DURJOY DATTA When Only Love Remains Contents Also by Durjoy Datta About the Author Dedication One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen Seventeen Eighteen Nineteen Twenty Twenty-One Twenty-Two Twenty-Three Twenty-Four Twenty-Five Twenty-Six Twenty-Seven Twenty-Eight Twenty-Nine Thirty Thirty-One Thirty-Two Thirty-Three Read Mord Follow Penguin Copyright Also by Durjoy Datta Hold My Hand * Someone Like You (With Nikita Singh) * Till the Last Breath . * If It’s Not Forever It’s Not Love (With Nikita Singh) * You Were My Crush Till You Said You Love Me! (With Orvana Ghai) * Oh Yes, I’m Single! And So Is My Girlfriend! (With Neeti Rustagi) * She Broke Up, I Didn’t! I Just Kissed Someone Else! * Now That You’re Rich (With Maanvi Ahuja) * Of Course I Love You Till I Find Someone Better (With Maanvi Ahuja) PENGUIN METRO READS WHEN ONLY LOVE REMAINS Durjoy Datta was born in New Delhi, India, and completed a degree in engineering and business management before embarking on a writing career. His first book—Of Course I Love You!—was published when he was twenty-one years old and was an instant bestseller. His successive novels—Now That You’re Rich!; She Broke Up, I Didn’t!; Oh Yes, I Am Single!; If It’s Not Forever; Till the Last Breath; Someone Like You; Hold My Hand—have also found prominence on various bestseller lists, making him one of the highest-selling authors in India. Durjoy also has to his credit two television shows, Sadda Haq (Channel V) and Veera (Star Plus), both of which have done exceedingly well on Indian television. Durjoy lives in New Delhi, loves dogs and is an active Crossfitter. For more updates, you can follow him on Facebook (www.facebook.com/durjoydatta1) or Twitter (@durjoydatta). ... I Love you Rachu ... Dear Frnds pls spread this msg until its reach to my rachu I thinks she knows my name Ebook Downloaded from: EBOOK4IN.BLOGSPOT.COM To the month of February 2014; to new beginnings; and to my nephew, Reyhan One avanti She measures each step, small and deliberate, and looks at her watch hoping time would stretch out indefinitely, locking her in the moment. Delhi University buses, the U-Specials as they are called, screech to a halt at the bus stops nearby and kids pour out, chattering, shouting, complaining and cursing. Music and strained guitar riffs blare from her pink Skullcandy earphones and yet she can’t concentrate on Devrat’s painful, screeching voice. She makes a mental note to get those noise cancellation earphones at half-price from an online retailer. But they don’t come in fluorescent pink or orange. Then she thinks that maybe it’s not the earphones, and attributes the sound to the decrepit studio in Kolkata in which Devrat must have recorded his music. ‘The Endless Road’. It’s her favourite Devrat song and she listens to it on a loop every few days, staring in the distance while she does so, imagining herself to be playing a complex, interesting woman in a movie. She often scribbles down the lyrics on the margins of the books and notebooks she uses, but the words seem empty without Devrat’s broken voice and his imperfect guitar riffs. Devrat never does covers of songs sung by others; all his songs are fresh compositions and most of them are recorded on cell phones. He has been uploading his videos for the last five years. She reaches the gates of her college to collect the receipt of her admission in a correspondence course. It’s her third day in Delhi and she already doesn’t like it. Going back home to a reserved, stammering, absent-minded father isn’t really her idea of fun. Avanti can’t wait for her job to start at Indiago Airlines as a flight attendant. Attending college, taking down notes, running after college professors and getting notes photocopied was never her calling. She was too pretty to score well and be confined to a cubicle. There was a time she wanted to go to Xavier’s in Mumbai or Symbiosis in Pune. Back in Dehradun, where she grew up with her grandmother, she had heard great things about both the institutes. She wanted to be the one who zips around in a little pink scooter with her face wrapped like a terrorist or take an auto at three in the morning without the fear of getting raped. Being in Delhi and staying with her father was the last thing she ever wanted to do. But her grandmother forced her to shift out of her house in Dehradun where she had lived for the last twelve years, to move in with her father. ‘He needs you,’ she had insisted and she can seldom turn her grandmother down. Avanti hadn’t seen her father in a decade. She had grown up with her grandmother in Dehradun after her mother died in an accident when she was really young. She spots a few guys looking in her direction and she shrugs it off. She turns up the volume on her iPod and Devrat’s voice blares into her ears. Devrat, the reclusive young singer, has always been Avanti’s saviour, right from the first song he uploaded. Avanti had a troubled childhood. She was only three when her mother passed away, and all of five years when she was put into a girl’s boarding school, a place her unsuspecting grandmother thought would be safe for her. Little did her grandmother know what would happen. The first few months were the worst. Little and lonely Avanti would be woken up by Warden Aunty and taken to the back alley of the library, every night for weeks at an end. She would be stripped and touched all over, and she would cry, she would wail, and the warden would ask her to stay shut or she would be caned the next day. Avanti, scared and crying, would bear everything. And then after a few months it suddenly stopped. The warden preyed on someone else. For years, she stayed shut. The few girls she talked to about it would brush it away. The warden eventually left the school and disappeared. It’s said that her deeds had come out in the open and she was thrown out, but there was no case against her because the school wanted to uphold its image as a safe, friendly school. ‘Big deal! It happened three years back, naa? Forget it now. Move on,’ her best friends would tell her. But it was hard for Avanti. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. She tried the hardest she could. She was still the most talkative, ebullient kid in school who participated in everything, but when alone, she used to be a scared little girl fighting with those images of being naked with the warden, her rough fingers on her body, her voice telling her to shut up, telling her that what was being done to her was nothing unusual, and every new kid goes through the same. The more she talked, the less she was reminded of those long, torturous nights. So Avanti hasn’t stopped talking since then . There were years when she wouldn’t sleep in the night with the lights off. And if any roommate would switch them off, she would curl up in the corner of the room, and cry herself to sleep, scared. She had even tried to cut herself a few times over the years. She doesn’t do that anymore, but the scars remain. It took eight years for her to sleep without fear. It wasn’t until the time she was thirteen that she got a grip on the situation. It wasn’t therapy or her grandmother’s love, who knew nothing about what had happened, that gave her a fresh lease of life. It was the songs of a fifteen-year-old boy, Devrat, singing in his modest house in Kolkata that gave her the strength. She had stumbled on those songs on a networking site and had downloaded them on her iPod. The boy had floppy hair, puppy-like eyes and a strange voice. And since that day, it was as if this boy was singing to her. And since that day, whenever Avanti is down and out, scared, or crying, she just listens to his songs and suddenly, everything is better. It was Devrat’s songs that drew Avanti out of her fears and gave her another chance at life. The boys are still looking at her. Avanti has been through the entire lifecycle of being the cute, chubby toddler to the adorable adolescent to now—a very attractive young girl. She’s wearing a T-shirt three sizes too big, her shorts barely visible from under the T-shirt. A school bag hangs loosely across her shoulder and her thick curly hair is a careful mess that took two hours, a curler, hairspray and unwavering patience. ‘You’re a dream,’ a boy in the fifth standard had said and she remembers it like yesterday. She used to look at television actresses and wonder if she were better-looking than them, and she still does. She has a face fit for television but acting never held any charm for her. ‘It must be exhausting to be someone else,’ she thinks. She was smart enough to know that she wasn’t going to win the Nobel Prize for physics or find a cure for AIDS, and so when she heard that Indiago was looking for flight attendants, she took the bait.