Page 229 - Till the Last Breath . . .

was not next to Dushyant because her responsibilities as a doctor demanded

her to be.
‘After the transplant … do you think he will live?’ Kajal asked Zarah,
who was lost in her own train of thought.

After a long pause, Zarah said, ‘Only a slight chance.’
‘You didn’t test your compatibility as a donor because you wanted to

help out … It was much more, wasn’t it?’ she asked.
‘I don’t want to talk about it. Anyway, the two of you seem to be happy

around each other. I have seen the look on his face when he talks about you.
So this conversation means nothing,’ Zarah said.

‘We have a history. I was his only friend,’ she responded.
‘Good for you,’ Zarah snapped.
Kajal was taken aback at Zarah’s curt, almost rude, reply. At a sudden

loss for words, she looked away from her and outside the window. It went
without saying that in the two years that had passed by, Kajal had missed

Dushyant. Even when in Varun’s arms, she used to close her eyes and think
about Dushyant and how he was doing. Occasionally, she would get

snippets of the fights Dushyant used to get into, the drunken brawls, the
skirmishes with hostel guards and the like. Incidents like these had been on

the rise after their break-up. Kajal could think of just two reasons for it.
Either Dushyant was destroying himself or he was trying to catch her
attention, after she had snapped all ties with him. Or both. After a while,

he’d stopped. The breaking of college furniture and water coolers, the
burning of staff offices, all of this stopped. Or so she thought.

The gossip died. The bad-boy legend of the college retreated to his room
to die a quiet death. There were younger, meaner students baring their teeth

in college. Dushyant was no longer trying to catch her attention; he had just
spiralled down deeper into his addictions. Alcohol, weed, marijuana, ice,

heroin … master of all drugs, jack of none.
Sometimes, they did cross paths on the streets of the college—Dushyant,
often with a cigarette in his hands, Kajal with her eyes dug into her toes.

They never talked, avoiding each other in the hallways and the corridors
and the labs, if and when there was any crossing of paths. For all she knew,