Paradise Lost and Found

This story is selected as Editor’s Choice and won INR 500

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It had all begun with one simple question.

“Do you even know what love is?”

The question was thrown at her out of nowhere. She was an innocent ten year old at that time, pestering her older sister to play with her. Her sister, a moody eighteen year old, had been moping around in the room all day long. Later she found out from someone that the reason for her sister’s tears was a guy. A guy whom she had been dating for the past whole year. A guy who had suddenly decided that he didn’t love her anymore.

“Di, why are you getting so upset about a boy? It’s okay if he doesn’t love you anymore. Feelings change. His did. But I still love you.”

“Do you even know what love is?”

She was momentarily stumped at the way her sister shouted at her between sobs. However, she recovered soon enough to share her ten year old words of wisdom.

“Of course I do. It’s what I feel for you. It’s what Mom and Dad feel for us. Love is a feeling.”

Her sister lifted her head to look at her. It was a strange intense look, which almost made her flinch. The bitterness in her eyes was replaced by pain. “Love is a feeling? See that is where you are wrong. You don’t know anything about love.”

She never thought about that conversation again. It was buried away amongst the millions of other long lost childhood memories. She had always felt that her sister had merely blurted out something in her depressed state. People fall in love all the time. Love is a feeling. She was not wrong. Her mind was made up.

Until she laid her eyes on him for the first time.

****

They were a wrong fit right from the start. She was a simple, happy-go-lucky person. She didn’t expect much from life. Her priorities were set straight. Her family came first, before everyone and everything else. She was content in the company of a few selective friends. She was reasonably normal. He, on the other, was chaos to her carefully knitted world.

He had got those kind of looks, which almost challenged her not to fall for him. His molten brown eyes were like a magnet, pulling her a little bit closer every second. His voice was a pure soothing melody, the kind of song you wanted to play on the radio over and over again. But that wasn’t what drew her to him. She was drawn to him because of the empty, lifeless look in his eyes. Because of the forceful upward turn of his lips which was mistaken as a smile. Because of the worry lines on his forehead which lingered even during the brightest of his laughs. Because his agonized face resembled a verse of poetry, too damaged for even paper to handle. She was drawn to him because he was broken. And she was a fixer.

The moment she realized she was falling for him, a warning light shone brightly in her mind. She was made aware that this was the kind of love which would destroy her to the very core of her existence. But she acknowledged the warning and chose to ignore it. She knew that there would be no one to fix the fixer herself but she chose to risk it. She knew she would crumble and collapse in an irreparable way but she chose to break herself.

And that very moment made her realize that her sister had been right all along. Love isn’t and had never been about feelings. Love, just like everything else in the world, is a choice.

****

“You should stay.”

She would never forget the first words she had spoken to him. She had been observing him from afar for a long time now. He was the kind of unsolved mystery which made boring college lectures suddenly fascinating. She knew by now that he didn’t speak to anyone much. If she was an introvert, then he was a closed book. Unlike the others, he didn’t even attempt to make friends and shunned away the people who did. He wasn’t rude to them or anything. He just seemed to not care about befriending anyone. It was as if he was too drowned in his own life to care about mundane tasks like fitting in. And so, it was quite predictable that he was surprised at her words.

They had been standing at the bus stop for quite some time. Enough to comprehend that the bus would be delayed due to the heavy rains. He had started to walk out in the rains alone and she had taken this as an opportunity to talk to him.

He turned around and looked at her in confusion.

“Excuse me?”

She pointed to sky in indication. “It’s raining too hard to walk without an umbrella. You shouldn’t go walking in such weather. The bus will be here at any minute now.”

“The bus is delayed.”

“Well then, the sun will come up. It always does.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Sorry but do you even know me?”

She would have answered this question in millions of different ways but she chose to go with the basic reply. “We are in the same division.”

He did not comment on this so she continued.

“I am Sanjana, by the way.”

His lips turned up in a polite non-smile. “Hi.”

“That’s the cue to tell your name.”

“Vivaan.”

She already knew that of course. But she was trying hard not to be too much of a stalker here.

“As in first ray of the sun?”

