘Promise, Monster?’ Prisha asked. Saveer’s lips st
retched into a grin.

  ‘Girl, you are gone!’ he said.

  ‘You’ll have your chance. Right now it’s mine,’ she said, hovering the ice cube and the lighter above his thighs. She loved the way his penis was poking his shorts. She kept the lighter and the ice cube aside and kissed his thighs.

  ‘I hope by now you have realized that you have made a Mean Monster out of me,’ Prisha said in a naughty voice.

  ‘Uh huh! go ahead, show me how good a student you have been,’ Saveer said in a raspy voice. He felt his shorts being tugged down to his knees. The way she pressed at different points on his erect shaft while her tongue slurped on his balls made him clench his fist in ecstasy.

  ‘You really going to do this to me, baby?’ he pleaded. He heard her laugh.

  ‘You want me to stuff your mouth as well?’ she asked and crept up. He had his mouth open, expecting a kiss. It was a slurpy smooch. The way she sucked his tongue, sometimes urgently and at times gently, it seemed she was trying to call out to his soul. She slowly sat down on his erect penis, pushing it inside her wet vagina. Prisha started with slow hip movements and then closed her eyes. It had been long since they had been this intimate. Everything, right from the beginning, started flashing before her eyes. From the time she had seen him at Zinnia’s place to the moment she had hugged him in the hotel lobby, Gauri and her parents. Her long moans were punctuated by his fierce grunts. It only made her ride him harder. With him, she had understood that an orgasm was like a perfect world. And she could feel that she was about to enter that world. She came soon. And did so crying his name out loud and digging her nails into his chest. He was her territory now. Period. She’d claimed him after a long war. And no power would be able to steal him from her.