Dear Kajal,
Hi the seventeen year old me. I am your twenty seven year future writing to you. I am a corporate lawyer working for a MNC. I am pretty successful so that's a good thing. I hope you are ok? Wait, who am I kidding. You were never ok. You were not ok. After all that was a bad time. Mom and dad were getting divorced, weren't they? Come to think of it, it was the blackest period of my life. Sorry, your life. Sorry again, "our" life.
It was also the time you met Abhi. Or you will. Soon. It will probably be the day when school starts. First day of your final year in school. You will be keeping a hand made calendar in your bag, striking each day as it goes, keeping a count of the number of days before you become an adult. Probably you should have kept a calendar of the number of days you have with Abhi also. Then maybe it would have lessened the inevitable pain that you endured for a long time. In fact you still endure it till today, at least the remaining vestiges of that pain that still are present in me.
Probably you think that it is some kind of joke that somebody is playing at you. But you have believe me. I hope that you can change certain events in your life so that the regret that you lived with or will be living with every day after that incident would not be there to eat you till the only thing you wish for is quick death.
I hope you understand what I am saying. Treasure every moment that you have with Abhi. After all he won't there with you in your future.
Love,
Kajal
Chapter Two
That first day of the final year. It was crap. In fact crap is an understatement for it. I thought I had seen bad days. But this one tops the list. I wish I could change that day. A lot would have then been straight and simple. For example my first meeting with Abhi would have been pretty nice if it hadn't been for the fact that I looked like a zombie.
Well it all started in the morning actually. You or rather I overslept and that's why you ended late on your first day to school. On top of that your form teacher turned out to be Mrs. Urmila Krishnan, your physics teacher. Yuck. She was wearing a bright orange saree with gold border. Double yuck.
You wanted to scream in exasperation when she started her lecture on punctuality but being out of breath, you let go of that emotion. I guess that turned out to be your biggest flaw. Your hamartia. If you had learnt to hold on and fight for them, you would have been a lot happier. But that will take a few more years of growing up before you realise that.
Anyways as you were late you had to sit in the front bench. Sheesh. And that too in the 'pakao' physics teacher's class. You used to snooze off in her class. God you were hopeless in physics, weren't you? But the best part of it was that you were sitting next to Abhi. Oh well, that's why you didn't fall asleep in Pakao's class that day. You thought you were the luckiest girl under the sun. And that was true, wasn't it? After class he introduced himself to you. "Abhimanyu Singh Rathore" he said. God you had control those freakish emotions. It took all your will to keep a straight face and look in his eyes and then say" Kajal. Kajal Singhania". God you sounded so cliched that the present could have just wrangled your neck apart for that.
After that it was always the first bench. You just never went to the back bench after that. Everyone made fun of you, even Yamini didn't lose the chance to tease you. You were nicknamed "front bencher". You were ready for everything as long as it was next to "him". God, you were stupid,weren't you?
Life went on as normal as it could be.
But the series of events that followed this normalcy were what lead to that fateful night.........when you lost Abhi.
Chapter Three
Dear Kajal,
It all began with that inter-school culturals. There were many firsts and lasts too. The first "first "came right after we started preparations for the whole thing. You suddenly became aware of yourself in that period. And it was not just you. It was also the seniors who saw you. Your feminity and your specs(which up till then had earned you the name "four eyes" ) became your assets. Every guy in that hall suddenly became your friend. And you(as usual) was unaware about that. You thought of it as guy friendliness even though it was a different kind of friendliness.
It was also the time Abhi noticed you. He probably was more aware than you were. Suddenly he started helping you in every task you did. It became normal for you. You took it for granted. I guess that it was another of your flaws. You took too much for granted where Abhi was concerned. I wish you or more properly the seventeen year old me hadn't done that. You regretted that the most in your future years.
Then one day he didn't come. It was July 15, 1995. After that he didn't come for two weeks. He missed most of the preparations. It was in those two weeks that you finally found out that your parents were getting divorced. That was a bad time. Now that I think of it, it was probably that bitterness which led you to do a lot of things you shouldn't have done. I wish you had handled it more maturedly.
When Abhi did come back, he looked normal. He was smiling but there was a certain sadness in his eyes. You never saw it. Never even bothered to ask him what had happened. If you had then you would have known that his mother had died. She had committed suicide.
I wish you had been a bit more considerate towards him. It would have saved him.
I wish you had done something instead of letting go.
Love,
Kajal.
