Your Dreams Are Mine Now (28 page)

In one corner of the waiting room outside the ICU, Arjun arranged a small table and pulled up a few chairs. He placed the food and some disposable plates that he had got on the table. He then called Rupali’s parents to eat.

Rupali’s family, Arjun and Saloni were the only people in that special ICU ward. They were hungry, though their minds didn’t register it. Caught in the most horrible day of their lives, food was the last thing on their minds. Rupali’s mother resisted Arjun’s invitation to eat something. The bite of bread would not go down her throat, she said. Her father wanted to see his child open her eyes and talk to him for once. Only then would he feel like eating something.

But Arjun kept insisting. Saloni joined him.

‘When Rupali gains consciousness, she would not want to know that you starved. If you eat, she will get well. Please eat for her sake,’ she said and gave them hope. They half-heartedly agreed and moved towards the table. Arjun and Saloni followed them as they talked between themselves.

‘Any updates from the doctors?’ Arjun asked Saloni.

She shook her head.

‘Did he eat anything?’ he asked, pointing at Tanmay.

‘A sandwich at noon, when I took him to the canteen. But nothing after that. He is not talking. In the evening, when I came back from the washroom, I saw him standing at the ICU door, trying to peep through the little glass window. It’s quite disturbing and painful to see him this way.’

Arjun walked up to Tanmay and gently led him to the food. A couple of minutes later, they all sat around the table. Rupali’s mother tore a bite of chapatti and poured a spoonful of curry over it. She was about to have it when all of a sudden two nurses came sprinting towards the ICU. They pushed the ICU door wide apart and rushed inside. Two surgeons came running behind them and followed them into the ICU.

The bite of chapatti fell off Rupali’s mother’s hand. Everyone got up from their seats. They immediately rushed to the ICU. They found the door was locked again from inside. But the family kept tapping on the door, worried about what had happened all of a sudden.

Through a small glass window, Arjun peeped inside. The curtains surrounding Rupali’s bed had been pulled apart. From an angle, amid the chaos inside the ICU he happened to see her intubated face. He could see his Rupali—her face bandaged, unrecognizable.

And then he saw one of the surgeons holding two pad-like devices in his hands. He was holding on to their handles. There was panic inside. He could not hear a single word from behind the soundproof door. The surgeons and nurses plugged various devices on and off in a jiffy. A nurse was busy preparing an injection. The surgeon pressed those pads against Rupali’s chest. Arjun’s heart began to sink. He’d seen this only in films.

He watched in fear.

Rupali’s motionless unconscious body jumped on the bed. There was no response. Another shock. Again nothing.

Arjun felt his world swim around him.

Twenty-Six

Rupali took her last breath on that fateful night. They could not save her.

An innocent soul departed from the miseries of her mutilated body. Her dear ones believed so, for it made the reality minutely less difficult to bear. Perhaps, therefore, that night wasn’t as fateful as the night on which the human scavengers had torn her apart. Probably, she had died that very night and for the next three nights, her unconscious body that still somehow had her heart beating inside, provided a little cushion to the shock for the people who loved her. An element of hope, no matter how small it was, that she may survive worked as that cushion.

She would never open her eyes; never speak again; never go back to her home that she had once left to pursue her education from her dream college. She would never grow old; her pictures of youth would mark the end of her journey in this world.

The worst time in any parent’s life is when they have to collect the corpse of their young child and perform the last rites at the funeral. Rupali’s parents belonged to that ill-fated clan of parents. Four unknown men didn’t just rape their daughter. They also raped them; they raped them of their daughter. And for the rest of their lives, as long as they lived in this world, every day, when they will wake up, they will have to confront this cruel fact.

Rupali’s lifeless body was cremated at a time when the city slept. The police didn’t want a riot.

Her parents decided to take her ashes home, where they would immerse it in the waters of the Ganga.

A love story had been left incomplete.

