Page 120 - Till the Last Breath . . .

Three years later, Kajal was disillusioned and wanted to quit college.

Fluid dynamics, Fourier transforms and the like were not things she was
interested in; she was just good at them.
Kajal was the apple of her parents’ eyes; her wants were always put first.

When she had first mentioned her discontentment—after her break-up with
Dushyant—her dad had arranged for prospectuses of colleges in London

where she could study literature. Or journalism. Or whatever young girls
with kohl-lined eyes, dressed in kurtas, studied abroad. A little part of her

had wanted to go. Not because it was the calling of her life, which she had
conveniently ignored, but because she had wanted to run away. Only if she

had left for London instead of continuing here, she would have never gone
through the turmoil she faced now. The news of Dushyant’s illness had
shattered her. The severity of his disease had been keeping her awake for

days now. Varun hadn’t been helpful at all. With his eyes glued to the
presentation on his laptop, he had asked her to get over it. Dushyant would

have listened to me and not asked me to get over it if the roles were
reversed, she thought. Against her good sense, she had gone to see him at

the hospital, only to get ridiculed and be thrown out.
As she made her way back to the auto she had come to the hospital in,

she felt her grief first swell her heart, and then her eyes. For more than two
years, she had tried to cut off that part of her life which Dushyant had been
a huge chunk of. But the moment she set her eyes on him, her heart called

out to her, jolting it out of its slumber.
The contours of his face had hardened, the eyes were sunken, the beard

was unshaved, but the sincerity in his eyes screamed for attention. The
goodness of his heart, which nobody else but she could see, called out to

her. It was as if two years had meant nothing, just a blip on the time–space
continuum. Within an instant, she was back to the day he had first talked to

her in the library. Since the break-up, she hadn’t gone back there. There
were a lot of places they had been to together and a lot of things they had
done together that had lost their charm once they parted ways. The library

didn’t feel the same, the golgappas had lost their tang, and the late-evening
walk in the park felt like a chore.