Rewritten and update version of original story, published on 2023-11-02, link: Old version. Here I have added better character development to make the characters more unique and relatable.
Continued from previous blog - Link
A few years ago.
The Engineering college gate was loud with the end-of-day chaos and students spilling out in clusters, lecturers walking briskly with folders pressed to their chests, autos honking at the junction.
Pooja stood apart from all of it.
She was in a blue silk saree, the kind that catches light at certain angles and holds it. She stood with her back perfectly straight, as if her spine knew something the rest of her was still figuring out. Her dupatta was folded once over her left shoulder, edges even. She had worn the saree deliberately. She had taken two hours to get here deliberately. Everything about today was deliberate.
Except her eyes.
Her eyes were doing something they couldn’t be told to stop. She had worn her lenses today. a decision made at the mirror this morning for reasons she hadn’t admitted even to herself. But the lenses didn’t stop her eyes from doing what they always did when she was looking for something she was afraid she wouldn’t find. They scanned the crowd, moving left to right, searching for a familiar face, a familiar silhouette, a familiar presence.
A familiar silhouette appeared at the far end of the path.
Her breath caught. She touched the bridge of her nose out of habit, an old reflex from years of spectacles, and looked again.
It was him.
It was Sanjay.
Whatever composure she had assembled over the last two years, whatever careful distance she had constructed between the girl who loved him and the girl she had tried to become it dissolved in the three seconds.
She didn’t walk. She moved the way water moves when a dam gives way.
She reached him and wrapped her arms around him with both hands and held on as if releasing him would mean something final.
“I love you, Sanjay.”
“Pooja …” He glanced around, catching the eyes of a few passing students. “There are so many people around.”
She heard him. She didn’t care. She pressed closer. Her fingers found the fabric of his shirt at the back and held it. Two years. Two years of ghost-following his social media from an account he didn’t know existed. Two years of watching him post motivational quotes about moving on while she was still standing exactly where he had left her.
Sanjay responded the only way he knew how with a kiss on her forehead. It was a kiss that said so said much without saying anything at all.
“Love you too, Pooja.”
She pulled back then, blinking. The warmth of his kiss had returned her to herself, to the footpath, to the watching eyes. Her cheeks flushed and she laughed softly, dropping her gaze for a moment before bringing it back up in a way that was steady and direct, the way her eyes always were when she felt safe.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop myself. We’re meeting after two years.”
He took her to the nearest Ganapathi mandir, a few miles from the University. The early evening light was going amber by the time they reached. The small courtyard was quiet except for the faint ring of a bell somewhere inside and the smell of incense and fresh marigolds.
He turned to face her in front of the sanctum. His expression, for once, had none of the performance in it. This was the version of Sanjay that very few people ever saw and only emerges in private, when there was no audience to perform composure for.
He took her hand in both of his.
“I’m incredibly sorry, Pooja. I had to ditch you because of our misunderstandings. I never imagined you would come back for me.”
“Thanks to social media,” she said, and the slight curve of her lips told him she had spent a long time deciding whether this moment was worth the risk. “I’ve been following you. Under a ghost account. For the last year. It wasn’t hard to find you.” She paused. “But you never looked for me, Sanjay. After we broke up. Not once.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. His eyes didn’t go dull but they went inward, the way they did when he was deciding how much of himself to give away. Then something shifted. His free hand came up and touched her fingers.
“I did. But the guilt stopped me. What I did to you and I’m extremely sorry.”
The tears that came surprised him more than her. He hadn’t planned them. Pooja looked at the moisture at the edge of his eyes and felt something in her chest unknot, slowly, like a thread being pulled free.
She kissed his cheek.
“I love you. Let us be together again. Forever.”
“It is tough to find a loved one,” he said softly, and for once there was no lecture in his voice, no structure, no composed-man-handling-things. Just a man standing in a temple saying something true. “It is tougher to find a loved one who knocked on your door a second time. How can I leave you?”
They stood in the temple courtyard as the light went gold and then dim, as the bell inside rang again for the evening prayer, and the world outside continued its noise without them.
Ten months later.
It was the fourteenth of February. Pooja had taken a half-day from her college.
