New Arshi TS: Moirai's Gambit COMPLETED| Part 3| Page 11| 9/10 - Page 8

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Epilogue

Destiny is name often given to choices that had dramatic consequences.

-J.K. Rowling

June 15, 1982

Dear Khushi

I hope to reach you before this letter does. I write nevertheless. I do, more like as an attempt to atone for the fool you met four years ago. The one who did realize his folly, but only too late. The one who did try to reach out, but maybe the effort was too feeble that fate laughed and chucked it into time's dump yard.

Destiny has been an unruly kid and I the delinquent parent to have spurred her offensive games. Ergo, I am as much to blame, if not more for this prolonged separation as Moirai.

Four years! What is it between you and me that four long years of staying apart could not diminish? What is it in you that kept me waking up every single night with your vision? What is it in me that my stubborn reticence notwithstanding, you wrote to me, you continued pouring your heart out to me. Maybe, it's nothing in me, but all in you.

In you I found myself searching for what had been missing in my life. In you, I seek its fulfillment. You wonder whether the marks of ink you left on paper for me, mattered to me because I never told you that they left indelible marks all over my heart. Because I never told you that for two years, it wasn't the warm coffee in my apartment after a tiring day, it wasn't the picture of my family hanging in my living room but the sight of a certain yellow envelop in my mailbox that filled me with a sense of home coming.

And then your letters disappeared, the cause of which is lying today in a hospital, fighting for her life. The cause of which has inadvertently postponed my physical journey towards you. The cause of which was also the reason for the abrupt ending of our conversation, earlier this morning. I wish at this moment I could leave it all and reach you, forget it all and just be with you. But responsibility beckons, hurls me back into the world that becomes drearier without you with every passing moment.

Trust me Khushi, it's not that I never tried finding you or the reason behind the sudden disappearance of your epistles. My pursuit had brought me to your city, I vividly remember the night of 5^th November, 1980. I was there in Kanpur then Khushi, looking for you. My friend had coaxed me to attend the wedding of an employee. There I had seen you, and inferred you to be the bride. How else would I interpret a woman in a bridal trousseau, sitting on the stage? I do not doubt you, I can never, but this plight confounds me.

Can you forgive me Khushi?

Yours

Arnav

PS: In reply to your question in letter dated 18^th January and the other five letters you mentioned there in. Yes, I did go to school and can read and write. This epistle can be taken as the proof. Also I hold a degree in Mechanical Engineering, just for your information.

PPS: I know my handwriting doesn't conform to what's largely conceived as legible. One of the reasons I never wrote to you, apart from many others.

He folded the hand written piece and placed it inside a white envelope bearing her Delhi address. His lips quirked in a content, lopsided smile in remembrance of the conversation that had taken place between them twelve hours ago.

Married? Me?

Two words spoken in derision, almost spiting him, couldn't have made him happier for the life of him. Amidst a frenetic day and incurred financial loss, he had recalled the conversation at every opportunity of a free breath.

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"Arnav, is that you? Oh god, I can't believe!" she cried.

"It's me. Yeah. " he paused to take a breath, unable to decide how to begin, where to begin. "How have you been Khushi?"

"I am good, much better. H...how are you?" her voice broke in excitement.

"Trying to be fine, ever since you... ever since I lost contact with you."

"Huh?"

"And I have been unsuccessful." He confessed.

"You never tried to contact me before Arnav." She said, but there was no accuse in her tone. "Is everything alright with you? I thought... I feared... that I don't matter..."

"Khushi, forgive me please, I have been an ass. You matter, you matter more than you can imagine. "There he said it, in not much unclear terms but as plainly as that. It felt as if burden of an entire city was lifted from his shoulders. "I want to meet you Khushi. I want to see you as soon as possible... there's a lot that has happened, I just... I just have to meet you."

"Arnav! " She was audibly stumped the second time in the conversation.

"It should have happened long ago." He said calmly.

"But how will you meet me? I mean are you in Delhi?"

"I'll catch the first flight, that is, if it is okay with you."

"Hell yes. " her voice betrayed every bit of her eagerness.

"Khushi... I... I missed you." He barely whispered.

"Then why didn't you write to me? Or call me like this, I have had this phone installed here since one year Arnav and you were the first person whom I informed about it, you know it took me six months standing in queues at telecom office to get this thing, I wrote to you my number and even asked you to call or send me yours. But you..."

"I never received those letters Khushi." Her rant was interrupted by his words.

"You... didn't? Oh my god, I knew it, your address must have changed over the years and I wasn't...but then how now..."

"It isn't as simple as an address change Khushi, there have been other factors, all of which I can't discuss on phone, I'll tell you all when we meet." He heard the shrill cry of the phone kept in Devyani's living room downstairs at that moment.

"One more thing... are you" he stuttered and winced, "are you...or have been married by any chance?" he couldn't help but blurt the question that had been nagging him, suffocating him.

He heard silence from the other end, he counted his breaths nervously, almost forced to chew his lip.

"Married? Me? You think... you think I would write to you like that if I was married to somebody else?" she snapped, and for the first time he heard her angry and rightfully accusing tone.

