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The Hardest Kind of Forgiveness
As I sat at the Guwahati airport waiting to board the plane, Chandhni cracked a joke which made absolutely no sense to me and started to laugh. I faked a laugh as I did not want to hurt her sentiments.
This used to be the routine even during my college days. Rong, the girls and I would be walking around the campus singing songs and talking random stuff when Chandhu would crack one of her jokes. It would make sense to none of us, but nonetheless we all laughed together in unison.
We were five of us; all post graduate students at The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Arenla - slim and tall, with her long flowing hair and thick rimmed pink spectacles, who looked like she had stepped out of a Korean Drama, Bursen - athletic, with her curly black hair intertwined with red streaks and a constant “I don’t care” expression on her face, Chandhu - plump, foodie, independent, with a serious case of OCD, Rongmei - short, but handsome and charming, fun loving and loved by all, and myself – a skinny, long-haired half-Mallu-half-Anglo. We were a strange group of five. I often wonder how we found each other. It was meant to be.
Arenla is the one who had to undergo this torture the most since she was Chandhu’s roommate. She would tell me all about it when we went for secret walks without the others during class hours.
Aren and I, we were so comfortable with each other. We could sit under the Breakup Tree and just talk for hours on end. That was our favourite spot; a cemented quadrangle around a huge banyan tree as old as the campus itself. No one knows how the Breakup Tree got its name, but it was apparent that way too many couples had broken up under this very tree. Now it only seems fit that Aren and I were bound to break up.
No one knew about us. May be we even tried to hide it from ourselves. I knew she loved me. And maybe she knew I loved her too.
But we were connected to each other through something that happened to each of us in our childhood.
I was maybe ten years old when it happened. My mom owned a marriage bureau in town; a single room in a rather shoddy complex. Adjacent to this room were an advocate’s office, an astrologer and a recreational institute for the deaf and dumb. My school was only a kilometer away from my mom’s bureau and so I used to go there every evening after school. And so I was well acquainted with the people in the complex.
One day when I came back from school, there was someone at the bureau, talking to my mom; a charming young man in his late twenties. But I could not understand the words that were coming from his mouth. It was only when my mom introduced him to me that I realized that he was deaf. He tried to say something to me through gestures and sounds. But it did not make sense to me. Mom said he had invited me to the recreational institute and asked me to go with him. She did not see the discomfort on my face.
I had never been to the recreational institute unlike the advocate’s office and the astrologers’ that I frequented. It was a shady room much like my mom’s bureau but a little bigger. There was a desktop computer in one corner of the room and a...
This used to be the routine even during my college days. Rong, the girls and I would be walking around the campus singing songs and talking random stuff when Chandhu would crack one of her jokes. It would make sense to none of us, but nonetheless we all laughed together in unison.
We were five of us; all post graduate students at The English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. Arenla - slim and tall, with her long flowing hair and thick rimmed pink spectacles, who looked like she had stepped out of a Korean Drama, Bursen - athletic, with her curly black hair intertwined with red streaks and a constant “I don’t care” expression on her face, Chandhu - plump, foodie, independent, with a serious case of OCD, Rongmei - short, but handsome and charming, fun loving and loved by all, and myself – a skinny, long-haired half-Mallu-half-Anglo. We were a strange group of five. I often wonder how we found each other. It was meant to be.
Arenla is the one who had to undergo this torture the most since she was Chandhu’s roommate. She would tell me all about it when we went for secret walks without the others during class hours.
Aren and I, we were so comfortable with each other. We could sit under the Breakup Tree and just talk for hours on end. That was our favourite spot; a cemented quadrangle around a huge banyan tree as old as the campus itself. No one knows how the Breakup Tree got its name, but it was apparent that way too many couples had broken up under this very tree. Now it only seems fit that Aren and I were bound to break up.
No one knew about us. May be we even tried to hide it from ourselves. I knew she loved me. And maybe she knew I loved her too.
But we were connected to each other through something that happened to each of us in our childhood.
I was maybe ten years old when it happened. My mom owned a marriage bureau in town; a single room in a rather shoddy complex. Adjacent to this room were an advocate’s office, an astrologer and a recreational institute for the deaf and dumb. My school was only a kilometer away from my mom’s bureau and so I used to go there every evening after school. And so I was well acquainted with the people in the complex.
One day when I came back from school, there was someone at the bureau, talking to my mom; a charming young man in his late twenties. But I could not understand the words that were coming from his mouth. It was only when my mom introduced him to me that I realized that he was deaf. He tried to say something to me through gestures and sounds. But it did not make sense to me. Mom said he had invited me to the recreational institute and asked me to go with him. She did not see the discomfort on my face.
I had never been to the recreational institute unlike the advocate’s office and the astrologers’ that I frequented. It was a shady room much like my mom’s bureau but a little bigger. There was a desktop computer in one corner of the room and a...