She left behind a huge void in Arjun’s life—a void that could never be filled. Rupali was different. She was unique in her own way. She had no match. What a loss to a life like that of Arjun’s! A life that till a week back looked so promising, had suddenly been shattered. Only Arjun knew what he was going through. Unable to call her up, to listen to her voice, to touch her, he kept pulling out every tiny memory he could recall from the box of precious memories in his mind. But the more he tried to relive her memories, the more alone he felt. The more alone he felt, the more he tried to relive her memories.

It was all the more painful at night, when he was all alone, when the world slept and he tossed and turned in his bed, often crying tears that would leave the cover of his pillow wet.

It would all flash by in front of his open eyes. The little things she would say to make him feel good, her thoughts, her . . . her rationale, her stands, her wishes, her dreams . . . her dream of a DU where no Raheema would be molested again by any Mahajan . . . her dream of a society, where instead of turning a blind eye, people would come together and stand for what’s right and against what’s wrong . . . her dreams . . . her incomplete dreams.

Going over them again and again somewhere in his mind, Arjun had transported them all to his thoughts. In her absence, those dreams were becoming his own. It gave him some sort of solace to believe that way. It offered him a reason to live; a goal to achieve; a meaning to his life.

Left alone in the middle of an incomplete love story, Arjun took a pledge to fight for justice, for only that would bring peace to Rupali’s soul. It became the larger purpose of his life.

Arjun didn’t let Rupali die in people’s mind. He fought with the system in her name. And he wasn’t alone. He had the support of his party. He had the support of the entire university. He had the support of every Indian who had started believing that what happened with Rupali can happen to anyone and that enough was enough.

Rupali’s death gave birth to a movement; a movement for change; a movement to demand stringent laws and their enforcement; a movement to call for swifter judiciary.

Three days after Rupali’s death, the police had nabbed all the four accused. In his statement to the police, Bhaiyaji, the leader, admitted to raping and attempting to kill Rupali along with three of his men. He was a contract killer. He accepted that he received money from Mahajan to finish Rupali. In his statement, Bhaiyaji also confessed that he believed he had killed Rupali and that he was unsure how she had survived.

Before that day ended, Mahajan who was out on bail was booked again, this time with a non-bailable warrant in an alleged murder case registered against him. The media broke the complete news that the entire country had been waiting for.

But it didn’t end there. It only marked a new beginning to a long long process of judicial trial; a trial in which the call was to treat this case as rarest of rare and demand death penalty as the only justice.

Meanwhile, Saloni had planned to move out of her hostel back to her home. She didn’t want to live in that room or for that matter in that hostel any more. She wasn’t prepared to live without Rupali. Before she packed her own luggage, she packed everything that belonged to Rupali. Arjun was there too, waiting outside. They would send it all to Rupali’s parents.

Arjun could not stand seeing Rupali’s belongings packed. They again brought back memories.

Epilogue

It is 4.00 a.m. Arjun hasn’t been able to sleep the whole night, and now, he has turned on the lights in his room. He is sitting on his bed, supporting his back on a cushion. His legs are stretched out in front of him. His eyes are glued to the screen of his mobile phone.

A little smile makes its way to his lips. Unable to sleep, he is reading all the old SMSes from Rupali that are still present in his message box. Every SMS that he reads takes him back in time, when his Rupali was there with him.

The one he is reading now takes him back to the New Year’s Eve when he kissed Rupali for the first time. The memories flash by in his mind. He is reliving that moment again. How her lips felt in between his! Draped by a wonderful foggy night, that intimate moment when, for the first time, he had felt a girl’s body in his arms. They had shared the warmth of each other’s bodies on that cold night. It was a beautiful, magical moment . . .

He looks outside his window and he can see the faint light of dawn. It’s today again. The present! It’s so different from the past. The past! It will never come back. Never ever! That little smile that took birth on his lips has vanished now. He scrolls down the message box. A few more moments pass.

Something makes him laugh this time. He reads the message again and then, the next moment, he looks away from his phone.

