Hidden Roses

[Confessions: I am sorry. This is terribly long. And it's not worth the effort to be read. So please overlook it! Thank you.]

"Yes? So, what is it?", I swept my eyes over the items in the menucard. We had a table at a corner. The restaurat saw less people that day.
The room was dimly lit. It was the mellow yellow light that had spinned its own magical web across the air.
"I don't want to waste time", Jia's voice was firm, as if with a forced overtone, "I am saying this to you because you are his friend. You are going to tell him this."
"What?", I went anxious.
"That I am already married."

I was wonderstruck. We spent the next half hour silently eating that evening. She avoided an eye-contact.

When we had finished and she took out her purse to pay the bill, I said softly "Can I ask you something?"
She was quiet.
"Why did you do this?"
"I don't know", she hurried through her words, as if deliberately trying to project each of them on an emotionless plane, "You may think whatever you wish to. I loved to spend time with him. My husband was out of town. Now he'll be back soon. If he knows, I'll be in deep trouble. Can you ask Ronir not to disclose anything?", she looked away, "That'll be quite a favour".

She looked to get up and leave. The waiter had left with the tip.
I looked at her eyes. They were as expressionless and still as frozen water. Shamelessly outspoken.

"Jia", I almost made her stop. She was walking away. "Did you love him?"
"No", she said firmly, "Ask him to forget me. Tell him that I am sorry. Our relationship never had a future."

She left.

I walked my way home that night. Ronir was my childhood buddy. And more, he was a child at his heart. I went numb to imagine how would he react to all this.
I remebered the moments when he first showed to me Jia's photograph, three months back, trying so naively to express exactly how much he loved her! He was so overjoyed to have finally found someone so special in his life. He told me stories. We had so many glasses of beer over them.

Ronir had never asked about Jia's past. Or, who she was once; ..what she did. He knew that she lived with her parents at an apartment near Juhu and had just completed her Masters'. That was enough for him. He believed her!


I told Ronir everything. He cried his heart out. I had never seen him cry so much before. His voice chocked. He wanted to phone her once. He had some questions. But, he feared. He was in awe that his tender feelings could well be dehydrated under the merciless fire of the girl's outspoken betrayal. He was such a soft guy!

"What are you going to do now?", I asked.
"Don't know, maybe, ..leave this place". He went silent for a while. His eyes were still liquid. "Every lane of this city is going to remind me of her, ..of the moments that we had spend together. We gelled so well! We went to the movies. We went to restaurants. I had planned a large gift for her. Next month had her birthday. But it's useless now".

I held his shoulder. He had gone so weak inside. "I think, you should look to forget her", I said.
"I hope I do that someday", he said, "But you know what, I would never be able to manage that I feel. She came and touched such stupid corners of my heart that I once kept so very only for myself! They have gone lonely now. Tell me Akaash, ..if she had to go away someday, why did she at all come?"
"Don't feel pain, brother", I insisted, "The whore cheated you. She was someone else' wife already. She never was yours. Why waste your emotions over something that never was, Ronir?"

Ronir left that day. He told me that he would meet me after a few weeks. He was leaving town. He said that he needed time to think the matter over.


And it was then when I suddenly got to contact Shenaz over an online chat at somenight.

Shenaz hapenned to know Jia.

"How's Ronir?", she asked.
"Your friend didn't do something very correct", I typed to her, "Ronir would take months to heal his wound. Girls are girls. I hate them."
"I don't get you", she answered, "What do you mean?"

I told her everything.
And then to my astonishment, she answered "My God! This is not true. The story is something else! Jia did something very naughty, then."
"She never told me that she said all that to you and Ronir", Shenaz typed, "Though I knew that she would say something. Do you know, she wets her pillow even today, every night, thinking of him and the hurt she has caused him. What she only wants now is, if Ronir could remember her, at least for the rest of his life. Though she believes mightily that it's never going to happen. She could do nothing about it. But I never knew that she degraded her image in your eyes! She doesn't deserve that. Here, read this."

She forwarded me an e-mail.
Jia hapenned to write it to Shenaz.

It said,
"You know how much we love each other. But the situation is getting worse day by day over the last one month. Baba wants me to marry somebody out of his own choice. You know how conservative my family is! I cajoled. I cried. I threatened to commit a suicide. But Baba has stayed fixed. My mom said nothing. Lucky me, that I had suspected all this before. I never told Ronir my own details. He never asked.
You know, I so very much want him to start his life afresh. He is such a good boy! He should be forgetting me. But he loves me so much, I don't know how am I going to make him do that.
I know Akaash. He's his friend. I think I should let him know everything. But I fear that if I tell him the truth, Ronir would be crushed. More so, because he'll feel my pain. He may also rush in and create a scene. I had always kept his existence a secret to my family. He's so impulsive, you know!
I want him to rejuvinate, Shenaz. To a new life. With new dreams. He should look ahead. I don't want him to hold on to a lost past. I want to see that boyish smile of his again. It was so very filled with an innocence! I fear that I have taken it away from him, forever."

I went dead silent after I completed reading this. Jia hapenned to know Ronir better than what I knew him to be! Perhaps, that was meant to happen in love.
Shenaz asked for my thoughts on the issue. She 'buzz'ed me five times on Yahoo Messenger, that night.
I logged out instead.


I met Ronir six months later. He contacted me and asked me to come to a party at his house. He was back at his uniquely jovial and simple mannerisms.
He beamed a smile at me and said, "Hey buddy, had to tell you something. I had met this pretty thing one month back", he showed to me another photograph. "I had told her everything. She asked me to forget the bitch. You know, she said exactly what you said that afternoon -- why fret over something that never was ? These things happen in life! Not that everybody you meet in your life comes out to be all good!"
He waited eagerly for my reaction then.

I saw love in him, that evening. As if it had returned by some magical ways.
But, I thought I also saw some unerasable stains of pain, insult and regret that he so desparately tried to hide behind his cloak of superficial satisfaction; -- a secret buried too carefully, perhaps only to be identified and understood by another man!

Ronir threw Jia away. But, I thought, he failed to throw away her love. It remained in him and it was all the same. Only that this time it taught Ronir how to hate!
"Just think what happens, if the right-one comes in my life now", he reasoned, "After I had wrongly loved the wrong-one so very much?"


I looked at his eyes. I never found Jia there at her own respectable self! My eyes desparately hankered for a minimum vestige of the girl. As if, whether she found even a small space in the radiance of the man she so deeply loved.

But I never saw the roses.

Still, ..I felt that somehow they were there!
Perhaps, they preffered to stay behind the curtains. Perhaps, they were quite justified in doing so. Perhaps, selfish mortal eyes didn't deserve to see their beauty!

Jia lived on. In Ronir's hate. Ronir lived on in Jia's love.
Both of them remained! The sour memories of those sweet moments remained.

Their roses remained, hence! ...the roses that were uniquely theirs!

"Yes", I nodded, "You are right! What's this gal's name anyway?", I said.