She didn’t miss the grimace on his face before his mask was back on.

“Yes.”

Small talk obviously wasn’t the way to get through to him. She couldn’t get more than two syllables out of him that way. She looked at him from the corner of the eye as he debated whether to step out in the rain again and she decided to push her luck a little bit.

“That’s ironic, isn’t it?”

The surprised look was back on his face. It was a better reaction than the blank polite expression.

“What do you mean?”

“Well you know…there’s the first ray of sun. And then there’s you.”

A flicker of anger sparkled in his eyes fiercely. She knew that was playing with fire here.

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I don’t think anybody does,” she answered, not taking her eyes off him. “I have never seen you talk to anyone in the entire college.”

“Then you should have realized that I am not interested in talking to anyone,” he retorted, angrily.

“Or maybe you just like sporting this image. Being the new mystery guy. Trying to show that you are not normal like the others.”

He scoffed. “There is nothing called normal. Normal is an illusion.”

She smirked back at him. “So you would think. I am normal.”

“Are you now?” he mocked at her. “Here you are standing at a bus stop, arguing with someone you don’t even know.”

She bore her eyes into his. “Maybe I edited the truth a little bit. Maybe I do know you.”

“Yeah whatever, we are in the same class. That doesn’t change the fact that you are a stranger to me.”

“Strangers are often illusions.”

He held up his hands and backed away from her.

“Look I am done with all this. I don’t understand whether this is some pathetic flirting attempt or whether you are just trying to pass time. Whatever drama this is, I don’t want to be a part of it.”

She smiled at his little tirade.

He sighed. “Why are you are smiling now?”

She pointed at the sky again. “It has stopped raining.”

He looked at her expression. She was grinning proudly, her face like that of a kid waking up on his birthday morning. He bit his lips to cover a smile.

“Is that what you wanted to prove? That time passes quickly when you are having random conversations?”

She shook her head gently. “No. I wanted to prove that the sun does come up. It always does.”

He stared at her speechless. She smiled back.

“You should stay.”

“Why?” he whispered. “It has stopped raining now.”

“I know,” she whispered back. “I still want to you to stay.”

She lowered her eyes this time, feeling shy at blurting out such a bold answer. He looked at the delightful, confusing girl next to him, as her shades changed from confident to fragile in the fraction of a second. His lips pulled up into something which felt real after a long time. He sat down on one of the empty bus seats in response. She smiled as she took her place next to him, a place where she wished to be for the rest of her life.
***

Sure enough, loving him was one of the most difficult and challenging things she had ever done in life. There were times when he shut her out completely. She had to beg and plead him to let his mask down. There were times when he sank back into his depressed, dark side and she had to go out of her way to bring him back into the light. Slowly and gradually, he had opened up to her about his past. She had seen his vulnerable phase, his moody, bleak days, his lonely phase, his tired phase. She had seen him laugh his heart out, tease her about stupid things, crack jokes which were so lame that they turned out to be funny, sing tunelessly on top of his voice and smile for no reason. She had seen him at his best and his worst.

All she knew was when she was him; her ordinary life was pushed to the extremes. She experienced the kind of love which was intense, passionate, heart-breaking yet breathtakingly beautiful. He excited her, challenged her, and pushed her beyond boundaries which she didn’t even know existed. Although she was a dreamer at heart, her hold over reality hadn’t loosened. She did know that it wasn’t possible to be this happy for too long. It’s all about Physics in the end. Everything that goes up eventually comes down. She had soared the skies of paradise with him and knew that there would come a day when she would have to sink to the depths of hell too.

****

“I can’t do this anymore.”

She stared at him wordlessly for a moment. “So that’s your solution for everything huh?” she lashed out, finally. “If there’s a problem, then let me just push away everyone who loves me?”

“Please don’t make this harder Sanju.”

“It is hard Viv! There is no easy way to break up with someone you have been in love with for three years! Don’t you get it? It is hard! It is heart-breaking! It hurts like hell! It is supposed to be this way. So stop turning off your emotions every time you start to feel something.” She was trying her best to sound annoyed but her voice broke at the end of the sentence.

