I do

I

“I feel alive”, she remarks as she describes the new man in her life. He’s another one of those, short-lived flings for her. She’s happy with the primary man in her life, on most counts. She looks outside that relationship for excitement, something that’s been missing in the primary one for a long time now.
“Every relationship becomes dull after so long”, she tries to explain. This is her way of keeping herself from breaking up with him, whom she genuinely loves. “It really means nothing in the bigger scheme of things”, she adds.
“Obviously, since it’s someone new, you have so much more to talk about than just ‘How was your day?’, which seriously gets boring after a while”. Radical, yet effective, her mechanism to keep the relationship alive. Lost though she may seem, she is calm and calculating, as she defines new rules for herself. Rules that invalidate the existence of a conscience. Rules that seem blissfully innocuous. Rules that perhaps conceal a darker truth.
“Infidelity is the norm, no more the exception”, she theorizes. She returns back from a wild night with the new guy. Her boyfriend opens the door to receive her, oblivious to the whirlwind of emotions she's going thru. “Love you, sweetie”, he says looking into her eyes. She smiles, hesitating to respond.
“What, you don’t love me anymore?!”, he asks mildly perturbed as he walks back to his place on the couch in front of the TV.
She turns around, bolts the door, takes a deep breath and responds, “I do…”


II

“I’ll never give the kind of importance I gave to you, to any guy again”, she says confidently to her ex whom she’s speaking to after a long hiatus. “I’ve realized that you cannot depend on anyone else for your happiness, so I stopped giving that right to anyone”, she continues. He almost can’t believe it, the cheerful girl full of life at one point of time, now reduced to another cynic, one that has seen her share of failures in life.
“I agree I’ve been adamant, but I can’t justify it. I’ve moved on now, and I’m the center of my own universe”, she claims. “And he was there at the right time in my life”, she talks of her fiancé.
“Are you happy”, he asks her.
“I’ve never been happier”, she responds without thinking.
He sighs, as he reminisces the time when every small event in her life was associated with him.
“Do you think about your ex before me?”, he asks about a guy whom she spent twice as much calendar time with. “Not at all”, she says not quite figuring out where this line of questioning is leading her.
“And what about me?”, he dives right to the point now. There’s a very obvious pause suddenly.
“Yeah, I do”, she reveals, knowing that she never could and never will be able to hide anything from him. He asks some more questions and realizes that she’s been watching over his life online, occasionally. He’s got all his answers now, knowing that she’s obviously taking a leap a little too soon with her marriage on the cards. He gives up, knowing there’s no way he can reason with her.
“So you really think you can live your whole life with this guy happily?!”, his voice trembling with frustration.
She pauses for more than a moment, then responds with the all-too-familiar adamant tone, “I do…”


III

“Sometimes it’s just not meant to be. You can’t define some relationships”, she thinks to herself. She’s broken up with the object of her thoughts some time ago.
“He was a bit too perfect for me”, she thinks as she reminisces the good old days before she went ahead and blew everything apart.
She always had her own ways to rationalize seemingly disastrous decisions to herself. She still can’t get over the guy, who had done everything right.
“He made me a better person, much more than I ever knew I could be”, she remarks to herself. The inter-city bus she’s traveling in pulls over at a designated halt for food. She walks up to the STD/ISD booth near the restaurant.
She dials the number that is almost inscribed in her memory, something she had promised she would wipe out, along with every other memory of him. He picks up, and she immediately hangs up. She repeats this twice more, each time hearing his voice and hanging up, not knowing what to say or do. She steps out of the booth, pays and walks back.
Meanwhile, he calls up on that number. The booth guy picks up, explaining that it was a public booth. “Wahan se kisne phone kiya tha do minute pehle?” (Who called up from there two minutes ago), he probes. “Sahab, koi ladki thi… Lambi si, gori si, aur…” (Sir, it was a girl. She was tall, fair and…), he had only started. He hangs up, already knowing who it was.
She looks up at the star-lit sky as a tear just drops out of her eye. “I still love you”, she whispers under her breath.
A thousand miles away, he looks out his window and sees the same star-lit sky wondering if she’s also looking up at the same stars that very moment.
He says softly, “I do too…”