She had not told Sanjay she was coming. She had bought a small box of his favourite cashew burfi from the shop near the bus stand. She had worn her glasses today, the ones he had once said made her look like she was reading the world rather than just living in it. She had taken the longer route deliberately, the one that passed the theatre, because she knew he sometimes went there on weekday afternoons.
She saw them from across the road.
Sanjay. And a girl she recognised as Swati, his classmate, the one whose name had appeared once or twice in passing conversation, the one she had not thought to worry about.
They were walking toward the theatre entrance. His hand was resting lightly on the small of her back, the way it had rested on Pooja’s back in the early days of their relationship, when they were still learning how to be together. Swati said something and tilted her face up toward him and Sanjay laughed, a particular kind of laugh that Pooja had seen only a handful of times in her life.
She had been about to cross the road.
She didn’t cross.
She stood on the footpath with the box of pulla reddy badshaah in her hands and watched them disappear through the glass doors. A two-wheeler honked behind her. She stepped back. Her back, out of habit, straightened. Her eyes, already looking slightly to the left but not at the theatre, not at the road, but at some middle distance that wasn’t anything and stayed there for a long moment.
She did not cry. Not here.
She touched the bridge of her nose. Adjusted the glasses that didn’t need adjusting.
Then she turned and walked back the way she had come.
She waited two months.
This was not weakness. This was Pooja, and Pooja never arrived at the door without first circling the question three times, approaching it from different angles, giving it every possible chance to resolve itself without confrontation. She believed that if she showed him enough love, if she held still enough and trusted enough, he would find his way back to honesty on his own.
He didn’t.
The calls became shorter. The replies came later. The distance grew in the way distances do when no one names them and quietly, incrementally, until one morning you realise you are standing very far from where you started.
She chose to stop. Not with a fight. Not with an ultimatum. She began citing her career, her exams, her future plans. She stepped back one degree at a time.
The months after were different.
She cried more for Sanjay than she had for her parents. She understood this later, in the quiet of a session with Meera, and felt a complicated guilt about it. Her parents were a wound she had inherited before she was old enough to choose it. Sanjay was a wound she had walked into with her eyes open, in a blue silk saree, on a deliberate afternoon. That was harder to forgive.
Present Day. The Psychotherapy Clinic.
”Please wait outside or speak to my receptionist for the next queue. I’m already engaged with a client”, said the therapist.
The receptionist’s waiting area was the kind of space designed to feel calm with neutral walls, soft lighting, magazines fanned in a careful arc across the side table. The kind of room that succeeded at looking peaceful while the people inside it rarely were.
Pooja sat in the chair nearest the window. Back straight. Legs crossed at the ankle. She had worn her lenses today. She had a film magazine open across her lap and she was reading it with the focused attention.
She heard footsteps but didn’t look up.
“Pooja.”
She looked up.
The magazine stilled in her hands. One half-second of something unguarded moved across her face with a genuine surprise which was quickly replaced by a careful composure. Her eyes, which had been scanning the magazine, now locked onto him with a steady and direct gaze that was both warm and guarded.
“Sanjay.” A beat. Then, with that composed warmth “I’m amazing. How are you?”
“Fantastic,” he said, and sat down in the chair across from her with a brightness that felt slightly more assembled than genuine.
“How come you are here, Sanjay?”
“Counselling session. Going through a tough phase.” He paused, and something in his expression shifted which was not quite genuine, but reaching toward it. “And you? Are you here for counselling too?”
“No.”
He tilted his head, reading her the way he always had. “Are you working here?”
She smiled and shook her head.
“I couldn’t stop noticing, you look very stunning, Pooja.”
Something moved briefly across her face. Her hand came up, fingers touching the bridge of her nose and quickly resets herself. It was a reflex she had developed over years of wearing glasses, but it was also a way to momentarily break eye contact and gather herself when something unexpected happened.
“Thank you,” she said, clear and warm and closing nothing.
“Tell me, why are you here?”
She held his gaze for a moment. It was the steady kind of eye contact she kept when she was composed and the kind that didn’t waver, that gave nothing away but did not hide either.
“I’m here for my husband,” she said. “He is presently having a counselling session with the therapist.”
<<< To be Continued >>>