To-Be-Married Exes, and Channeling My Inner Saif Ali Khan
Shayonnita Mallik medium.com @shayonnita.mallik
I’d been waiting, like a good friend, to hear back. And when he called me, when he said hello, I knew. I imagined him sitting beside her on a bed, allowing himself to know her. I imagined him smiling…
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Even before he called me that day, somewhere in my body, I knew.

I’d been waiting, like a good friend, to hear back. And when he called me, when he said hello, I knew.

I imagined him sitting beside her on a bed, allowing himself to know her. I imagined him smiling his warm, calm smile as he soaked in the sound of her laughter as the memory of me receded to a recess of his mind.

As he spoke to me on the phone — his voice buoyant with a smile another woman put there — I could hear him begin to unlove me. In vain, I clutched the phone harder, watching him drift away like a cruise ship from my rocky, abandoned island…

“How was your date?” I asked, carefully keeping my voice neutral.

“It was good,” he says, “The chemistry is good. Better than I was expecting.”

The right side of my chest begins to ache. Low thumps that make it hard to breathe. I feel like someone is sitting on my chest. I swallow and proceed.

“Did you kiss her?”

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Nice,” he says.

“Not better than we used to be… It was her first kiss… It’s strange because it’s been so long since I’ve thought of anyone but you…” he is gushing to assure me. But even the guilt of hurting me, of leaving me behind cannot hide the happiness he is feeling.

I keep my voice light, pleasant and continue with my questions. He is excited, even to tell me about this kiss.

I learn that they kissed while talking, a natural segue between topics between a man and his future wife. It was mutual, he says, and I imagine him leaning in, holding her eyes.

I turn on a song, a random episode of a random show. I light and extinguish a cigarette. I need to stop my mind.

I imagine him fitting his lips to hers, tilting his head to deepen the kiss, teaching her what he likes. I imagine her smiling against his lips as her hands rise to the nape of his neck. I imagine him pulling her closer, the awkwardness over, now that they know how the other tastes.

I want to burn something. Preferably, my own brain. And yet, I cannot stop. And so, I give up trying.

With the images, the tears flow as well. Holding a hand over my mouth, I silently cry.

It takes me a few deep breaths. But on the phone, I say cheerfully school my voice, “I’m so happy for you. That’s really nice.”

He doesn’t say anything. Just, “Yes, touchwood.” But even with that I can feel the lightness in his voice.

“Did you get her flowers like I asked you?” I ask, taking on a slightly teacherish tone to try and mask the million pieces of my breaking heart.

No, he says.

Well, at least some things haven’t changed.

Even with me, he was never the gestures kind.

***

Broken, aching, sleepless, in vain I struggle to confine my mind. His thoughts do not leave, but my desire to eat does. I sit at lunch and dinner with family and guests gaping at food I once liked. I wonder what it is about grief that is so filling that it ruins your appetite.

At a loss of what to do, I read. Returning to favourite authors feels somewhat like coming home while my erstwhile home of three years finds someone new to house inside.

“Jealousy — at least as far as he understood it from his dream — was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course, if he wanted to escape he could do so. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall.”

I pour through Murakami — his quiet words soaked in loneliness soothe my mind. The character of this book loses his closest friends, mourns, and then finally rebuilds himself — filling his being with a newness that comes only after a part of you has died.

Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki, Haruki Murakami

***

Do you remember Saif and Deepika’s break-up party from the 2009 film, Love Aaj Kal? As a child, this celebration of separation had seemed ridiculous. But now, as an adult, the idea of staying friends with an ex — someone whom I once considered the love of my life — seems very attractive. After all, we both just want each other to be happy, even if it is with someone else. Right?

Only, I was discounting the rest of the movie. Saif and Deepika entirely and completely fail at being friends.

Yes, they rationally decide that since their plans for life are very different, they must break up. But no, that does not mean that love stops.

Saif Ali Khan moves to Golden Gate Bridge while Deepika sets up a good life in Delhi. Work blossoms, but so does loneliness, and one wonders if the life is worth it if it means having no one to celebrate it with?

“Aisa Kyun Huwa Hai,

Ye Pata Hai Jaante Hain,

Tujhse Bhi Mohabbat,

Hai Mohabbat Kaam Se Bhi,

Yuhin Nazdikiyon Mein Rahi,

Yeh Dooriyan! Yeh Dooriyan!’

Despite their best intentions, when they see each other it is that same love, lust, want, all over again. Despite their best intentions, the sight of them with someone else is like a flaming ball of kerosene shoved down their throats to their heart. Despite letting them go, if you really really loved someone, you can perhaps never really, truly hate that you did not end up with them.

Which explains, in pieces, why I am sad.

Saif Ali Khan had his Golden Gate Bridge, and I had my dreams of a life abroad, a foreign education. On one hand, was a man I wanted with the ideal life he wanted, and on the other hand was my ideal life without the man I wanted.

And in this life, I could only choose one.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And to choose one would mean killing the version of me that would have travelled down the other.

***

Moving on is strange.

Like looking for a restaurant in a foreign land that makes something familiar to the food at home; moving on too offers the temptation of settling for hints of them in new people.

The echo of a voice. The familiar patterns of argument. The same profession. The same perfume. The same neighbourhood. The same laugh.

Yet, nothing feels the same and slowly you acknowledge that what needs to change is you. Collect yourself into your arms, and let go of the ghosts. Dare to love yourself more, and let them go.

Love is a despite concept, yes. But it cannot exist inside a broken you.

As I collect the pieces of this weekend, I forgive him, and my crazy heart.

I owe him for telling me honestly that he did like her, another woman, that their kiss was pure. Not hearing it would have left me in suspense, hearing it would have killed me. Either way, I would have been angry.

Because I remember how many dates with how many different people it took me to find someone half-decent, someone 10% him, whom I could deign to kiss. While he kissed the first girl he met, and that was enough for him to move on.

“What is marriage? But two rings, a bed, and the fear of society in your head?” I had scoffed in a poem I’d written years before. Now marriage scoffs at me — in the face of a stranger with whom marriage was more appealing than a non-societally approved romance with me.

***

For the first time in three years, I block him completely.

I listen to all those Love Gurus on YouTube, my family and friends and finally accept that I cannot be friends with the man I love while he builds a home with another woman. I accept that I wish him well, but I am too small, too petty and too jealous to participate in their wellbeing as a benign friend, and see him smile yet another smile that she put there.

And so to save myself, to save the last shreds of dignity that I have left before I melt into a screaming banshee, I block him. From my phone, from WhatsApp, from Twitter.

I delete everything I can, and block out the rest.

If only blocking them from everywhere could block all these feelings. But that also, in good time. Slowly, steadily, till one day all this isn’t a storm, but only a flickering memory.