"No... Khushi I can explain..." he began, but was interrupted by an ashen Rajpal, coming running upstairs all out of breath. "Sahib, Raizada Sahib, there's been a fire on the set. Madam is ... hospitalized, she... she got burned and many other unit members too."

*********

He had rushed to location of the set and met the sight of charred stands, blackened back grounds, a couple of coughing spot boys, water jets and a fashionably late fire brigade. The Police acted proactive in the investigation, courtesy filmy influence. His lawyers had immediately started working on the insurance claims. He had then left for the hospital, visited all the injured, thanked god for the first time in his life upon learning that there had been no loss of life. Devyani along with her makeup man had been severely injured, after hours of observation, she was declared out of danger but still critical.

Arnav vacillated between sympathy for her for old time's sake and apathy considering the latest discovery. He came at terms with her predicament with a heavy heart, what went around had come around indeed.

It took four days, for her discharge, the relocation of the movie's set. And signing up of the new female lead. The time during which, Arnav had placed innumerable calls to a particular Delhi number and all had gone unanswered. His patience slithered away and ire nudged ahead its way.

One palm fisted into a ball and another holding the phone inside a PCO in a deathly grip, was how he found himself on the fifth in the nation's capital city and his birth place. He banged the unresponsive phone in its place and threw money at the boy sitting there counting minutes and marched out frustrated. Reading out her address that he had scribbled over a paper with some difficulty in deciphering his own letters to the cab driver, he made the drive towards her home.

How had she not given up on him in four years when he was this mad in just four days? Was his only thought when the cab came to a stop in front of an old building in the smothering populated environs of Chandani Chowk. He paid the driver his due, climbed the stairs to the second floor of the three storied building while averting the curious glances thrown his way.

He checked the house number in the paper again and before he could ring the door bell, his eyes caught the brand new, shiny lock hung over the latched door.

*****

When Khushi Kumari Gupta came back after the day's toil at ten at night, carrying two heavy bags of ration, cursing a list of things she had populated for the day she was startled to find a black blazer carelessly hung over the railing and a weird mix of smell of musk and cigarette smoke suspended in the air. She then noticed a man, leaning over the railing, the two top buttons of his dark blue shirt open and tie loosened, smoking.

"Excuse me Mister, who are you and what are you doing in front of my house at this time?" she demanded in a threatening tone putting the heavier bag down on floor.

"For starters, I am the man you have been seeking sweet revenge from since past four days."His husky voice reached her ears with an unsettling wind current as he straightened from his leaning position and stepped out from the shadows into the feeble light. The lighter bag that she held slipped from between her fingers that he caught in air in one swift move. Her breath was stuck for the longest time she could remember and her eyes skimmed over the chiseled face and came at rest on the cognac colored eyes. Unlike her, his eyes skimmed all over her form making her take an inadvertent step back.

"I also happen to be the man who had vowed to never travel by train since year 1978. And if this helps, then the man a particular girl from Kanpur probably got besotted with." She saw the mirth and challenge in his eyes.

"Oh I get it, you are that film maker who cannot distinguish between reality and an act." She came back like a galloping race horse. "Who made a satire on Indian Weddings where the friends of the bride and the groom on their wedding enact their story from the first meet to the D day but could not discern it to be that when a particular girl from Kanpur decided to get inspired from your film." She said sharply.

The words took their moments in registering, when they did, his eyes widened before narrowing down to slits and jaw slackened. It was her, almost too perfect that he could well dismiss all of this as an act and call its blasted idiot of a director to cut the shot and shout pack up. His instinctive feeling from that night came with a rush of increased blood pressure.

"That was the dumbest movie I had ever made."

"Maybe, your viewers didn't share your thoughts. It was your first commercial success Mr. Raizada." She folded her arms.

"Who does such a ludicrous thing in real life?"

"A particular girl from Kanpur who probably got besotted with you."

"Khushi." He covered the distance between the two of them in a single stride and pulled her in the circle of his arms.

"I am sorry Arnav, to any man to have walked in that moment, me in a bridal trousseau sitting on the stage would have earned the same inference." She quoted the words from his letter that she had received in the morning. "And for these four days, I was hardly at home Arnav, with Ma in the hospital..."

He placed his index finger on her lips quieting her, "I am with you in this moment Khushi, and I am with you in the moments to come, in the moments we'll spend lamenting on the time lost and in the moments we'll decide on creating new memories to cherish." He gently removed his finger and replaced it with his lips. She stilled in his embrace, her quivering lips rendered immobile ensconced in his.

"What is it in you Arnav?" she barely whispered as they moved apart breathless, "that I fell for you in a single day of familiarity, and fell so hard that I lived four years in almost a fantasy and a belief so firm that it could be scary at times."

"What's it in me? Nothing, but a heart that beats for you. " pulling her closer still, her body molding in his, he crushed her lips with his.

******

Stardust, Issue #67

December 1984

Cover news: AR production's Sridevi and Narendra Kumar starrer Romance, The Train becomes the highest grosser of the year.

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