Jab Tak Hai Jaan

“I have plans for my future, unlike you keep planning for our future.” I wondering what she was talking about. She said, “A guy proposed me, and he is good, I want to probably marry him. And I kind of like him. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I just pinched my skin on my forehand and it hurt. It was happening in reality. And it was something which I should have anticipated with the bitter turns our relationship had taken in the past 3-4 years. For a watcher who doesn’t know us both personally, and for the ones who just judge people, our (just my now) love would sound immature and childish, but I don’t live my life for the people who judge me, I have never lived it that way, she was one person whom I cared and I literally lived my life for her. All my plans, right from education to future plans had her in it. I would spend sleepless nights thinking about her, waiting for her, and trying to make her happy. But things were not the same with her. She had a traditional upbringing. She wanted her parents to decide. In the prime of our relationship she had told me that she loved me, and I would be her first choice if given a chance to choose her soul mate. And I am a man with a photographic memory. I remember minute details about people and things. And you say something like this, I would remember it to my last breath. Maybe I was stuck on her. Maybe I was afraid of moving on, maybe I didn’t want to start on someone else all over again, I just held on to her. I know it was my mistake to love her so deeply. It was my mistake to give her more importance than what she deserved. But I couldn’t help it.

“When we marry, and when we have a home and a car, I want to take you to a long drive, I want you to sing for me, I want to hold your hands and walk aimlessly on the shores of the sea on a romantic evening with cold breeze, I want us to have candle light dinner on a beach, I want to learn to play guitar for you. I want to propose you every single day, I want to move the thin strands of hair, that fall over your face, I want to look into those blue sapphire eyes. I want to buy you a pearl set. I want to sing a song for you, dance with you in the rain, and more than anything, I want to stand by you when you have no one else to listen to you. If the entire world feels that you are wrong and blames you, I will stand by you, I will answer all those who question you, and I will fight all those who intimidate you. I will be there when the sun comes up and even when he goes down and the moon lights the sky. I will be there holding your hands when you count the stars. And then we will have kids, probably just one. You will teach him music, and I will teach him cricket. We can have a great life. Live happily. You would go on to be the nightingale of music that you wanted to be. I don’t have any specific dreams. I just want to be a successful engineer, and when you achieve big, I just would want to stand there and clap, along with others who join me. I will shower you with so much love that you will hate me finally for loving you so much”. And she would blush. That was just one of our conversations. When we were in good terms.

Well, destiny has always things that you don’t see. I was one day texting her, it was a normal romantic text, and it went to the wrong hands. Her elder sister saw it, and that was an end of the love story from her side. I was not a simpleton to accept defeat. Call me an old-school if you like, but I held my ground very strong, I tried. She tried to bully me, tried to ignore me, she avoided me, and she scolded me, she said me that she hated me, her friends judged me, her family considered me to be a lowlife, but I wouldn’t give up. Don’t ask me for a reason for my stubbornness. Even I don’t know. I guess somewhere deep down I felt that she loved me, she wanted me. But her family and her career was ahead of her interests for me. She had told me that I would be her first choice right, I still was under the impression that I stood first in her priority list. My first love and her first love it was. And it was something that I wanted to be alive and I wanted to keep that fire burning bright. I would literally push a mountain aside if she was with me. I wanted a year or 2 to settle down in life and she had so much time before she would be asked to marry. I would talk and convince her parents. And it would be a simple and happy love story. In all these days, she was passive. She wouldn’t speak a word about what I would say her, she would say, “I don’t love you anymore, I am seeing no one else, but that doesn’t mean that you have a chance. You stand nowhere in my checklist”. And I would be one simpleton to think that they were all excuses to keep her family happy.

But then life wouldn’t be this interesting had everything gone the way you thought it would do. I was constantly pestering her about having a relationship with me, or to be at least a friend of mine, and she would retort saying, “You are not any more qualified to be a friend with whom I can have fun”. If you are a man with slight self-respect you would just stop having any form of contact thereafter. But I didn’t, love makes you do the most stupid of the things, and the weirdest of the decisions, I still decided to hold on. My mistake maybe, but that was the best thing that my heart suggested me to do. I wanted to give my 100 %, I wanted to try everything that I could. So I wanted to live my life without regrets. If our love story had to be tragic it was to be because of her. I had decided not to give up.

That was when this text came from her which read”, I am seeing someone else” it was just the last thing that I wanted. I cried for a long time, I thought it would be better after that, but the cry didn’t help. It just left me with a blocked nose and some wet tissues. That is when I realized life is not a movie. It is not something where you attend your girlfriend’s marriage, and she changes her mind there, and she decides to come with you .And then the groom has a negative character, he sends his goons after you, and you hit them and then have her. Finally when everything is over you say her that if your family wants this then only I will marry you, otherwise its ok. And then her dad or grandpa says her that “Beta, jaa uske saath, jeele apni zindagi “, and she runs to a running train and you catch hold of her and have her with you.

I shook up with the cigarette burning my fingers, I smiled a weary smile and got back to my work. It is 10 years now. I am settled, she is settled. Now I can talk to her dad and ask for her, but yeah, this is not “ Jab Tak Hai Jaan ”