He stared at her with the eyes which sent her heart throbbing against her rib cage in joy. Only today, the feeling was replaced by a dull empty hole, threatening to engulf her into the dark oblivion.

“You know this had to end someday Sanju. Maybe this is it. It’s time.” His eyes were staring straight ahead as if he was reciting a weather report instead of breaking up with the love of his life. But she knew him too well to understand that this was his way of dealing with the pain.

“Why are you so sure that this had to end someday?” she whispered, refusing to let him break away from her stare. “Because people leave you every time?”

His eyes flashed with an unrecognizable emotion before he managed to compose himself. “Don’t.”

He didn’t bother to emphasize. That one broken word conveyed volumes more than a speech ever could have.

She reached to take his hands into hers. “We are going to do this my way Viv. You are not going to be the one walking away this time. I am not going to be one to come after you. I love you Vivaan and I know that you love me too. But that is not enough. I believe in us. I believe that we will survive all of this. And I need you to do the same. I can’t be the only one fighting for our relationship anymore. I need you to fight with me.”

She released his hands and cupped his face in her palms. She looked into the molten brown eyes which had drawn her closer for the first time. “I am going to be the one walking away this time Viv. But you need to understand that does not mean I am leaving you. You need to understand that love is not just something that happens once and then that’s it. You need to fight for it every day and every single moment of that day. Because if this ever gets too hard, if it ever feels unbearable, if I ever walk away from you, I need to know that you’ll come after me. I need to know that I’m worth fighting for. I need you to stop me Viv. So stop me. Please.”

And so she loosened her grip against him and turned away. She took slow, measured footsteps, afraid that she might collapse at minute now. She reached the door and paused for a moment, hoping against hope. Until her mind carried her away from the place where her heart still dwelt. As she closed the door behind her, she allowed the tears which she had been holding back for so long, to finally make way.

***

It had been one month. That one month felt like a decade. It felt like forever since she had last seen him. Or maybe just one day with the pain still fresh in her mind. She didn’t know how she had survived this month. She had just dragged herself out of bed every morning. She had just fake smiled her way through life. She had just reminded herself to breathe in and breathe out every now and then. She had just done all of this over and over again, hoping that one day she wouldn’t have to remind herself to live anymore.

Today, she stood at the bus stop where they had met for the first time. She was just standing there, staring into the empty space which resembled her life. She was just waiting to take a step forward on the road and walk into the nothingness. Until a familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.

“You should stay.”

Her breathe got stuck in her throat as she dared herself to turn around.

She could instantly spot the subtle changes in him. Things like the way he hadn’t shaved for the past month, the way his eyes looked like a forced insomniac, the way his voice sounded hesitant as if he was afraid she was going to ignore him. But beneath all that, it was still the guy she had given her heart away to and hadn’t yet got it back.

She looked into his soft glance and asked,” Why?”

“Because I want you to.”

She shook her head, choking back a sob. “That’s not good enough. How long do you want me for? Until the next fight?”

Before she knew it, he was right in front of her, his fingers wrapped around hers. “I want you to shout at me when I am pushing you away. I want you to hold my hand when nothing feels right. I want you to grumble about petty things just to watch me pamper you. I want you tell me the same stories over and over again just so that I can watch you while you do. I want you to complain when I let you win purposefully and accuse me of cheating when I don’t. I want you cry your heart out in front of me, so that I can kiss your tears away.” He brushed his fingers against her cheek tenderly. “I want you through the good and the bad, through the laughter and the pain, through the difficult times and the easy ones. I want you every single day, for the rest of my life.”

She did break down this time, right into his arms. He wrapped her in a protective embrace as he kissed the top of her head lightly.

“You were right Sanju. I had been hurt too many times before to believe in happy endings. I had lost my faith in everything. When things got bad, I gave up on them because I believed that they wouldn’t have worked out anyway. But then I met you and you showed me how wrong I was. You are the girl who showed me that even after the stormiest of nights, the sun will come up. It always does.”

She sighed in content in his embrace. The sun shone in the sky above the two lovers, symbolizing the end of a stormy period and a new beginning.

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