After All This Time by Nikita Singh Read Free Book Online Page B

history . . . it’s so complicated . . .’ Deepti cried.
    ‘It’s complicated only because you make it complicated. I’ve told you a hundred times to put him in the past. Just forget about him already, damn it!’
    ‘I have! He means nothing to me. I love you . . . Avik, listen to me, look at me—I love you. Only you. You know that. No one else matters to me any more . . .’
    Shourya pulled the phone away from his ear, and disconnected the call.
    I fell out of love with him a long time ago.
    I was stuck with him.
    He means nothing to me.



4
    Denial requires a lot of work. Your brain has to actively keep you away from something, every minute of every day. That takes work.
    The mornings were long. Lavanya found herself wide awake before 4 a.m. almost every day since she’d come home. By the time her parents woke up and started their day, she had already spent hours thinking and worrying about what she was trying so hard not to think and worry about, and getting her head twisted in a knot—one she then tried to untangle all day. Being around her father only made matters worse. So she made an excuse of needing fruit juices and fat-free milk and what not to get out of the house.
    ‘Mom, I’ll be okay, really!’ Lavanya said for the fourth time. ‘It’s just five minutes away, I think I can handle driving there on my own.’
    ‘But I can drive you there. It really is no trouble.’
    ‘No, Mom, you have to take care of Dad’s breakfast before he leaves for work. Go back inside, he must be getting late.’
    Mrs Suryavanshi looked at Lavanya and then back towards the house. ‘Okay, be safe. You know how people drive around here,’ she said and rushed back inside.
    ‘I do.’
    But it turned out she really did not. She had been a teenager, not eligible to drive, back when she lived in Delhi. She had occasionally ‘borrowed’ her parents’ cars for midnight escapades, but never regularly. And driving in the States did not prepare her for driving in India, not even close. To begin with, she had to drive on the left side (which was a big adjustment), there were a hell lot more vehicles on the roads, no one seemed to care about lanes, people were overtaking her from either sides, no one giving a damn about pedestrians, and unless it was a main road with traffic signals people were basically driving without laws and regulations.
    ‘What the . . .! Seriously?’ Lavanya muttered, as a guy on a bike cut into her lane and braked suddenly. She stopped just in time to avoid a crash. She rolled down her window, stuck her head out and hollered, ‘Hey!’
    The rider ignored her; he was too busy fishing out his cell phone from his pocket—large phones and tight pants don’t go well together. Having squeezed it out, he fixed it in his helmet somehow and rode away.
    Lavanya sighed loudly and started the car again. It took her half an hour to cover the five-minute distance. Between keeping an eye out for wayward drivers and pedestrians, and remembering that she was now driving on the opposite side of the road, she briefly considered abandoning the car and walking back home to fetch her mother. But she knew she would never hear the end of it.
    When she eventually parked outside the grocery supermarket, she knew it wasn’t worth the effort she had put in getting there. But she was there, so she went in. She picked up a box of corn flakes and compared it to another box. The one with strawberries promised eight essential vitamins and iron power. But then again, there was another box of cereal that had chunks of chocolate in it. Since Lavanya was in no rush to go home she started reading from the back of the second box, leisurely, like it was the most interesting piece of literature in the world.
    ‘Lavanya Suryavanshi?’
    She spun around at the sound of her name.
    The first thing she noticed was the hair. Oh God, so much hair. Long strands of thick black hair that fell to his shoulders in waves and framed a thin, angular