‘Hell! I couldn’t do it.’ He is talking to himself.

And then he speaks again in the dead silence of the dawn, ‘But she did it.’

He shakes his head in disbelief and, at the same time, admires the guts of the girl he loved. Again a smile makes its way to his lips.

‘A first year girl proposed to a senior!’ he says and thinks about it.

He continues to shake his head. The smile on his face widens and soon changes into a grin. The moment comes alive before him. His nervousness and stammering, Rupali’s confident proposal . . . the planes flying above them, the noise of traffic.

He is laughing now.

‘Oh Rupali!’ he says, missing her even more. The pain resurfaces and he suddenly chokes on his own words. Tears rush down his eyes.

He is sobbing hard, like a kid.

‘Oh Rupali . . .’ he screams in pain.

He hits the bed with his hands. Again and again in frustration. She’s gone . . . she’s gone . . .

His eyes are red from crying. Then a thought strikes him. The noise might wake his mother up. He doesn’t want her to hear him cry. He grabs the cushion behind him and tightly holds it to his chest and bites it hard. It suppresses his screams. He weeps loudly into it.

He wants to flush out all his tears in one go, so that he doesn’t have to shed them again, so that he doesn’t have to go through this again and again.

Slowly, he is able to regain control over himself. But he is breathless. He drops the cushion and takes a deep breath. He is calmer now.

He picks up his cellphone again. His wet eyelashes blur his vision. He scrolls down his message box. He arrives at what looks like the very first message from Rupali in his mobile phone. It dates back to the evening when they had sat on the lawns outside her hostel. It was to discuss Raheema’s case. He recalls how she had said that she was scared of him since the day of the orientation. ‘Did I really scare her then?’ he thinks to himself.

Then suddenly, he recalls something—the plant! Rupali’s tulsi plant! Something has struck his mind. He looks at the time on his mobile phone. It’s 5.10 a.m. He jumps out of his bed. He rushes to the bathroom and washes his face. Suddenly, he is in a hurry. The next minute he steps out of his house and picks up something from his garage. There is more light but the sun has not risen yet.

He purposefully turns the ignition of his jeep. It disturbs the silence of the dawn. But it doesn’t bother him. Arjun reverses the jeep and in no time he’s on the road.

About forty-five minutes later, he is standing right next to Rupali’s tulsi plant.

From a sapling only a few inches high, it has grown to well over two feet. Memories have yet again begun to play hide and seek in his mind. He recalls how, almost a year back, he had stood right at that place when he first talked to Rupali. How she had pulled this plant out of a plastic bag and shown him what she had been digging the earth for. His eyes are getting moist again. There is no way he can hold back his tears. He is tired of crying. He is embarrassed of crying yet again. But that doesn’t stop the tender memories from flowing in. He recalls her face and how she had some dirt on her pretty forehead when she had rubbed her soiled hands over her face.

He kneels down and runs his hands through the leaves and the
tiny flowers that have blossomed.

He realizes that he is touching a life that Rupali had once planted and nurtured. He gets a feeling that through the plant he is connecting with Rupali. He believes he is touching her—as if he is holding her in his fingers. The tiny branches slip inside the gaps of his fingers; just the way Rupali would slip her fingers within his. But he cannot see the plant very clearly any more. It’s his tears that are blocking his vision again.

He recalls Rupali’s words from that evening, ‘This plant is a symbol of my dreams. I want to take care of it. I want to nurture it.’

He murmurs something. It seems like he is talking to the plant. ‘. . .Won’t let your dreams die. They are mine now . . . They are mine now . . .’ He repeats like a child.

He gets up and runs back to his jeep. He gets the spade he had picked up from the garage. He digs the earth around that plant and, very carefully, pulls it out from its roots along with a chunk of earth. He ties a piece of cloth around its roots.

He brings it home and plants it in his garden.

And, for the first time, he feels peace come over him, as if the young girl he loved has gently spread her pink dupatta over his face. And he smiles.