Page 246 - The World's Best Boyfriend

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Dhruv’s father didn’t last two years.

Hell, he didn’t last two months. It was all so sudden. One night he was there
and the next all that was left of him was white dust. Dhruv lost track of time and
often he found it hard to believe that all of it actually happened. Relatives had
flown down and suddenly there were so many tears that there were none left for

Dhruv.
His mother had cried and so had others. He had not known what to say to his

mother when he had met her. They counted days and performed rituals together,
both stealing glances at each other, grappling for words they might use. The
silence was deafening.
After the fourteenth day, his mother went back to her family. ‘Will you be

okay?’ she had asked Dhruv while leaving and Dhruv had put up a brave front.
Dhruv had lived most of his life hating his parents, crucifying them. But the

twelve weeks he had spent with his dying father watching movies and reading to
him had left Dhruv lurching with an identity crisis. His father took away all the
bad memories with him, leaving behind a lump of good ones, reducing him to
tears every time he thought about him.

He truly was an orphan now.
‘Why don’t you call your mother?’ Sanchit had asked a number of times.

‘What would I say to her, Sanchit? That I have suddenly forgiven her? That
I’m sorry I hated her for twelve years but it was my fault? What should I talk to
her about? She doesn’t know me any more,’ Dhruv would say, trying hard not to

reduce to a puddle of desperate tears.
Dhruv was most scared of the days to come, the loneliness that would soon
follow when the semester ended, when everyone would go back to their happy

families and spend two happy summer months. Where would Dhruv go? To that
empty house? To his mother’s? What would happen to him? Why did he always
fucking end up alone?

Dhruv didn’t miss a single class. He spent days locked inside his room,
studying. Time was slipping by like sand from a closed fist. The semester exams
were near. The hostels would be empty after the exams, leaving him alone, he