Chapter Four
Dear Kajal,
You remember that party night? The last night of the culturals where everyone was required to wear something that was opposite to their personality and you wore a black dress which was free flowing and it made you glow beautifully. It made you look like a princess even though you are the opposite. God it was a beautiful dress. It was not meant to attract male attention to your fullness (ahem,push-up "b" and I can't say the "b" word; after all it's grandma's job to deal with "girl issues"). It was meant to make Mr. Abhimanyu Singh realise what a princess you were and in fact it was his honour to be sitting next to you but you being the generous person that you are(I can almost gag at that), you were sitting next to an unaware man( yes, he was a man even when he was just seventeen).
And while you were fretting over such petty issues, he was having to cope with the fact that he might have been the reason for his mother's death. If it hadn't been for the fact that he had been detained after school due to work for the culturals he would have been able to go home early and take her to the hospital for the leukaemia treatment that she was undergoing. There were so many times,so many conversations, so many things that went unsaid which if you had not ignored and had paid attention to would have led you to save him from committing suicide.
Do you realise what you did? What your hamartia is?
You let everything slip out of your hands.
You did nothing at all. Nothing.
Love,
Kajal.
Chapter Five
Dear Kajal,
August 15,1995.That was the first time Abhi tried to commit suicide. He had tried to cut his vein. He wanted to die so that he could tell his mom that he was sorry. His grandmother found him in the bathroom. God, it scared you. For the first time you were aware about him. Suddenly your own problems looked small. But you know when you or rather I grew up I realised that no one's problems were small or big. Problems are just problems, they just come and go.
For the first time you realised that you practically knew nothing about him. That realisation made you realise one more thing: you are selfish. The latter hurt a lot. You tried according to your definition "to the best of your belief" to get Abhi to cough up his secrets. But was that really enough? Just a little more nudge would have been enough for him and he would have shared his secrets, you know.
You were sworn to secrecy and he just smiled sadly through it all. Till the day he died he never stopped blaming himself. It was his fault that his mother died. It was his fault that his father cried quietly in the pillow and slept off while crying hopelessly in the lonely night. It was his fault that he couldn't be a part of anything because everything had something connected to his mother. It was his fault that he felt guilty for the fact that he was happy at times and he thought that he had no right on happiness.
There was so much mess out there between you and Abhi that before you both could even realise the pit that you had dug for yourself, you had already fallen into that grave. There was only one difference.
Abhi's dead body was kept inside that grave while you die everyday in that grave.
Love,
Kajal
Chapter Six
Dear Kajal,
This is the last time I write to you. I am twenty seven years old, a successful corporate lawyer, a ten year future version of you. I have written every regret I have had for the past ten years since the day Abhi purposefully rammed his bicycle against a lorry.
Today, I am writing to you because I want to tell you just one thing. Actually a lot of things. We cannot change our past. We can never change it. It is the only thing that stands testimony to the fact that we are humans. We are not flawless. We are the most flawed creature god ever made. He managed to create a variety of us because well, he is God. I know I just said a very crappy joke.
Abhi, long before he died, said this to me: "Every wound leaves a scar, every scar has a story and the story which says I survived". I can never forget those words.
I never managed to fall in love again. It was just too much. But you know what. I survive every day. In fact I am surviving every day. There a lot of times I wonder what a twenty seven year old Abhi would have been like if he had been alive today. I wonder how the two of us would have made as a couple.
Anyways, good bye.
Love,
Kajal.
Chapter Seven
Dear (future) Kajal,
Hi, I am the seventeen year old Kajal. I figured out the way you sent me the letter and I am sending something for you too. You know after Abhi died, I went back to his grandma. I went on sudden impulse. I needed something or someone, anyone for that matter, to get me out of the excruciating emotional pain that I underwent after he died. His grandma gave me something which helped a lot. I hope it does heal you too.
Letter from Abhi:
"Dear Kajal,
Hi. Um, sorry. I am not really good at introductions. N or am I at writing letters. But I want to write to you something I should have done before I went away. I love you. I have always and will always till I die. By the time you read this letter I would have already died, so that actually has no meaning but I hope you get what I mean. I always wanted to say this to you. But the time didn't seem right. Know just one more thing that I have treasured each and every moment that I have spent with you. I hope you did too.
I realised something when my mum died. I realised that we, humans, don't die of sorrow or any physical pain when we are on our death bed. We die of the regret of the umpteen number of opportunities and things that we didn't do when we were young just because we hesitated or had some other mind block. That's why I chose to die now. It's because I have no regrets. I have spent a solid five months and three days with the one I loved and managed to be one of the closest friends. I won't thank you for it because that would just shame the bond that we share.
I hope you realise that I must end this letter or else I won't be able to go away. Just don't spoil your life blaming yourself. Do what you can while you are around. Make memories which count because that matters the most.
Love,
Abhi"
Love,
Kajal
P.S. I am twenty years old now. See you soon.